Muscle memory: geeky, but cool
There are moments when the you realize that you're always going to be a geek, and you're still pretty stoked about it. Yesterday offered me one such moment.
Despite all my plans over the last year or so to get back to programming a little bit, it has just never happened. A combination of being incredibly busy and almost as lazy ensured that.:)
However, a need to keep myself occupied over the summer and curiosity about if the Facebook platform is really as easy to program to as advertised meant I finally got around to writing some code again. Big surprise: not doing something for two years will leave you rusty! Particularly if its web programming, which you never really did anyway.
Some things still stay constant though; like the time you need to waste up front to prepare so that you can actually get some work done! It took me more than a day and a half to (re-) install the necessary software on my machine, figure out the particular eccentricities of the web-hosting provider I decided to use, and recover from pulling out my hair because of the way Facebook sample files play with PHP4 and PHP5.
Somewhere in the middle of that was when my geeky moment happened. My programming editor of choice is XEmacs. However, the rust has meant that I've forgotten most of my keyboard shortcuts.
The one I use most frequently is splitting the window into multiple parts so that I can have more than one file open at a time.
For the life of me I couldn't remember what the shortcut was, and since I could get along without it, I did. After working for a while though, the thought just popped into my head, "I need to split the screen", and involuntarily my fingers just moved and the screen was split! I didn't know what the keys were until I looked down and repeated the action.
Don't ask me why, but I think that's kinda cool!:)
By the way, I spent a while trying to figure out if this was geeky or nerdy. I don't think this satisfies the "deep knowledge" part of the "geeky" definition, but still ...its slightly more flattering to my ego.
Despite all my plans over the last year or so to get back to programming a little bit, it has just never happened. A combination of being incredibly busy and almost as lazy ensured that.:)
However, a need to keep myself occupied over the summer and curiosity about if the Facebook platform is really as easy to program to as advertised meant I finally got around to writing some code again. Big surprise: not doing something for two years will leave you rusty! Particularly if its web programming, which you never really did anyway.
Some things still stay constant though; like the time you need to waste up front to prepare so that you can actually get some work done! It took me more than a day and a half to (re-) install the necessary software on my machine, figure out the particular eccentricities of the web-hosting provider I decided to use, and recover from pulling out my hair because of the way Facebook sample files play with PHP4 and PHP5.
Somewhere in the middle of that was when my geeky moment happened. My programming editor of choice is XEmacs. However, the rust has meant that I've forgotten most of my keyboard shortcuts.
The one I use most frequently is splitting the window into multiple parts so that I can have more than one file open at a time.
For the life of me I couldn't remember what the shortcut was, and since I could get along without it, I did. After working for a while though, the thought just popped into my head, "I need to split the screen", and involuntarily my fingers just moved and the screen was split! I didn't know what the keys were until I looked down and repeated the action.
Don't ask me why, but I think that's kinda cool!:)
By the way, I spent a while trying to figure out if this was geeky or nerdy. I don't think this satisfies the "deep knowledge" part of the "geeky" definition, but still ...its slightly more flattering to my ego.
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