Computer Coding is a Foreign Language and I am Hopelessly Unilingual.

Welcome to today's installment of "Self-Flagellation" or "How Computer Coding has Turned Me Into a Sado/Masochist Who Could Grind Christian Grey Into Chalk Dust". 

It has been a stress-free ten days since my learned tutor and I sat down for a lesson. Various other pursuits have kept us from our appointed task and I must admit that there is a certain measure of satisfaction that comes with procrastination, especially when the task one is delaying has the ability to send one shaking and screaming from night terrors and awakening at 3:00 am in a pool of one's own sweat and drool. The only problem with such an ardent pursuit of postponement and deferment is that my middle-aged, swiss-cheesed gray matter can't retain any amount of information longer than the time it takes to watch the average beer commercial. So when I innocently asked about moving some elements around the page on my dummy (yes... I am well aware of the irony of that term) page,  The Husband looked me square in the eye this morning and said in astounding seriousness that "You already know how to do that". I gazed back at him with an expression that I am certain imitated the face of a gorilla on Prozac. Square one...here we come.

This morning, this article was on page one of the Miami Herald, right beneath the article of the Super Bowl defeat from hell. Seriously. Is there anybody outside of New England who doesn't believe that Tom Brady has sold his soul to the devil and will be languishing in the bowels of Hades alongside Donald Trump for eternity? But once again, I procrastinate and digress.

So...this article...on page one.

I will not debate the merits or inherent stupidity of this proposal, (other than saying that it is incredibly Floridian and that both skills are necessary for students in the 21st century) but I will say that after enduring a mere four lessons in coding, it is fundamentally apparent to this moronic student that coding is most definitely a foreign language and the ability to master it lies in continual and constant practice. You simply cannot become fluent in any language if all you manage to utter are hello, goodbye, and peace. Great thanks to the Divine Spirit for making Hebrew simple enough to use a single word for all three. Coding is very different, very comprehensive, very complicated, and very very very confusing.

I asked The Husband for his opinion on how he thought my web page should look. I very much value his opinion on design and I was kind of silently hoping that he might just take pity on me and simply redesign the whole fucking thing himself without the stress of imparting this coding bullshit to me. I asked him at one point, how he managed to learn all of these different computer languages that he so effortlessly uses, and he replied without a hint of glibness that  "I just woke up one morning and they were all there." The really crazy part of that statement is that I believe both of us think it is actually possible. 

I decided that I would like for the front page of the site to be the most recent blog posts so that when you all open up the URL for Dawn Ponders, the posts are the first things you see. After determining that we actually couldn't accomplish such a thing using HTML alone, The Husband very gently explained to me that we would now be diverting our attention to "real" programming as if what we had been doing before was a kind of an ersatz mess. He had this look in his eye that said "Don't worry, honey. You won't feel a thing as I push you out of the plane. It's the landing that's the real bitch."

(By the way....there is a nauseated churning that occurs within the pit of your stomach when your teacher takes your computer, spends ten minutes surfing Javascript sites to figure out why he can't solve a basic problem that he wants to convey to you, swears vociferously that it doesn't work and he doesn't know why, and then says...let's try this instead. That feeling of security is EVERYTHING!)

And so we are now in the world of JavaScript working in less than perfect synchronization with HTML. It's kind of like asking "Where's the bathroom" in Spanish and being directed to the bank in Italian. 

Here's what we managed to do.

And here are the results of over an hour's worth of laborious coding. 

See the little "Hello Dawn" under the Home tab? 

Yup. 

That's it. Aren't you all so very proud of me?

At this rate, I might have a new site online in time for the celebration of Canada 175...if we both manage to live that long. 

One last note. Take an expanded look at the coding photograph.

Go on.

Blow it up.

I'll wait.

Are you there? 

Now, look at the very bottom of the screen in the extreme right-hand corner. Do you see that tiny blue icon?

IT'S A FUCKING SQUIRREL!!!!!

They have invaded every part of my life and are determined to haunt me until the end of days.

Teaching a Monkey Mozart

It has been more than a week since I gave you all an update on my ever-increasing computer prowess. Perhaps prowess is too ambitious a word. Let's call it computer incapability or maybe numerical ineptitude? However we term it, I'm still here and I'm still plugging away, a stranger in a strange land, but I did require a short sabbatical this week from the infernal machine in order to regain my ballast.

But before we made our way out of town, The Husband once again sat me down to inundate me with technobabble involving hrefs, hyperlinks, attributes, command/shifts, and divs. I am like the only Earthling amongst a gaggle of Martians. I yearn for easy language and reasonings for why items are defined the way they are, but so far all I seem to get in response is "that's just the way it is." Years of evolving as an advanced society has brought us to "that's just the way it is." An entire world dependant on the functionality of machines has led us to the remarkable conclusion of "that's just the way it is." I am feeling so less safe knowing that my entire history and financial future is being housed and handled by people who live by the motto "that's just the way it is." 

We (meaning me) decided that we would continue the probably futile work of constructing a new website for Dawn Ponders. I say futile because I am starting to realize that by the time this project reaches fruition, all independent thought locations on the web will probably be shut down in the new world order, and fancy pull down tabs, pretty charts, and new hyperlink addresses will be seen as ridiculous endeavours. But, in the name of education and science, I persevered.

I decided that I really didn't like the spacing of the title, so I asked The Husband to show me how to move it to the left of the page. He eyeballed me with a side glance and sat as mute and stoic as a teetotaller at a frat party. After I ascertained that he wasn't suffering from some form of aphasia brought on by a stroke, I asked him again. He said, "How do you expect to learn if I tell you everything?"

Seriously!! He said this.

Years ago, I had a swimming teacher who would throw kids into the deep end of the pool and expect them to start paddling furiously without the benefit of a single lesson. Most of his students sank and required rescuing. What did they learn? More often than not, they learned to fear the water. I refused to be one of those living in fear, so I paddled furiously instead. Here was my very loud and very vigorous paddled-response to The Husband.

"How the f*** do you expect me to learn anything if you sit there like f***ing Marcel Marceau?"

While I may not have been entirely genteel in my language, my goal was achieved. There seems to be a need to continually remind The Husband that this little project was his brainchild and, for better or worse, (mostly worse) he has committed himself to being my tutor. I vociferously explained to him it is impossible to learn something new without a thorough lesson. I also ranted that some children (me) require endless reiteration of previously taught facts they find difficult to absorb. Not everybody is a fucking computer genius who was building his own machines at the dawn of the fucking ice age. I tried  to give him a lesson in teaching and I explained to him in my patient, B'nai Mitzvah-tutor inside voice that all students aren't as smart as their teachers.

Not surprisingly, my little tirade brought him back to my reality and we were able to create the following. It only took us 2 hours, but hey...progress is progress.

Once again, don't get too excited. The entire code page is only 51 lines long. This creation all happened last week, and I can't for the life of me remember how we did it. (I actually had to ask him to remind me of what some of the commands were called in order to write this post.) Kids take note. That is what happens without constant repetition and refusal to do one's homework. 

I do realize that The Husband is doing his level best. I know it's like trying to get a monkey to play Mozart on a washing machine, but teaching is often more difficult than learning. I guess this process has something for both of us.

HTML Has Turned Me Into a Baboon

Day 2 of the great experiment is now in the books or as I have taken to calling it "How to Make Dawn Feel Like a  Knuckle-Dragging Cretin in 10 Easy Steps."

I had forgotten how humiliating it was to lack comprehension at a glance. I had totally blocked those feelings of insecurity, self-doubt, timidity, and vulnerability I used to have when even though my concentration level was at its peak, my understanding was at its valley. That, in a nutshell, is how I define my progress on Day 2 of this ridiculous experiment The Husband has laid out for me.

In any relationship, there is a division of duties that seem to fall naturally to one partner or the other. In ours, for example, The Husband has easily fallen into the role of money manager and tech-geek, while it has usually fallen to me to be the teacher. The exception to this rule was the aforementioned "teaching of our children to drive experience" in which I refused to partake for two simple reasons. One...I am a self-proclaimed coward behind the wheel and I knew that my anxiety (and my constant blood-curdling screams of potential death) would be detrimental to the learning process and two...I was totally convinced that I would put a gaping hole in the passenger-side floor boards from continually pressing on the imaginary brake that I so wanted to be there. (The Husband, still to this day, describes the experience as the only teachable moment in a child's life you can literally die while doing.) Taking on The Husband as my tutor for this endeavour required a great leap of faith on my part. I needed him to fully understand that I needed a logical progression in our lessons and I also required a project that made sense. I told him from the outset that he needed to explain things as if he were teaching a baboon because that's kind of how I feel when I am venturing out of my comfort zone; a clumsy and completely moronic being that without proper and careful training might end up using the computer as a cutting board. He said he understood, promised he wouldn't call me stupid,(although we have already skirted the edges of this vow) and then tried to pep-talk me with platitudes like I am one of the smartest people he knew and that I could learn anything. Does anybody else think that this is the strangest mating dance, EVER??

We decided that we would use these lessons to complete an assignment. Together we would attempt to design a new website for DawnPonders. Of course, I have visions of Ferraris and Lamborghinis dancing off of my fully interactive and elegantly designed screen, while The Husband is instead trying to show me how to build a Lada and drive standard with the hope that we manage to spell DawnPonders correctly, but I will take my successes wherever I can get them.

And so we began.

Today's lesson consisted mainly of me trying to create a header. I was ready to simply type the title of the page into our programming box and be done with it but of course, nothing in computers is that easy. We have now taken to communicating with each other through jargon. That's the techy word for bullshit. He uses words like bits, bytes, hexadecimal, and binary. He had me talking tags and attributes and modifiers. Is anybody else out there suffering from the vapours? Are you hot yet? He kept side-glancing me to make sure that I wasn't upset and when he saw that my eyes were crossed and my skin had considerably paled, he asked me if I was about to have a meltdown. Meltdown?? I was so evaporated my shoe size had shrunk. Forty-five minutes into the process we had created this.

Looks impressive, doesn't it?

But in reality, all we really managed to get accomplished was this.

I hope you like the colours because those fuckers took me forever to understand.

We had a chat with Younger Son and His B'shert last night after all of this was done. My beautiful boy is a computer whiz just like his dad and has taken it on as his calling and as his profession. Many a day has passed where both my daughter-in-law and I have exchanged glazed over expressions as our men devolve into Java-spouting cyborgs, lost in a conversation that has no discernible meaning on this planet unless you too happen to be a Java-spouting cyborg. After assuring my son that if this experiment with The Husband should fail that I wouldn't be calling on him to rescue me from this soul-sucking experience, he proceeded to tell me that this wasn't really programming but rather it was merely design work and that the real labour was still in the offing. Thanks, Son. With your positive encouragement skills I know you'll make a great dad someday.

At around midnight last night, I roused The Husband from his early REM cycle to ask him to explain the hexadecimal system to me again. (This actually does matter in the context of our programming because of a discussion we had involving colour choices using HTML.) We had previously engaged in this conversation last year while watching the movie The Martian. Remember the scene when Matt Damon is trying to converse with NASA and he needs a system that works better than simple yes/no? Of course, my fifty-something brain can't retain shit like this any longer, so I needed a refresher and for some reason, I needed it at midnight last night. He mumbled something about finding me serious medical treatment before he drifted back off to sleep. This morning, he re-engaged this baboon like it was her first time with computations. He asked me what I remembered from third grade. I can't even recall who my teacher was in third grade, let alone math from that mesozoic era. He used house diagrams (remember those?) to demonstrate to me the difference between base ten and base sixteen. Is there such a thing as a dyslexic in math. He had me multiplying 10x1 vs 16x1. Seriously. He did. I swear the baboon would have mastered it faster. And then I watched him calculate and convert an RGB (red, green, blue) number into hexadecimal....in his head!! Me? I'm still back on 10x1.

In the words of that great sage Scarlett O'Hara..."Tomorrow is another day."

A Day of Distractions

My day started as uneventfully as any other. I was sitting on the couch, pushing the refresh button on the Blue Jays homepage every two minutes or so hoping for updates on the supposed and still unconfirmed Jose Bautista signing, while alternately blocking asshole misogynist anti-Semites from my Twitter feed, when I suddenly realized that I was circling back to the same information on every news site known to the internet. I looked at The Husband and I whined:

"It's finally happened. I've hit the end of the internet."

The Husband, ever the understanding and so very patient problem solver, expressed his deep-seated and heartfelt sentiment to my plight. 

He burst into gales of laughter.

As he wiped the tears of mocking from his eyes, he actually gave me a look that elegantly crossed grave sincerity with pity and said:

"You need a new project. I think that you should learn how to program."

As I started to protest that TV network jobs were probably not going to fall out of the sky for a middle-aged Canadian woman who is a few years past the shelf life of the 18-49-year-old target demographic, it suddenly dawned on me that he actually meant computer programming.

As is my habit, I immediately grabbed my laptop, began Youtubing "How To" videos, and read everything I could find about Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak. That's right. I said Wozniak, not Jobs. We computer geeks just somehow know these things. 

Seriously?? You poor gullible bastards. Have you learned nothing about me from reading this space?

After I collected my jaw from its resting place on my boobs, I began to sort through my mental index file of why this idea ranked somewhere between skydiving and spending six months at sea working on a tuna boat on my bucket list.

1. I have never ever ever ever taken a single computer class. Not in high school. Not in university. Not online. Not in continuing education. Not at the Apple Genius Bar. Nada. The sum total of my experience with the dreaded machines is akin to my experience with a car. I know how to turn it on and how to drive it, but I have never had any desire to repair it or understand how it runs.
2. I still get the night sweats from any and all recollections of any course that I may have taken over my academic career that even vaguely included math and numbers. That long directory includes calculus, algebra, economics, physics, chemistry, and if I go back really deep into my history, multiplication tables.
3. I would require a teacher. A good teacher. I adamantly refuse to sit in front of some idiotic internet vids produced by some asshole Big Bang Theory wannabe, who spends his days on Reddit, and works out of his parents' basement in outer Scarborough. In order for me to learn, I need to be able to ask questions without being made to feel like an idiot. I expressed this concern to The Husband and he immediately volunteered. Which leads me to....
4. He kind of sucks as a teacher. Just ask my boys about their student driving experiences. He is brilliant and capable and accomplished. He also lacks patience and would often rather do himself that which he considers easy. He has absolutely no tolerance for stupid. If he was going to teach me, he would have to let me bombard him with asinine queries like "What's a server?" (Yes. I actually asked this.) I gently reminded him of the time his grandmother tried to teach me to knit. I badgered her for months with dropped stitch problems, casting on issues, and ripped purls. The poor woman actually died before I finished my sweater. I just tossed that shit into the trash before our move this past summer. I honestly couldn't imagine a scenario whereby his teaching me would work and we could still happily celebrate our thirty-second wedding anniversary in June.
5. Do I still have any ability to retain knowledge? I have been re-learning Spanish for about a year now and while my comprehension is markedly better and my conversational skills have improved exponentially, (I am a whiz at ESPN Desportes. My high school Spanish teacher Señora Lee would be so proud if she too weren't deceased.) I have noticed that retention is a bitch. This tends to happen at a certain age. I can't even remember where I put my fucking glasses, how am I to recall computer commands?

And this is just the short list.

The Husband assured me that I could learn and learn it quickly. I asked him why he thought this was a good idea and he replied, "Because it's creative, it's fun, and you could help me with a project I'm working on." 

Really! He actually said that. This shit was all about free labour.

He asked me to give him about fifteen minutes and then we could get to work.

Three hours later....

I was still waiting. I mercilessly mocked his commitment to this project and he looked as though he should never have suggested the whole endeavour. But...we were now like a snowball running downhill and I wouldn't be waylaid.

It took him about a half an hour to figure out my computer. Yeah...I know. I couldn't believe it either. 

Once he finally had whatever downloads required, we commenced with lesson 1.

I will be beginning my education with something called HTML. Apparently, it is the language of web-design. Here's what we managed to accomplish in about 45 minutes. Are we impressed yet? If anybody out there is laughing, I curse you all and may a thousand squirrels invade your attics.

The Husband is concerned that the only reason I have consented to do this is for blog material. He is only partially correct in that assertion, although my inability to master this might prove more comical than cat videos. I have also consented because frankly, I need a diversion from the news and this project and trying to recall Spanish past tenses is helping enormously in that regard. 

May God have mercy on both of our souls and may Los Azulejos firman a José Bautista ya!