Not As Tech-Stupid As I Thought...

So my latest self-torture project is to learn enough HTML and CSS to be able to build my own eBooks from the ground up. I know what you're thinking: But Jaye, you're always going on about how tech-stupid you are! How can this possibly be a good thing?

Here's the secret: *whispers* I'm not really tech-stupid. It's actually more like tech-lazy. In my other life, I was a ceramic engineer and I worked in the nuclear waste industry. I was rather shocked to discover that some of those skills are actually transferable... although, you know, not the really interesting ones relating to the Care and Feeding of Weapons-Grade Plutonium. And not the ones about How to Avoid Having Your Reproductive Organs Irradiated. (Useful Hint: showing the source your arse can help, but only for certain types of radiation.) And definitely not the ones relating to how they figure out how much dose it took to kill you if there's a Horrifying Incident involving neutrons. (Useful Hint: it's a neutron dosimeter affectionately referred to as a toe-tag.)

Unfortunately, the transferable skills I'm talking about have to do with all that useless boring frustrating coding experience I had in graduate school, back in the days when Windows was called DOS, and most of our lab equipment wouldn't recognize a computer if it came up and bit it on the arse. In those days, I had to write my own data analysis program and design my own graphical user interface. It was painful. And slow. But it got the job done a lot faster and with a lot more accuracy than if I'd had to do it the old-fashioned way, with a slide-rule calculator, scissors, and library paste.

And it made everyone in my research group think I was a Coding God of Unparalleled Brilliance. *mwahahahaha!*

Believe it or not, there is a twisted and deviant part of my brain that actually enjoys coding and finds it rather soothing *ducks to avoid thrown objects*. HTML/CSS makes total sense to me. I've yet to try putting together an eBook file, but nothing I've read so far smacks of black magic. Who'd have thought?

What's really sad, though? I'm actually sort of geeked about the prospect of building eBook templates.

I think I need to get out more.