Journal of Fear and Hope (2024)

Only two entries this year? I really let myself down.

Life's Not Unpleasant
August 23, 2024

Every morning, before I log on for work and talk to strangers, I make coffee and do the New York Times word games. Not all of them, because they limit what nonsubscribers can play, but I have my fave four. I start with Wordle. Then Strands, followed by Connections (my personal favorite), then the Mini crossword for desert. Always in that order. I’m like Jeff Daniels in Pleasantville, certain my life would crumble if I changed any aspect of my routine.

Depending on how easy it is for me to get out of bed each morning, I have between an hour to only thirty minutes to finish the puzzles. I can’t always do it. But the days I can are good days. It’s a psychological trick. John and Hank Green talked about it on one of their podcasts. For a lot of people, the Wordle is the one thing they will conquer in their day. When you nail it in two or three tries, it uplifts you. When I stare at that five-by-six grid for forty-five minutes trying to force a word that ends in “C” out of my lexicon, I just know the rest of the day will be harsh.

My morning routine is a way to ease into the world on my own terms. It shakes up my brain. I talk out the answers and prepare my voice for the next several hours of lecture. And on pleasanter days, I celebrate myself. It may be the only chance I get.

Computerized Clinic
August 10, 2024

As a software trainer, I often have students who are not confident with computers, who are scared of computers, or have just not had much experience with them until their new jobs forced them into contact with the technology. Those students have a hard time during class. They get lost, ask me to repeat instructions several times, do the opposite of what I say they should do then stop the class so I can help them undo their mistakes.

I hate to say it, but it's usually the older students who have the hardest time. The younger ones breeze on through.

I am patient with my struggling students. I'm happy to pause or repeat. I know how they feel. I've been there.

Earlier this year, I took a series of computer programming classes at the library. It was a course not just dedicated to teaching how to code. It was themed around game creation. Some of my favorite things all at once: computers, gaming, libraries. How could I not go?

I was no stranger to programming. I wrote tons of programs in BASIC on my beloved CoCo when I was kid. I aced FORTRAN in college.

I struggled through those library classes. We used C#, a language that felt familiar, but had weird quirks in structure and format that I did not take to easily. Plus, we used the Unity game engine for the graphics. We created the graphic items, wrote several completely separate (but dependent) subroutines of code, linked them together, then tweaked the properties of the graphics with a different tool than the one used to make the code. This was all new and confusing to me. When I said to the teacher, "Why can't we just use a GOTO command?" she went online and found an XKCD comic in which a coder considers one GOTO line and is immediately eaten by a velociraptor. I didn't know my simple question would be met with such wrath.

I hate to say it, but I was the oldest person in the room. All the younger students breezed on through with minimal need for assistance. But the trainer was patient with me. She paused the class to catch me up and made sure I got my code to work.

The course didn't make me an expert in C# or Unity. That was never the expectation, nor what I wanted. I came away with a rekindled love for programming first sparked when I, like thousands of others, made my computer say "Hello" to the world when I was nine. That's what I wanted, to revisit something that made me feel smart and special, and to see if it might again.

Looky here, I made a program. It's a quiz about Rush album covers. I learned a lot about JavaScript and had fun making it. If you're a Rush fan, I hope it's a mix of easy and difficult. If you're not a Rush fan, then quickly go listen to 40 years of progressive rock, memorize all the lyrics, seer the album covers onto your synapses, then come back and see how you do. I'll wait for you.