Programing Headaches

So there are good days and bad days with my programing experiences. Good days I figure out what I'm supposed to be learning and manage to get a little closer to it, or actually successfully complete a piece of code. Then there are the bad days, days that I can't seem to do anything right. These days are so incredibly frustrating I just want to hit things and cry. It doesn't help when my computer is so slow that it takes 30 seconds for a word to show up on the screen when I am typing, but that isn't this blog post. So I'm working on something right now and I can't find the key words I need to understand something, which of course means I am spending %1000 more time on every little thing and far more than I actually should be. This is frustrating, so frustrating that it makes me want to say "screw it you stupid piece of S*&^$#%".

As it stands I have spend most of the afternoon on this problem and have absolutely no freaking way to fix this problem until I can ask Jayson. This sucks, quite a lot because I just wasted the whole afternoon on some jumped up piece of C*&%$. So I am nowhere near getting the things done that I need to get done and am so frustrated with everything I could kill someone, especially the jerk that ran me off the freeway yesterday. P.S. thank you grand theft auto for the brake turn, spin gas combo that saved my life and the lives of anyone I would have hit on the backlash from slamming into the cement sides at 70mph.

Anyway, so I am supposed to be making 3 separate functions and then calling them to load, permute and save some data. Ok. So I did this exact thing on fri. without the separate functions. Turning them into functions however seems to be my downfall and every time I think about this stupid thing I see red and really hate myself. I am trying to make it so I can call the various functions but they don't work, well thats fine go online and find out how to call functions. Please keep in mind that these functions are the same ones that I successfully managed on Fri. Oh btw there is absolutely no information on how to call functions online, as in it doesn't exist unless I'm using classes. So apparently this lower level of programing doesn't exist. Ok, maybe I just need to look at my functions again, oh, yeah functions don't exist by that name in Ruby yet everyone uses it. Ok, its war.

4.5 hrs later...
*Scream* just kill me please, because I clearly am the most stupid person on the planet because I cannot figure out how to make these "functions" functions, let alone call them into action. I've looked everywhere. Seriously everywhere. I don't know what to do next and I feel so incredibly stupid I can't even breathe. How on earth do people learn this cracked out excuse for a language? Its bad days like this that make me want to go into something that never requires me to think ever. I know that I'll have better days but honestly, I couldn't remember the feel of success right now. Yay, hopelessness.

Japanese Hiragana part 2

So I don't seem to be having many problems with the pronunciation of the first 4 columns of Hiragana. The 5th column has a little hard part, getting the 'u' at the end of "tsu". Otherwise it's going well, I am remembering pronunciation very well and am having fun with the column pattern.

In other areas, I am working on getting myself organized and trying to get into the way I want to be. I've set up a to do list with times and all kinds of stuff. I'm trying to look at it every day and check things off as I do them. Hopefully this will make it easier for me to remember to study enough and pay attention more often. I've cut down on my Netflix watching so that I am more in the moment and listening to mood boosting podcasts when I walk or do chores around the house. I got a ton of chores done today, desperately needed today, as well as lots of studying.

Focus gone, signing off.

Rails with Jayson

So today's lesson concentrated on learning to read the Ruby core library and then using a few as case studies. This evolved into a lecture about variables and stacks when I had a slight mental issue with a string method called String.new("string"). This little gem of horror creates a copy of the "string" so the original string is not changed, it seems that this would be an easy concept right? Ah but does it really make a copy or is it tricking my brain into thinking it makes a copy? Answer: both. Yes it is actually making a simple copy, problem was I was associating variables with the "string" they were representing.

P.S. an "!" means to force a change and not copy (using string.capitalize creates a copy of the "string" and capitalizes the copy, while String.capitalize! just capitalizes the "string".)

Once that was moderately beaten out of my head we moved on to String.succ. Which of course meant we had to go through all of this again. On top of which I didn't understand why there were so many different instance variables, why name is made into @name when it isn't used for another function, and the order of the rest of the function. Basically it was a WTF? moment, again. Once we slogged through that (which included hair pulling, temper tantrums and tears), I mostly understood the point and could probably understand the file if I pulled it up....Yup I understand it, mostly.

Next was a lecture and lesson on stacks and how that all works, using a debug gem so I'd be able to see what was going on under the hood of ruby. This blew my mind for longer than I'd like to admit. Yes I know about stacks and how one would use them... vaguely. So I had to learn more about stacks and how that works using the Time class.  Not to mention the Time class itself and the weirdness that are time methods. So now I understand stacks better. How then to decode the rest of this lesson? Well first off "<=" means lesser than or equal to. Kinda important little piece of s*&*^,    *cough* comparison operator. So setting the time expectancies understood but what is that magic that makes the year the beginning of the year and not 3 weeks in!? Oh right, its the meaning of the freaking class method of .utc (which has an acronym that is actually backwards).

So knowledge gained and being slowly absorbed into my poor borg brain. Even through the crazy temper tantrums and crazy need to put my head though a wall when working on this stuff I learned something today and more than I thought I did as evidenced by remembering most of parts of the lessons for today.

if cass.sleepy? and freaking_late? (time) then
    puts "Freaking Bedtime."
else
    puts "Nap time, oh god."
end

Japanese Lesson 1 part 2

In this part of the lesson we went over the different alphabets for lack of a better term, of Japanese.
Hiragana:

• Used as the "alphabet" of the "Alphabet" (ie. Kanji)
• sounding out and understanding the more difficult Kanji
• Words without Kanji
• Suffixes
• Particles
• Verb and Adjective inflections

Katakana

• Has the same sounds as Hiragana
• Used for foreign words 
• Scientific words
• Onomatopoeia
• Emphasis (italics)
• Food often

Kanji

• Chinese characters repurposed for Japanese
• Make up the bulk of the language vocab (needing 2000+ to read Japanese)
• Each character has multiple pronunciations
• Can be Noun, Adjective or Verb

I didn't really have any trouble with the Chapter and the way this is written just sweeps me along for the ride so I don't really notice that I'm working hard. I think its going to take some work to get them straight in my head for their purposes but they aren't that difficult, honestly I'll just quiz myself for a while and keep writing it down so I get the correlations correct. So all in all not really having a hard with this at all so far and being fairly entertained. If only my other classes were as entertaining and snarky as this I'd be happy.

Rails Lesson 1

Rails Lessons with Jayson

So as I've been learning Ruby on Rails I have encountered a few different ways of studying and learning to program. Learning Rails with my mentor Jayson allows me to ask questions from the inane through as advanced as I can imagine and get answers worth asking the questions. While this approach is pretty much the most difficult I can think of, I am learning things that I can't learn from books about programing and the career. I can also get very well thought out answers to questions I hardly knew how to ask. I can't even express how helpful and amazing this is for me, cogent answers!

Today was the second actual lesson though he has been tutoring me for a couple of months. I had a particularly bad experience last week with a coding study group and that stimulated a change of plans. To bridge the gap of my knowledge and to make learning more relevant to where I am he started developing lessons on his own to find my weaknesses and teach me the main points I was unable to find elsewhere, (example: learning Terminal, the Mac base program). While I am still studying Rails though books I am getting an advanced/supplementary education on the side as well. At the moment we are meeting x2 a week for long brain bending sessions of complete and utter world reorientation. 

Today was a redo of the last lesson for the problem set he made, for more practice and an advanced understanding of functions, expressions and classes as well as format for calling functions. Last week's lecture was on loops specifically "for" and "while". 

• "For" is a loop that continues as long as there are objects to run through the loop and reacts as those objects are available. They come out in order. Most common type of loop.
• "While" loops run as long as a condition is true and don't require an object. This is the most general type of loop. 

These can be mutated into one another, written as a different type of loop.

Today's lecture was on Expressions and types of Literal Expressions. I have notes of these for my notebook, making me very happy that I grabbed that new heavier paper and another pen this weekend.

Homework:

Come up with other methods for the Venue class and implement them within the class.

Japanese Intro

So, Nick and I are starting a round of Japanese and this is a review of that event.

Goals

1. Learn Japanese with Nick so he has someone to talk to and I get Nick time.
2. Study Japanese in addition to all the other things I am working on.
3. Clean my study area.
4. When I sit at my desk I study.
5. Mon. and Thur. at 5 I study with Nick.
6. Create a study Blog (heheh already had one from when I was studying Accounting, but this is still a good idea even though previously I sucked at keeping up with it.


This is devoted to #6; I am creating a section for my Japanese class to chronicle my studies. So far in this first lesson we've been using TextFugu's free section for our experiment. This website is well, well put together as a class so far. There is a lot of educational theory at the beginning to prep people for what they are getting themselves into. Since I already have Chinese experience I understand with greater depth how incredibly relevant that is. So we'll see how it goes.