I'm in an odd place and not quite right.

[hunter]

I'd be happy to lock myself in my office and write software but our dogs never let me get away with that. So I took them out for their daily walk and this cat popped out of of a bush and attacked our old lady dog who immediately yelped, slipped her leash and ran home. She's got a bloody claw mark on her face.

The younger dogs didn't like that and tried to go after the cat, knocking me over, face first. Our latest dog, a husky, is strong! But I held onto them and the cat ran off undamaged.

Can't say the same for myself...



It probably looked comical to anyone who witnessed it, but OUCH!

[No Vested Interest]

1. What we go through for our pets! nt

[Neoma]

2. That's something you go to the hospital for.

Face plant on concrete could cause a blood clot or something. You don't risk it like that. (Nag, nag, nag.)

[elleng]

3. OUCH indeed!

Have it checked out, and be well.

[Locut0s]

4. You write software? Cool...

I'm trying to get into the programming field myself.

[hunter]

5. Here's a cool thing if you've had some programming courses...

... but not yet python:

https://developers.google.com/edu/python

It's the Google intensive two day seminar course.

The first computer I built used a CDP 1802 microprocessor. I hand-coded some software for that processor which was used in a commercial data logger (mostly military ).

My first programming class was fortran. Then later I decided I loved pascal. It became the "hot" language for teaching. I have a bunch of pascal stuff for Apple II and early Mac computers, and turbo-pascal stuff too.

My favorite computer was the Atari 800. It was the first computer I owned that was useful as a word processor. That was when I switched from writing on Unix terminals at school to writing on my Atari at home. I had a modem too.

I know little or nothing about "the programming field." I've written code for clients under deadline and I've hated it. The worst situation I got myself into I had no clear boss. My "bosses" often wanted different, sometime incompatible, things. But I did I save their butts because when I got there I discovered they were keeping people's credit card info on their own server. Nobody small should do that. If something goes wrong you want it to be PayPal's or some other big provider's problem, not yours.



I have no idea what college is like now. For a long time Java was the shiny teaching language. I've never been fond of Java which makes Android an unappealing platform for me. I like how c has become a "universal assembly language" and I'm beginning to like python. But I'll probably never have as much fun as I did messing around on the Atari 800.

[Locut0s]

6. We learn C, C++, Java, C#, and web development languages...

Yes Java is still a very popular teaching language. Thing is the object oriented paradigm is now used basically everywhere. C++, Java and c# account for a huge amount of the programming work done now and that's all object oriented. I enjoyed working with C and can see the appeal of procedural programming. The issue I have with procedural programming is having to handle memory manually, having to release and destroy resources when you don't need them any more. But OO programming can get really complex in terms of function calls and object hierarchies in different APIs.

Right now I'm quite worried about this semester though as I'm in an anxiety ridden state.

[hunter]

7. I started out with a fondness for hardware...

My 1802 computer had 1 kilobyte of memory. One had to account for every last bit!

My Atari ended up with 128 kilobytes...

Both of those were still too small for even c if you wanted to do anything ambitious. You had to use assembly language.

Python seems friendly to any programming paradigm one chooses. I can see python with pygame being almost as fun to write as Atari 800 stuff.

Does writing code (or anything else) help with the anxiety. I know that I could disappear entirely into it, shove everything else into the background. It was that and running at night, and neither was a good thing.

I met one of my kids at school once and just hanging out with friends in a school Lounge, relaxing. That was not a state I ever achieved in school.

Best wishes to you!

[Locut0s]

8. If it was my own code and project yes I could dissapear into it...

And yes that would help with anxiety. But the thing is I do VERY VERY poorly with any type of assigned responsibility. I can't relax when the material I'm working on has been assigned to me and or others might be depending on it. That's when I panic. I feel this crazy pressure to 'get it' right. If I were on my own I'd have fun messing around with it and would probably learn twice as much doing things wrong, looking it up etc, but then learning the right way. I can't relax enough to do that when it's assigned material.

[hunter]

9. What's "the right way" of learning?

Is there such a thing?

Seems I learn everything the hard way.

Worse, as Dr. Who says, "I'm a very dangerous fellow when I don't know what I'm doing."

Perfectionism is always the last step, not the first, and when you master something you realize there's no such thing as perfect anyways.

I never learned how to draw. My dad draws, my wife draws, my siblings draw, my kids draw. People, animals, trees, anything. Maybe my early fondness for cameras arises from that. I never got over the "hump" where I could draw fluidly because when I was a kid I couldn't get past the fact my drawings looked like kid's drawings. I took drawing again in college and ended up dropping the class. For me it was harder than my other classes, harder than calculus and chemistry, no matter how much encouragement I got.

And here's the funny thing. Put a camera in my dad's hands, my wife's hands, my sister's hands, my kids' hands, and they often take nicer pictures than I do even though they haven't much interest in the technology. They're artists with whatever tools they've got.

One of the things I've enjoyed about digital photography is that there is almost no penalty for taking bad pictures. I've "allowed" myself to became a more fluid photographer. I ought to have allowed myself to draw things that did not meet my own expectations as a kid. There was always plenty of blank paper in our house. With chemical photography every picture that didn't turn out as I'd visualized it was a disappointment that cost me money and time I didn't have.

I've only had one job in my life that required perfection, tolerated no shortcuts, and had very real deadlines that sometimes turned out to be impossible to meet. That was working in a blood bank. I think I learned something there. The first weeks working were terrifying, the first night I worked alone was even more terrifying, but gradually that went away. I was good at it and it meshed well with my perfectionism and OCD.

I never have learned to draw as well as anyone in my family and wonder if I'd be drawing now if I'd not dropped that class. But then again, maybe I'd have flunked calculus which would have caused me some real problems.

Good Luck!

[mopinko]

10. i have a giant pup who is making it tough for me.

technically, he is DH's dog. but he is the family dog, and i feed them all, and spend all day with them, so....
beside, we have a special thing, him and me. but he is 100 lb, 2 years old, sweet, but dog aggressive. he started off fine, but at adolescence got the idea that the biggest threat to his family were these dogs that are always trying to get in his back fence, he thinks.
i have been struggling with carpal tunnel all summer, so the cure for this- long walks and casual contact with other dogs, has been, well, painful. i feel so guilty. i feel so bad.
but i am cleared up enough to walk him wearing my hard splints. now if i can just find the time and energy, we're good.

i hate when people judge you by your pets. i have a couple neighbors that think i am just a lazy, selfish jerk because my dogs have scared them. waaaaaaaa.