the long uphill slog

The problem with not being a programmer is that each time I need to do something, there is that long painful hill of incomprehension, like slogging a heavy pack up a mountain in driving rain: you can't see where you're headed, you're just following the footsteps in front of you, nothing makes sense, and you have no idea where you are.

It's the learning curve.

If you're learning something to use on a regular basis, it's worth it. You only have to go up that particular mountain once, and then the rest of them just aren't that bad.

But if you *don't* use it regularly, it goes away. And the next time you need to do that task, you're back at the foot of the mountain of incomprehension. You know this one is the worst one. You're done it before. It's going to suck. And it does.

So, I hacked away at the site like a rain-blind hiker- stealing bits and pieces here and there. Piled everything into one page cause that's how the pages I was looking at did it. Used a truly awful switch statement for the 110 maps (I'm not completely stupid; I generated it with perl.) And it mostly worked.

Late yesterday the afternoon I finally got a div wrapper working so that the map titles scroll while the map remains fixed. Hey, even better!

However, this morning I woke up at 6am and slapped my forehead. Duh. I didn't need those stupid case statements. And, in fact, none of that should be in the html file at all. I ripped all the javascript out of the file, axed acres of switch statements, created a few small functions, and- voila! It even worked on the first run. The page looks mostly the same, but the code is at least 70% less ugly. It's still javascript that I wrote, though. So, no escaping the ugly. While I was at it I also stuck the css in another file. Sheer laziness kept me from doing that before.

I'm still horrified at myself. And my head hurts.

All of this internal churn makes no difference to my grade, of course: my TA can't read html source. Even looking at the map seemed to hurt him. "So, do you, like, use Frontpage?" "Um... no. No, I wrote the html myself." "Oh."

My cartography prof liked it, though— she even sent the link to another prof.

...

A couple of weeks ago she had a guest lecturer in. An old-school geek- while he wore a suit jacket, I suspect his pocket protectors were taken away under severe protest in the 80s. Works for the census. Good speaker, but the rest of the class pretty much sat there like lumps of clay. I even tried feeding things to say to one of the guys near me, so I wouldn't be the only one interacting. No go.

Anyway, I'd made a minor clarification to something he said– we were talking about post office boxes and zip codes, and he'd said "There isn't even a +4 with a PO Box, all you can know is the zip code." I was compelled to comment "Well, you *do* get one, but it's just the last four digits of the PO Box usually. So it's not helpful." And he blinked and then shot back at me "Want a job?"

Later that day, it hit me. These classes might actually lead to somewhere. I can actually start to see a path to where I'm doing something completely different– something I might even like doing *and* be better than a lot of the other people doing it.

I still feel like I have an unfair advantage, but that's a post for another day.