Classes continue to go apace. I have had some trouble parsing classes and where they fall on the difficulty spectrum. On the one hand, the readings are, if not necessarily challenging themselves, then at least, reflective of an intellectual stature that seems to foreshadow challenge in class. On the other hand, classes themselves are unnervingly easy; or at least, the level of engagement by other students makes it distressingly easy to appear capable by comparison.
This unnerved feeling isn’t helped by my schedule. The downside of having a very light course load, which requires from me really only two afternoons a week, plus however long it takes to accomplish homework, is that my brain doesn’t seem to really cycle between periods of productivity and downtime. I haven’t seemed to slip into a daily cadence which allows me to intrinsically know what day of the week it is, and have an intrinsic perception of the events of the next several days.
I say this is a downside; in truth I don’t know. It is unexpected compared to how I expected to handle things, but at least so far I have continued to handle things, which I suppose is sufficient for now. It may be that my old notions of how I viewed the week were solely a product of my high school schedule at the time, and that in time I shall develop a new perspective tailored to the present situation. If so, I expect this will take some time to develop.
One sign that this is happening is that I have begun to pick up old projects again. In particular, I have taken to toying around with the modding tools on my Hearts of Iron IV game, with the end goal of adding the factions from some of my writings. Although I have used some tutorials in this process, it has mostly been a matter of reverse engineering the work of others, and experimenting through trial and error. Despite being totally out of my depth, in the sense that this is a matter of modifying computer code files more than writing alternate history, I consider myself talented at throwing myself into learning new things, and have made great strides in my programming efforts, despite setbacks.
I am still tickled by the image of staring at computer code in an editor, making tweaks and squashing bugs in the code. It strikes me because I am not a very technically savvy person. I can follow instructions, and with a vague understanding of what I want to do and examples of how it can be done, I can usually cobble together something that works. That is, after all, how I built this site, and how I have managed to get alternate history countries onto the map of my game; though the cryptic error messages and apparent bugs tell me I’ve still got a way to go. But even so, I’ve never considered myself a computer person.
What’s funny is that I fit into the stereotype. I am a pale, skinny, young man, I wear glasses, t-shirts, and trousers with many pockets, and I have trouble with stereotypical jocks. When I volunteer for my favorite charity, which provides free open source software for medical data, people assume I am one of the authors of the code. I have had to go to great lengths to convince people that I don’t write the code, but merely benefit from it, and even greater lengths to convince the same people that when I say the process by which the code is made operational is easy, I am not presupposing any kind of technical knowledge.
In any case the last week has been not necessarily uneventful, but focused on small headlines. There are other projects in the pipes, but nothing with a definitive timeframe. Actually that’s an outright lie. There are several things with definitive timeframes. But those things are a secret, to be revealed in due course, at the appropriate juncture.
