The last days of summer. I don't have a good metaphor for how hot and muggy it is here. My air conditioner is busted and I can't afford another one. I'll deal. I always have. Well, I'll cope with wot's sot before me as long as I can, and then I won't anymore. C'est la morte!
I got up in the middle of the night because i went to bed early. I was exhausted mentally. My brain was exploding with possibilities for where my piano practice is taking me. I can play lead with either hand and bass with either hand, and I can play the scales with both hands together, but it's still difficult to play bass with the left hand and lead with the right hand together. Better though. A little better... maybe.
Yesterday I wrote about coming to a problem with the AppleScript tutorial that had me buffalo-ed. That's why I went to bed early. I only intended to take a nap to see if that would clear the cobwebs out. I never did figure out exactly what the problem was. It was a fairly short script with only about three or four lines of text and numbers, but compiled it's spreads out to a few words per line for the most part.
The point is that it wasn't that much content to check out, and yet I pored over it again and again for a couple of hours, and still couldn't compile or rather, sometimes it would compile, but it wouldn't Run. Early this morning when I got up from what was supposed to be a nap, about three a.m., I deleted the entire script and typed it in again, and it worked like a charm. There had to be a typo somewhere, but I simply couldn't find it. So, I resolved it instead.
I went back to bed and got up again around eight o'clock this morning. I played through my piano scales even before I had coffee and took my medicine. Then, it was back once more into the breach. Unfortunately, I soon ran into another typo in another script, and again I spent a lotta time looking for it, and couldn't find it, but this time I didn't take forever to re-type the script. Then, as I was retyping it I realized the mistake. I accidentally typed the letter "o" instead of a zero (0). Then, I remembered doing it while in real ti-me, and silently mentioned to myself I had to correct that, and then didn't. Jeez!
That's the one aspect of learning AppleScript that really pleases me. I've been able to find or resolve all the sample script errors I've encountered. I knew it could be this way because of a certain doggedness that has haunted me all my life. I don't think it's so because I'm what some people call a "perfectionist". I just like debugging stuff. Like editing my writing. Sometime I write for an hour, and edit what I wrote in an hour for four or five hours or more.
This is different. There's an end game that's definitive. Either the code I write compiles and runs or it don't. Thats much different than writing open-ended prose on a train to nowhere. In writing scripts, the proof is the results. For me, however, those results don't have to reflect some ultimate truth. Just the fact that I can get the computer to produce the results I reach for is enough.
I got the feeling today several times that if I keep this up I'm gonna be able to do some of the very things with a computer I would have done if I'd just known how. As a matter of fact, the tutorial seems to assume that the content of their efforts is about those simple things that many people wished they knew how to make happen. In part, that's what keeps me working at it.
There is a little larceny in my heart too. That seems to be part of the deal with me. It's that Scorpio Ascendent thing I guess. Either a snake-in-the-grass or the height of a soaring eagle. This larceny is not larceny at all, so I pretend I'm getting away with something because that seems to push me in one of the few ways I'll let myself be pushed.
What I'm referring to in that I signed up for a 45-day free jaunt at the web site tutorial. They apparently have lots of tutorials that their paying subscribers can use. They pay by the month. $23 a month, as I comprehend their spiel. I think the members can study any book they got there for that $23. Like I said, my youngest brother told me he participates with a group like this. He's seriously into FileMaker Pro.
I may be hooked by this free offer to the point that I give up their asking price. But, in the meantime, I'm using that 45 day free offer as incentive to finish this tutorial before the free offer evaporates and I gotta pay up or else.
I especially like the fact that AppleScript is written as much as possible in everyday English, and refers to the keywords as verbs, nouns, and other parts of speech. Not only does that make things easier to remember for a neophyte, but it's gonna help me organize my rhetoric around getting the results I want from the other with less effort, and for sure, less conspicuously. I just love playing word ga-me-s.
I studied neurolinguistic programming for a long time. I got a wall full of certificates of completion for various nlp trainer's courses. The entire idea of NLP is to program human beings, but for me it was only to program myself. What I learned was that I always had, but i coulda done mo' bettah. I guess I've put off studying programming itself. I don't seem to have recognized and found my way into one of the various portals that might lead me there. I did the logistics thing and organized the tools I'd need to work the Perl tutorial for Windows, but without a mentor who would get me over the rough spots I was pretty much screwed. Nobody showed up.
I should have known even then that certain things have to fall into place for me to get where I wanna go with various systems for thinking about things. I know a lot of them. Some, I've even mastered. I had to master just one thing first. I mastered the art of welding pipes of all things. It really didn't matter what I mastered, just that I mastered something. Anything. For me, although it might not work this way for others, mastering the skilled craft of welding and certifying for job after job for year after year was something I needed. I needed to learn how to become a master of anything I chose.
The personal attributes that allowed me to master pipewelding served as a model for mastering anything that mattered to me. The thing is, is that i'm not always sure whether something I'm trying to master actually matters to me or I'm doing it for-the-other. The way things seem to work for me is that I have to do something for-myself in order to do it for-the-other. I've heard others admit that it works the opposite way for them. They get what they need from doing-for-the-other in order to do-for-themselves.
It's kind of what I'm doing by teaching myself what I wanna know about playing the piano. In the same sense that all the music majors at the college I went to had to demonstrate a certain level of proficiency at the piano before they could get a bachelor's degree, no matter what their specialty was, I'm attempting to interweave all things musical I've picked up over the years into the piano as a container. I intend for the instrument itself to be the index of all I got going for me musically.
In the same way, I intend to use AppleScript to organize all things digitally. Well, as far as it goes with me. I've always known that beneath my unquenchable desire to show off, that I was always taking a chance of wandering off into territory where I'm as ignorant as a box of rocks. It's gonna get worse, and I'm gonna help it get worse as much as I can, and still defend myself against my experience of encountering God.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
