The past few days have been good for me. I feel like i’m regaining my form from January at long last.
theleavingcert.com has been revamped, i’ve done quite a bit of work on it. That huge college report i’m working on is coming together nicely and speaking of college, i’ve gotten 50 something percent in a networking exam, 60 something in a databases exam… that’s nothing to get excited about 
but it’s my ability to get through exams and get respectable results without really trying which impresses me.
photo credit: venetia joubert sarah oosterveld
They’re not really interesting subjects either… there’s no room for creative thinking which leaves me bored. When it comes to programming though i’ve started to get excited about it and enjoy it. I’ve figured out that i can create designs and tabs and beautiful interfaces using visual basic.
We were never taught how to go wild designing interfaces and i’d never seen anything other than a default gray background, size 8 font and white textboxes so i’d just taken it for granted that this was visual basic – an ugly, boring tool which uses standard interfaces to interact with code.
But for my last assignment i ventured outside the tried and tested formula and discovered how to really customize things… Different colours when you hover over buttons, banner ads on a program which link to external sites, rotating images etc…
Those simple little things which transform the entire look and feel of the interface have injected new life in to me in programming class. It becomes more interesting now… and now that i’ve figured out how to change things it becomes a competition… who can figure out something new… and then there’ll be 4 or 5 of us in the class who’ll start competing in terms of design. I don’t like being beaten, so i’ll continue to try and raise the bar if others catch up or if others discover something new i haven’t found yet
That’s what it’s all about – keep digging and eventually you’ll find something. Stop and you won’t. Thats probably the reason why things are becoming easier for me and not harder – because i’m learning things by myself – no lecturers really needed. I’ve always done things that way anyway, but i still need questions or assignments on specific topics to get me working on something.
Once you enjoy something, you start working and learning properly. Even if i don’t enjoy something i’ll work, learn and pass it as i know it’s all part of a bigger picture. Short term sacrafice for long term gain. But if you can MAKE something enjoyable that previously wasn’t enjoyable, everything just seems to fall in to place without trying 🙂