I am teh smrt

When I was little the only thing I could do on the computer was play Typing Tutor. I tried for probably a day to start up golf (my gosh, you only had to type in one word: "golf") before I finally realized I was spelling it wrong. I was very little.

Other than Typing Tutor and certain other simplistic dos games, I never touched a computer until I was in Gr. 7. I had never heard of Windows until I was in Gr. 8. The next year, or the one after that, I think I learned how to look something up on the internet. When I got my own computer after I graduated, I didn't hook it up to the internet until the spring of 2005.

The point of all of this is that I've always labeled myself as "not a computer person." When I was a tech and people would call in saying "I'm not really a computer person," I would say "me neither." When a prof asked me to help design his website one time I said "I don't know anything about computers." The other day on the bus I was talking with a girl who said she liked programming in html, and I said "I'm not good at that kind of stuff."

Wait, wait, wait... I disagree. I have absolutely no CS-type background. The most formal education in computers I ever got was how to make a sine wave in QBasic in high school (half the time we were doing computers; the other half we had typing practice on typewriters. Typewriters!) But after the bus episode I looked up the girl's site and it looked pretty much like she had entered some text into a pre-existing template. Modesty has its limits, and I hope I'm justified in believing my own site is far more advanced than that. I've certainly put enough work into it, way more work than I devoted to many of my university classes. I've learned a heck of a lot on my own, it's fun, I like it... I wish now that I could design that prof's website because I'll happily spend 6+ hours a day in front of my computer. My own site has been a gigantic evolutionary puzzle. Can you remember how it used to be? I barely can, though I know I started learning more than the basics about programming when I wanted to make my magic appearing links. That was the first puzzle, and I eventually figured it out. And then, how can I make it nicer, better, more impressive, more interactive, bigger, stronger, blonder... that kind of thing. So I learn more, until I work it out. Now I'm liking php. It's never strong enough, or blond enough, and although I say "completed! perfected!" it will never be.

So my latest addition is the thesaurus. In theory, it will offer sesquipedalian synonyms for common words, but I don't have very many words in there right now (you could look up "goatlike," but you probably already know my synonym for that one, at least if you've read the lapsionary).

In the end, I really don't know much about computers, especially programming. But I get an idea of what I want (be it invisible links that appear when the cursor passes over them or whatever) and I keep fiddling until it happens. Fiddle fiddle.