I have missed computers
I've rediscovered computers after last semester's full load of humanities and a buggy wireless card that crashed my computer every, oh... 5 minutes or so. Getting the Zen to work with gnomad was the start - I got hooked. Then the program to mount my Zen as a normal filesystem didn't work -- so I decided to re-write it from scratch. I had to learn a TON of crap about C and building/linking systems in Unix before I could really start... and then reverse engineer FUSE (a filesystem authoring system) lifecycle and learn the libmtp & FUSE API's. That was actually really fun. Turns out, the program DID work... it is just horribly slow.
But writing in foreign languages was a total confidence boost. Enough to attempt one hell of a php project. Basically, I had to reverse-engineer the forms that Ryanair uses to search plane flights in order to get a list of places and prices for a given date. And the result is really magical. I would have never thought of going to Oslo, which may be next weekend's destination.
And now, I'm sitting in a 2nd year computer lab listening to people have trouble compling simple dictionary programs in Java (and other trivial programs). I remember doing them -- and they are milestones. First year milestones. I love having gone through school and having gained a skill -- and being pretty decent at the skill. I didn't think that I could really just "pick up" new systems (granted, i'd had a bit of prior experience). But I shouldn't have a problem finding a job at all -- this stuff is easy. It just needs to be done.
But writing in foreign languages was a total confidence boost. Enough to attempt one hell of a php project. Basically, I had to reverse-engineer the forms that Ryanair uses to search plane flights in order to get a list of places and prices for a given date. And the result is really magical. I would have never thought of going to Oslo, which may be next weekend's destination.
And now, I'm sitting in a 2nd year computer lab listening to people have trouble compling simple dictionary programs in Java (and other trivial programs). I remember doing them -- and they are milestones. First year milestones. I love having gone through school and having gained a skill -- and being pretty decent at the skill. I didn't think that I could really just "pick up" new systems (granted, i'd had a bit of prior experience). But I shouldn't have a problem finding a job at all -- this stuff is easy. It just needs to be done.
