6ixStringJack: Hehe. Been known to step on a few toes myself.  Sometimes I luck out and the right person at the right time sees a coding request I've made and I get some assistance with automation. I've even been able to take code others have written for me and made it do other things without needing to bother them again. I just can't be arsed to learn and commit to memory all the basics and the ins and outs. I'm not interested in the coding itself. I'm only using it as a means to do what I'm interested in. Often times for me that just means a lot of persistence, trial and error and brute forcing things until they work right. But at least I've learned enough to do some of it automatically, and enough to know when something I want to do isn't going to be coded by anybody that I have access too and just needs to be done by hand. |
| Brenda: I am terrible with math but you need it to become an archaeologist. The reason for that is you need to be able to lay out a grid pattern and such for digging. But truthfully I hate it. When I was in high school just after VCRs came out, I learned how to wire one up to a tv. Teacher one day had a video to run but she couldn't connect the VCR to the tv. And apparently no one else in the class could. So, I got up and went over and did it. My dad always said if you can do something that no one else can. Don't worry about stepping on toes, just go do it. |
Brenda: I guess that is true. But with history I find there isn't too much technical stuff unless you are discussing inventions like da Vinci's work. If you are talking people and maybe motivations for why they did certain things or certain events happened, then you get my attention. I do have a habit of picking stray bits of information, like a magpie. Do it with languages too. I was in a college class one time and the teacher asked, "Whose colony was New York before it became British?" Without thinking I said, "Dutch." The whole classes eyes were on me. Then he asked, "What was it's name?" Had to think for a minute and said, "New Amsterdam." Again whole classes eyes on me and I even heard, "How'd she know that?" I have no idea but I picked it up somewhere and it got lodged in my brain.  And yes sometimes things can be used in writing with some tweaking. |
| Brenda: Yes, I can see what you are saying about computers. Course there are also a good number of people in the field, if you know one or a good shop to go to. You could be set. |
| 6ixStringJack: It's why college never was for me too. Couldn't pass College Algebra and Trig to save my life, but they told me they required that class that would never help me do anything else for the rest of my life no matter what job I got. But I can make old tech do some awesome things and I've been known to fix a car or two without any training. ;) |
| 6ixStringJack: My knowledge with computers would be somewhat similar to yours with history. You don't particularly enjoy doing the research or the idea of writing up technical stuff, but you're more than willing to go out of your way with something that is interesting to you or could help inspire more of what you actually are interested in writing. |
| 6ixStringJack: I don't know as much as I lead on. Never did, but never needed too. Computers aren't really all that complicated once you know some under-the-hood basics really well and you develop the ability to correctly and reliably be able to research what you need to know how to do, and that's gotten way easier over the years. Knowing that you would know how to fix problems as they come up is more important than being able to fix one specific problem from knowledge alone. |
| Brenda: Computer stuff. I am limited on my knowledge. I can do certain things and maybe fix my own mistakes by trial and error. But when it comes to bigger stuff and complicated, my knowledge is like what I know about cars. It can fit on the head of a pin. |
| Brenda: I get ya. Sometimes as you said to me it helps to write things out so you can see what you need to ask, which can lead you to answers or in my case more questions. |
| Brenda: No, I'm more of a straight-up fiction girl when it comes to my writing. Though I do consider myself a history buff. As I said that is why I do everything long hand so I can change things if I need to are add more detail which is what the poet wants me to for a piece. Will get to that on Sunday. |
| 6ixStringJack: In the past week, I've solved 3 pretty big hurdles on my own, just by writing them out here and other places. I'm dealing with a fairly complex directory tree structure on an OS that I'm not very familiar with. But I'm learning more about it every day and something that had been bothering me for days suddenly just clicked in my mind and I was able to find a single config file buried deeply in another area of the tree that I just had to make a few tweaks to and the problem went away. I probably wouldn't have ended up there had I not written it out and edited that post a few times. |
| 6ixStringJack: Though I'm not writing a a book, there is a fair deal of writing involved in just a portion of what I'm doing. More like mini-articles, than anything else. Mostly information written by others, but sometimes needing edits because what they have is far too verbose for the setting. I do go out of my way to clean as much of that up as I can as I find it, and I find it while adding and testing other aspects and tying it all in together and doing more testing. Eventually I end up weeding everything bad out or finding how and why I missed something in the process. |
| 6ixStringJack: Glad to help if you got anything useful out of it. I had a good feeling that you weren't interested in writing non-fiction historical accounts yourself. |
| Brenda: No, I'm not really down with the idea of writing a historical book. Not at this point anyways. I do in a way want to dig into my question a little more and see what I can come up with. And of course I could pass on my notes and ideas to someone who is a historian. Pretty good ideas you got there SIX. |
| Brenda: That's why I started this first book I am working on in ink. Pen and paper for everything I've done, then type written and now the computer. And that as you said let's you work out minor details or add more details to what you are working on. |
| 6ixStringJack: If you're not down with writing non-fiction, I don't think you necessarily have to be the one writing the historical book. Maybe through your research you can come up with a new story to tell that you haven't thought up yet, and you'll have a lot of notes and ideas that you didn't have before about events you didn't know took place. |
| 6ixStringJack: It's a good exercise. Just writing things down and bouncing ideas out there even when you don't really expect somebody to reply necessarily. I find that quite a lot of times when I do it I end up coming at a problem with a different perspective, which usually results in making something impossible possible or making a monumental task at least a bit less monumental if I'm lucky. |
| Brenda: No worries and you have a point. Sometimes it just takes a person to ask a question to get answers or come up with a new idea. A book about this subject would have to historical. Oh, I did go to that website which lists universities in the US. But the home page wasn't helpful, so I googled Montana to find the university there. I accessed their library and while everything is available on PDF for reading there is nothing helpful there. The books are on his life in Canada and his hanging by Sir John A's government on a charge of treason. |
| 6ixStringJack: Though I can't/won't go into any real details with my own project(s) right now, that's what I'm doing in a way even though it has nothing to do with literature. Something doesn't exist that I feel should exist. Ain't nobody else going to make it for me, so I'm going to make it myself. All that data and all that text that Google scrapes when we ask it a question came from somewhere. Somebody asking questions just like you're doing right now. |
6ixStringJack: Sounds to me like maybe you should be writing another book.  |