I only got thirty more days to use the free introductory offer on the AppleScript online tutorial. When I looked at "My Account" at the web site it said I had until 10/05 to do what i was gonna do on their free offer, and then i had to shit or get off the pot. I panicked a little, I thought 10/05 was tomorrow, literally, instead of tomorrow being 09/05. I always seem to be just getting to the good parts with this tutorial.
I've run into some problems with getting the examples to come out right. I just ran into another one, and decided to stop studying for a while and focus on some other project for a while. In my small little world, my options are simple and few. I can either practice playing on the piano, write a blog entry, work on the AppleScript tutorial or meditate.
Of course, I can do anything I want to with my ti-me as long as I can afford the activity or event, it's just that I may be poor with a purpose. The AppleScript thing gets more interesting as I progress through it. I don't have serious ambitions about using what I learn. Presently, especially. I may not be able to get it from my head to my hands. It worked that way with electronics. Both activities might stand a better chance of getting somewhere if I were more of a nerd.
The odd thing about doing what I'm doing with this tutorial is that I keep remembering stuff I might have entertained doing in the past, but I simply didn't know how to do them. The learning curve was too great, and I wouldn't really be satisfied with the results I got with a quick fix.
One of the projects I got in mind is to create a program for counting my repetitive use of certain phrases in my writing. There is years of it in my blogs I could mine for data. I write about the same things over and over deliberately to see what I'll say the next time.
I might already have the program I need with this free text editor called TextWrangler. I was looking for a more feature-filled program to set up the layout of my e-mail communication interactions. I don't know how I missed finding TextWrangler, it does everything i wanted plus it has an extensive AppleScript Dictionary that will allow me to program the results I need to get from it... if, and only if... I learn AppleScript. The only problem I foresee is getting discouraged and quitting before I get where I wanna go with it.
The authors of the book/tutorial write themselves that it's the first 12 Chapters that are most important to complete and learn as thoroughly as possible. I'm working on Chapter 9. i hope if i keep plugging away at it over a certain unknowable length of ti-me I should pick up enough to be able to alter previously existing scripts to work on my specific machine.
I've learned more about Macs in general from doing this tutorial than I ever expected to know. If I had know the score, I could have probably learned to use the MicroSoft equivalent program Visual Basic and been much happier using Windows than i was. Learning to use a scripting program means that one has to learn a lot about how the Operating System itself works, and that always makes things easier.
I just read an article on how the new Mac upgrade called Snow Leopard employs a new standard that uses the unused cycles of the Graphics Engines called GPU instead of CPU. Snow Leopard will use any computing chip on the computer thats not being used:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/09/04/inside_mac_os_x_snow_leopard_gpu_optimization.html
The name of this feature is called CLU, and it's a big deal. To make a machine faster, all one has to do is to install more GPUs on a video card in a PCI slot, and CLU will use them for general purpose computing. It may work the other way round too. It make use CPU cycles to help the graphics operations. That, and the option to install unlimited amounts of DRAM on the limited number of DRAM slots on the motherboard, computing might have just moved into warp speed even on the desktop and laptops. I'm still waiting for USB3 to show up in the chipset to buy a new Snow Leopard box.
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.
