A week late and plenty short

Les­son of the week: A blog is only as good as the posts you put therein. Of course, since a blog is more than the sum of its posts, …I don’t know what that means for me, but it’s good.

So Pygmy’s com­ing along. I just released the third ver­sion last week­end and am pleased with how it’s com­ing along. I’m rather sur­prised how much work it takes to get even a lit­tle app like this work­ing. I’m beyond the stage where I needed to read a lot of doc­u­men­ta­tion to learn how to code what I wanted to do (though the PyGTK ref­er­ence is still quite the boon), but I’m still find­ing that there are a lot of things to account for. And as the pro­gram gets big­ger (and harder to man­age), I see the use for design pat­terns to effec­tively use my code. I’ll need to read up on those more, but there’s no time!

So I just started my new job this week. Com­puter appli­ca­tion phone sup­port, to be spe­cific. This month is just train­ing, but by Sep­tem­ber, I’ll be on the phones mak­ing people’s days… or some­thing. It’s funny: I’m not really an Excel wiz­ard, so my train­ing has been illus­tra­tive in fig­ur­ing out what you can really do with it. But it’s sur­pris­ing, approach­ing an appli­ca­tion like for the first time. I haven’t really had that expe­ri­ence in a while, but at this point, I notice a lot of UI quirks and awk­ward pre­sen­ta­tion of fea­tures. For exam­ple, you can “set print area” in the File menu, define a “range to print” in Page Setup, define a named range “Print_Area”, all of which do the same thing. Why not pick one option and stick to it? Lay­ers automa­tion and mul­ti­ple options make the UI com­pli­cated and con­fus­ing. Anyway.…