Current location:	at my parents' place with Countdown
Current mood:	excited
Current music:	Velocity Girl, "Go Coastal"
Entry tags:	friends, geek, life

I Get To Be A Real Nerd Again!
Well kind of anyway...in my new crap gig there are basically 3 phases to the project. The first was to parse out a bunch of word documents and shove them into an Access database, which unfortunately had to be done manually. Easy enough, but boring. The second part is to take the Access database and send it to my employer's database. This can be done one of two ways, at least that I know of. The first, my first instinct based on my knowledge and skills, was to write a Visual Basic program that would hijack Access and hijack their client program, and automate the cutting and pasting. This would probably be effective, but it's slow, and inelegant, and probably not the best system for the future. The second, which was suggested to me by a friend, and then elaborated on by garthnak, is to learn Perl and figure out how to get the databases to talk to each other directly. Since my employer is willing to pay for a day or two of me learning the language (as well as purchasing a book), I'm all for it! Once I figure out how to make everything work, the actual program will be very short-it's still basically just automating cutting and pasting; it's just doing it in a lot more efficient way.

Now...about that part. I also have to understand how their client program transmits information to see if I can mimic it, and if this whole experiment is worthwhile. After spending some time with naerbic, looks like it is...but it's not _quite_ perfectly clean. I have to reverse engineer the protocol.

When I was in 8th grade a friend of mine showed me a few lines of spaghetti code BASIC on an Apple IIgs (which I swear ran infinitely better in ][e emulation mode than it ever did on anything native). Some time later that year another friend (who later became an enemy) showed me some DOS commands and batch file writing when we got our first PC, a 386DX33 that _screamed_ relative to anything I had ever used before. For the next 5 years, I spent every moment I wasn't practicing programming, or tweaking the hell out of whatever system I had at the time. I took programming classes at the local junior college while I was still in high school (and met some hip people that way). Probably the biggest thrill of my life outside of a classroom or a relationship was spending a month and a half of research and every waking moment writing an arrow-key menu interface in QuickBASIC, and then having the damn thing actually WORK. For many years Hackers: Heroes Of The Computer Revolution was almost my bible.

In short, while I was never great at it, or anywhere close really...I bricked at learning C, I never learned anything about anything assembly related (I know what PEEK and POKE are; I have no clue how to use them)...programming was a huge part of my life, and greatly influenced how I see the world and approach problems. In a lot of ways teaching was just a shift in interfaces-instead of hacking code, I hack people's minds.

But I haven't really programmed since 1996. I tried to be a computer science and music double major for about a semester, and realized very quickly that both are arts, and both demand the entirety of one's attention and passion or they both suffer. I had the choice to program or practice, and I chose to practice-with no regrets at all. On the other hand, it's been a part of me that's been missing ever since. I relished every chance I got to come up with an Access database because it meant I got to write 20 or 30 lines of code (in a good day) and kind of get something to work. I always said I'd get back into it, and I was always drawn to programmers, either as friends (such as my above helpers) or romantically (there's a reason I drooled over my last other so much. Several reasons actually, but the fact that she showed me Lisp the first night I was over at her place was a BIG factor). Almost all the people I knew from that time in my life are gone, and the first rap song I ever wrote was actually a reflection on that period.

So...here I am. I get to figure out a transfer protocol, learn a whole new language (and Perl seems awesome. Readable enough for someone who was always most comfortable in Basic or Pascal, but providing a really good jumping off point if I wanna finally learn the C based languages), and do it on someone else's dime-and still wind up saving them money in the long run. Sure, it's a dinky program, and I'm not gonna delude myself into thinking otherwise or degrade the far superior skills of just about anyone else. But...for a few days, I get to be as I was, even if only for a little while.