Because it’s a me sandwich on toasted me with a side order of me here at the all-you-can-me café.
Not sure how to describe my level of computer expertise, if you need a benchmark for comparison. I started life as an illustrator, but computers ate my profession a couple of years after I got my first steady job. It was geek or die. And I’m all out of bubblegum.
Writing code isn’t my primary job, but I’ve written a lot of code. A lot of stupid, psychotic, messed-up, throwaway code. People hate touching my code. I don’t know why. I comment it thoroughly. And I include lots of jokes.
I hit the internet early, maybe 1986. In 1990, I read Tim Berners-Lee’s white paper proposing a thing called the World Wide Web and I thought, “pff! That’s stupid!” Then I actually experienced the WWW for the first time around 1993 and thought, “pff! That’s stupid!”
Still, I built websites for money in the early Wild West days, but lost interest before CSS was common. I can bend it to my will, but it’s like elephant training — I smack things with a stick and observe the result. I maintain a handful of the sites I built, but I’m not really happy with the server I host them on. At least they give me a shell account, so I can telnet in from work and reach forbidden websites using Lynx and play Hack.
I never really got into databases. When I hear stuff like, “Early MySQL versions included few standard relational database management system (RDBMS) features, and the current production version still lacks properties found in other SQL RDBMSs, which has led database experts to criticize MySQL as falling short of being an RDBMS…” I think, “blah, blah, blah…my butt-bone hurts…can we have pizza?”
Even after all these years, I’m still afraid I’m going to do something stupid online and totally break the Internet, and then everyone will be all, “Ohmygod! Weasel broke the internet! Hey, everybody — let’s hate Weasel!” Which would surely suck, right there.
In short, I’ve been at it a long time, but I’ve managed to preserve a vast ecosystem of precious ignorance. I’m good at figuring out some things and bad at figuring out others. My computer expertise is a mile wide and a pica deep. And if you know what a pica is, you too went to art school.
Ha! Loser.
