Endless Wheel Spinning

For the most part, this week was fairly successful for me as I worked my way through the seemingly endless Python tutorials on Code Academy. I guess my failure in completing 43% of the tutorial in the span of 8 hours in one day was that I simply could not wrap my mind around the practical application of the commands I was learning.  In my productiveness, I only failed on the theoretical level. I suppose if I ever needed to calculate a tip or keep track of grocery supplies in the most complicated way possible, I would have the tools and knowledge to do so. However, I'm definitely not comprehending how in the world I will be able to use "defining variables" and finding 6^12 equals on my website directly and for any research-based application.

Can I learn about real pythons instead?

As I was told, the tutorials for any new program (or language, really) always start with the most basic of terms in order to build a foundation that can be used in other settings. This makes sense to me, but I can more readily see the usefulness of asking someone their name in a newly learned spoken language than making strings of zoo animal names in a program designed to ensure your inventory is intact. As a medievalist, the theory about learning and interpreting languages makes sense to me, but the practice is, thus far, lost on me and I truly feel as if I am spinning my wheels while I complete lesson after lesson.

Additionally, I am still on a quest to figure out QGIS  (again, tutorials become horribly mind-numbing after a while) and how I might be able to use it practically. I have a concept that I think might be solid enough to not completely hate what I eventually create, but I still have to get there. Spatial relationships have never been my strong suit, so seeing this part of the project as useful or worthwhile is a tough sell.

Putting Things in Places

Every time a break of some kind comes 'round (that whole once per semester reprieve we all wait for), I always tell myself that I will use this time wisely and catch myself up as much as possible. For our DH class, this would prove to be a monumental feat. My goal was to create a landing page for my website as well as the holding pages for "Research," "Courses," and "Digital Humanities." I also wanted to update my CV page to match whatever the landing page looked like and possibly figure out QGIS in order to have something on the DH page. Ambitious, I know. A bit too ambitious.

Repeat.

Thankfully, Fall Break was not a total failure. I spent over four hours creating a landing page that I think suits my needs as far as the website is concerned and looks halfway decent (I guess). I was also able to begin changing the CV page so that it didn't appear (as obviously) that they were not created at the same time or using the same mental design. The next part is where I ran into a major problem--one I haven't seemed to figure out quite yet. I realized that I have no idea how exactly to connect the pages together so that they will show up on the same site. I realize it has to do with linking directories, but I can't seem to figure out where the links are (I'm really not explaining this properly). I have everything uploaded in FileZilla (I think), but the directory path isn't really clear. 

Hours of endless frustration!

Needless to say, this is where my success stopped. I guess you could call the rest of my to-do list failures along with trying to put things (links to whatever directories) in places (the website).

Python Bit Me

I've been continuing my work through the Python tutorials, and two things have gotten me pretty perplexed. First, the "pushd" and "popd" thing is still bothering me even though we seemed to disregard the need for it in class last week. I can do it with the tutorial's examples, and I understand how to make a new directory and all that business, but when I attempt to do the "Now You Try" quests, I fall miserably short. Is there something I'm not completely understanding? Can I only push and pop within the same directory? That seems kind of useless when you can just use the cd command with a certain number of "../../" to get you backtracked, but that's what the tutorials seem to imply. I'm so confused.

Second, I am having trouble copying items from one directory and putting them in another. It seems like any time I need to move within two or more directories, my mind (or possibly computer) just can't handle it, and I get error messages. I really hate error messages when I know that what I'm doing should work because the example works. This reminds me of when I took Calculus in high school, and nothing ever seemed to work the way it did in the book. Grr! I'm still stuck on these two parts of Python, so any help you can offer would be useful.

Ok, that's my failure for the week. I don't know that I can call it productive, but that's what I've got to offer.

Down the Rabbit's Worm Hole

Productive failure is a concept that I am very clearly not comfortable with, and this class for me has so far been 99.8% failure. That, hypothetically, is supposed to make the successes all the sweeter, but most of the time I feel like the successes are nothing but flukes. I sometimes know why these successes happened, but that's not always the case. When it works and I know what's going on, there's another new addition that makes it seem like I am traveling through the white rabbit's hole into Wonderland. Unfortunately, there is no tea party, growing or shrinking food/drinks, talking animals, or bitchy queen trying to chop my head off.

It worked for Neo, right?

The white rabbit is quite a tricky little leporine that seduces you with promises of answers and further knowledge.  The same goes for working through programming tutorials.  They suck you in with assurances that you will understand the programming world more thoroughly and be able to apply what you learn to your own work. Well, as I go through tutorial after tutorial, I'm continuing to tumble through the rabbit hole getting glimpses of the furry little devil's bushy tail, but only that....glimpses.  I keep hoping there will eventually be an end to something, but it instead hijacks and takes me down yet another section of the hole.

I guess an example would be helpful here rather than my convoluted metaphor.  On our DH syllabus, we were to use the Google Map simple program. I had the hang of it and felt like I might actually be grasping (at straws, maybe), but then the next instruction to make it fancier throws me way off. There always seems to be such a disconnect between the two tutorials that I don't even have a solid direction anymore.

Can I use markers and watercolor too?

 

And so, I continue on with my "productive failures" while working through what the experts call simple tutorials attempting to resist the temptation to throw my computer at a wall. Perhaps one day I will catch that white rabbit and make him tell me why he's always such a jerk.

Starting Anew: Making a Mulligan Meaningful

When it comes to academic pursuits like papers or projects, I dread the instruction to "try again" or the comment "you've missed the mark this time" because it means that I've failed. I presume that the reason I'm in graduate school is because I have been able to either avoid those types of failures (best case scenario) or to turn a failure into a productive learning experience with positive result and enjoyed the experience. As much as I loathe failing at something, I'm truly beginning to see why coding and internet projects are the result of 99% failure, 0.5% happy accidents and 0.5% logical understanding and practical application.

In my last post, I wrote an entry which was simply a screenshot of my in-progress CV, and I was pretty happy about it. That is, until I saw what others had dreamed up. I realized very quickly that the original CV page was a good attempt, but I missed the mark that time. Knowing I had missed the mark, my initial response was to avoid the problem altogether because it would maybe go away by itself (we really need to work on these little computer elves (Keebler elves who make websites rather than cookies) that actually help you in your endeavors rather than those icky trolls (not the kind that I really don't know much about, but boogeyman-wannabe ones with hair everywhere and big, gross, snotty noses that take over your computer at night when you're not looking and screw everything up) that make life more difficult). Eventually, I realized that I needed to go back to the problem and hit it head on. This led to the devastating realization that I needed to scrap the first page and try again. I needed to pull a full on mulligan.

Perhaps it's my sentimental side that prevented me from deleting my first ever attempt at writing a web page or maybe it was my refusal to highlight, delete, and reinvent the wheel, but either way I decided to keep that original code (knowing it would never see the light of Internet day). So, I opened a new tab in Notepad++ and got to work. With a particular kind of redesign in mind and a great tutor at my side, I developed something that may still not be a fantastic looking page, but it is definitely better.

Full CV here.

So that's the new and improved CV. It's probably not the best you've ever seen, and it's probably going to be changed quite a bit following this post in the coming weeks and months, but it's all mine. I'm currently going through a tutorial about Javascript, so maybe I'll be able to incorporate something cool in there (apparently, I've got high hopes tonight) with my new found Java knowledge.I guess the sky (and my productive failing) is the limit.

What has this taught me?

This experience continues to teach me that 1. There are no helpful little elves that will do this stuff for me 2. I really shouldn't avoid completing something just because it's infuriatingly frustrating (I probably won't listen to that advice but it's there to annoy me) and 3. Productive failure is a great concept, but when you are experiencing it, the "productive" aspect gets tossed out the window while the "failure" part sticks to your mental insides like fresh Double Bubble gum stuck in your hair.

So much failure.

Well, that's where I am. The highs are super high (like when something cool works and you actually know why), but the lows are SUPER DUPER low. Essentially, learning coding simulates having bipolar disorder and the only relief...well..I don't think there is any. I continue to be nervously excited to see where this DH class takes me, and this blog, I think, will be my outlet. Back to the grindstone.

P.S. Be cautious of any software you're downloading, even from trusted websites! I recently downloaded FileZilla and with it came Astromenda, a piece of hijacking malware that likes to create operational problems on your computer. Who creates this crap? Must be those trolls I was telling you about earlier!

The Digital CV

The instruction to create a digital CV was definitely a bit overwhelming and gave me the heebie-jeebies, but I decided not to panic. I'm glad I didn't. Although it definitely looks amateur and I can't really figure out how to move things or why the first line of each bulleted list is smaller than the rest, I'm happy to show off my work:

And now you know what my computer screen looks like!

I can honestly say that I'm pretty proud of this amateur mess of a web page! After screaming at my computer and trying to figure out why something worked on the tutorial screen but wouldn't on my server, I finally got it to look relatively useable. Woot for progress!

And now when Blogger's "Compose" tab doesn't do what I want it to, I can go into the HTML and figure out what needs to be changed. Woot for more progress!

HTM-Hell

When I received Dr. Gibbs' email this past Saturday, I immediately started panicking. His directions of "by Wednesday that you'll be able to have installed a web server on your computer according to the instructions linked to on the syllabus. ideally, you'll be able to create an extremely simple html page on your own and see it rendered in your browser to make sure everything is working" were far more terrifying than I'm sure he expected/intended them to be, or maybe not (ponderings for another day). Anyway, once I convinced myself there were no satisfactorily good reasons to hit the "drop class" button, I went about following the directions. It was as if the programming gods sensed a hint of confidence in me and went about their sabotage.

I tried to download the WAMP server and hit problems from the beginning. I uninstalled/reinstalled twice before deciding to turn to Google. I realized that I needed to update the Visual C++ Redistributable on my computer before I could actually go further with the server. I was hoping this would solve the problem, so I reinstalled again. Know what happened? Yep, I got another error message! I have a feeling that I will be seeing a lot of those in the coming months.

Turning to social media, I was able to vent my frustration on Facebook (sometimes you just need more than 140 characters). Thankfully, my level-headed friends who didn't want to, at that point, ignite their computers provided me with some troubleshooting techniques. The simple fix: I didn't update the Visual C++ thing enough. After another round of updating/downloading/praying, I finally got everything to load successfully. However, WAMP was still not cooperating. Does this count as productive failure?

I got really tired of seeing this.

 
Time works in mysterious, glorious ways.

After a few hours' break, I returned to the scene of the programming crime and was astonished to find that WAMP did download successfully and was ready to operate. How did it happen? I have no idea. I'm just glad it did. Now, on to the html stuff. It's truly amazing what an at-home crash course in programming can do. Google is helpful, and I've discovered W3 Schools Online Tutorials in the process. It took about 4 hours, but I finally have a very basic html page to call my own! There was definitely a high that came from figuring out how a bunch of tags and symbols and random words work together to actually create something. I introduced myself to the world. Do I feel super confident now that I've made this first step? Not really. Am I ready to use this information and keep going with it? Of course, but that also scares me quite a bit. I'm glad to be in a class with individuals possessing a vast array of experience levels who are more than willing to share resources and commiserate with triumphs and failures.