I've finally come to peace with how to absolutely hate computers and work with them. I used to have a monitor with an i hate computers sticker on it. Now, I still hate (for lack of a better word) a bunch of the CS classes available at USC... they're so... ugh... tool dependent. It's like taking a woodworking class where they force you to use certain tools for fear you will hurt yourself on other ones. KLame. When really it's just done for ease of grading similar stuff. That's the price you pay I guess for admission, but in this era of OCW, etc... If I want to learn something about something I'll use Google. I'm here for classroom stuff, learning from peers, learning about stuff that isn't really up on science news sites but is damn deep and interesting. Oh well.

That said, I've realized that if I can get something done on a computer in X steps and I want to do it I don't really need to optimize that process. They say for programming that premature optimization is the mind killer, which is true, but in life I hate doing the same thing 5 times on a computer if it takes me more than 3 steps. I just want to "fix it" so I don't have to do it again.

I want it to be a button that I click or a command that I type with little to no memorization. When I turn on my guitar amp, it's on... there's no... extra switching... wait for the tubes to warm up if it's a tube amp, but whatever... it's simple steps... hard to mess up and easy to do. That's what I like in life. The rest is just too complicated to possibly be worth it.

What's weird is that Automator built into Mac OSX should fix a lot of this, but generally writing the code is as time consuming as doing the task again. And if you're not sure you will really do the 33 step task again... it's not, for me at least, been worth learning Automator to do it. I know other tools bash, python, perl, ruby, etc. etc. ad infinitum that can help automate the hell out of shit. And I used to love doing it in perl because it can basically do any math MS Office Excel does and then output Excel, which is super important for sharing numbers with people who don't program. But I've gotten lazy about it in my old age. Plus the real hell of it is making graphs over and over and over... for that I'll have to pick up gnuplot again, or just get less impatient over this 33 steps issue.