Meanderings: February 8, 2000

Tuesday,
February 8, 2000

Radio Free Europe.

First day of class. The teacher is a substitute by the name of Nathan Stevens -- sharp, funny, and American. Something of a ski buff, as he put it -- the wind and rain here must be something of a change. The subject of the class is Javascript -- how to cread it, how to write it, how to make it turn your webpages into sparkling examples of technological know-how. No Luddites in this class -- and this time, I actually understand the topic.

At least, I DID until he started talking about objects. Okay, I get the basic idea about objects, no problem -- but then we had to do this exercise where we wrote a script that would ask for a sentence, then analyze the sentence and produce a frequency list of how often each letter would appear. Which is fine -- except that it wasn't spelled out for us in the beginning. Nathan, a sweetie, came around to me and my partner (a nice woman named Claire) and told us good-naturedly to take the instructions on blind faith -- it would all make sense later. Unfortunately, that is not how I do my best work -- I like to understand what we're trying to do first. Telling me that I have to initialize the frequency to zero doesn't tell me bubkes UNLESS you explain that what we're doing is setting all the letter occurences to zero so that we can analyze the sentence and THEN figure out how many times each letter of the alphabet appears in the sentence, and if you didn't first set the frequency to zero, you wouldn't be able to increment up from it. THAT, I understand.

Meanwhile, the programmers at the next table over are zooming along and making all kinds of intelligent suggestions and questions, blah blah. Okay, I may sound like an idiot when I say I don't understand something, but dammit I need this information -- if I walk away at the end of the week with nothing more than a thin slick of drool and a gormless expression, not only have I wasted the entire week but I will also be in deep shit with the Materials Data pages. So I will sound stupid and ask for things to be explained to me in detail -- that's why TBS is paying for this course in the first place.

At least it's all making some sort of vague sense this time -- Perl just left me bobbing in the wake.

So here I sit on Upper Woburn Place at 01:57 UST, slightly out of breath and sweaty from a workout I just performed, and ready for bed. Let's see what happens tomorrow -- maybe I'll even figure out how to use the bloody FTP program that came with Windows 95 so that I can upload these pages. Whee. . .

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