Memoirs Of d’Old Geek
(with appologies to Dr. Issac Asimov)
Once upon a time, long ago, while shopping for some furs at a Russian Furrier, my wife made a comment about me not knowing furs. She said, “ He’s a Geek” The furrier expressed confusion and asked her what a Geek was. She spent the next half hour explaining to the Russian just what that meant. Until that moment I had never thought of my self in that way, a Nerd maybe.
Background
Now that I’m a 78-year-old, retired consultant I have to agree with her. Sixty-five years ago I built my first computer from relays salvaged from a pinball machine. Electronics became a passion with Vacuum tubes, the Radio Amateurs Handbook, and the local Radio Amateurs Club providing the knowledge and advice to build equipment. I joined the local Air Cadet core which built my self-esteem and confidence. I am blessed-cursed with many abilities, a somewhat keen intelligence, a curious nature, and a certain lack of wisdom and people skills.
When I graduated from High School, I joined the RCAF [Royal Canadian Air Force}. I was hoping the experience would provide some direction to a future career path. After a week of aptitude and ability testing, the counselor told me that any path I wanted to take, I could succeed in — except being a clerk — that would bore me to death. I asked what was the most difficult one and became a Telecom Ground Tech. I was introduced to transistors, printed circuits, and Integrated Circuitry.
After a tour of duty (3 years), I left the full-time force and enrolled with the Reserves while attending University. A kit bought from Popular Electronics opened the world of personal computing. A degree in Math and Psychology kept opening new vistas. A Commador Pet, Radio Shack Model 80, some knowledge of Forth led to me program a storage system using a cassette recorder [no floppy disks or hard drives then]. I soon moved to a bigger computer — HP8080, floppy disks and hard drives. Most programming was machine language.
Work during this period included Burroughs Business Machines as a Senior Field Engineer and CNCP Telecommunications as Senior Technician. There I was introduced to mainframes — such as they were at the time. Switches were mainly mechanical but moved to computers. We booted our mainframe by hand-feeding a punched tape through a telex reader. At Burroughs the latest thing was an office computer the size of a good-sized desk with an explosion-proof drawer to contain the hard drive. The head had a habit of crashing into the disk with rather catastrophic results.
WordPerfect, spell checkers, Spreadsheets, DB3, and DBIV were used. I joined TechNet and got the complete Visual Studio to do projects with. After a set of courses for MCSE, I Started my own business specializing in small and medium-sized companies. Wrote a VCR Rental system, Accountant placement system with Resume tracking, and a tool tracking system for the largest Hydro distribution company in North America. I taught programming and computers at a community college. It was in starting my own company that I really grew.
I had a friend who lived in Atlanta. He was a successful entrepreneur. I phoned asked him for advice on starting my own business. He told me he was in Spain at the moment but would stop in Owen Sound, Ontario on his way home. He flew in that weekend and spent the afternoon with me. I laid out my business plan in detail. What he taught me then was a valuable lesson.
He said to me: “Glen — I have some good news and some bad news for you. The good news is that you can be your own boss.”
To which I replied, “What is the bad news?”.
“You will be your own boss.”, he said.
Since then I was always aware that answers to many of my problems were to be found in myself. Some of them were found in who I asked, but the decision was always mine. So it is with my decision to return to my journey back to lifetime learning and ‘geekiness’.
Moving On
I want to thank Valerie for giving me the final nudge to start. [add link to her Medium profile here]. I enjoyed her article “Dare To Be Better”. She reminded me of another coder I hired 30+ years ago.
She came to my company from one that belittled her, put her down, etc -something that I apologize for on the behalf of all men. After a year of experience and assurance that she knew more than I and that I was basically dumb and depended on her. She was able to move on to bigger and better things. I was sorry to see her go but we were a small firm and her abilities and talent were meant for great things and for far better pay than we could afford. You also impress me as a great coder, organizer, with people abilities that far exceed mine. I hope for great things for you Valerie. Best of luck. So when I received your email after subscribing to you on Medium, I replied. So here it is. I offer my first lesson:
Use what’s Right in front of you
You will notice the reasonably blank screen at the start of this article. That’s what’s in front of my nose. So open a NotePad document. Rt.Clk on the blank screen. Move down to New, and Rt.Clk on Text Document. This creates a blank object on your screen called,NewTextDocument.txt. Dbl.Clk on the object to open it. Alternatively, type notepad in the bottom left, where it says [Type here to search] and Push <Enter>. You should get this:
On NotePad. [Seeing as I had it open and in my case, typing this.]
Notepad has always been a convenient way to quickly create notes for myself. I thought I had better turn on SpellChecker seeing as I was typing for someone else to read. I couldn’t remember how — a common occurrence these days. So I opened up a notepad doc and took a look around. I learned that I could turn on/off the Status bar at the bottom by View tab on the menu. There, I clicked Status Bar of Notepad to turn it on. I also took note of the Zoom option. Another thing I had not noticed before. I also saw Page Setup, something new, under File on the Menu tab. While exploring I noticed Ctl+P to quickly print rather than File/Print from the menu bar.
To Newbies, don’t be afraid to explore the programs you have access to. It's interesting what you will find. Further, when it comes to programming, you will see what others have done.
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Create a Log File:
I knew from previous use, about opening a New Text File, adding .LOG to the first line at the top, saving and closing it. Then every time I opened the file, it would automatically insert the current time/date in the next line. I used to keep this text file named DailyLog.txt on my desktop to track my daily activities. [This can also be done manually in a notepad document. Select Time/Date under the Edit Menu item or press F5 when you want to time/date stamp something.]
Turn on SpellChecker:
No Spell-checker there. Okay. I know it is there somewhere as it autocorrects on my tablet. I typed spell in the search bar on the bottom left of the screen and I found it under Settings/Devices/Typing. You could just enter [typing] there and it will take you right to it.
It was turned on there. Wait a minute. That’s for the software keyboard. Further down the page is Hardware Keyboard. I turn on autocorrect and text suggestions on there and Voila — I have spell correct as I type in Notepad. There are multilingual and more settings in advanced. [It also was turned on in Wordpad.]
I’ve also noticed that a * is added to the title bar in front of the file name if I’ve added text and haven’t saved it yet. Notepad also warns me if I try to close it and haven’t saved it yet.
More than Just Text Files
You can use the File/Save As to create an XML or a JavaScript file in notepad. Rather handy. When you have the Save As dialogue, enter the file name including XML enclosed in quotation marks, and click Save. There are detailed instructions in the next example. Just replace HTML with XML. You have an XML document. What is XML? Another time. You can also create JavaScript in notepad and save it by changing the [HTML] with [JS].
Create your First Web Page:
Similarly, you can also use notepad to create HTML code. Open notepad, enter your HTML code. For example, for those who don’t know HyperText Markup Language, copy and paste the following into a new notepad file. [Hold down the left button, highlight the text, then left-click on the hilite text, choose Copy from the popup menu. Go to the new text document, left-click on the document, and choose Paste from the popup menu.]
[Start Hillite, click and hold Lft. Mouse button below this]
<h1> This Is Sample Notepad In HTML </h1>
<p>
To save this notepad as HTML, enter this code in notepad. Then, on the top left of notepad, click File -> Save As.
</p>
<p>
When the Save As dialogue opens, enter the name of the file you want to save it as — followed by a period (.) — after the period enter HTML. Finally, enclose everything in double-quotes. For example “page.HTML”.
When you are done, click Save.
</p>
</body>
[End hi-lite by releasing mouse button above this line]
Left-click on the highlighted text, and choose copy. Paste it in your text file, Choose Save As, and enter “FirstWebPage.HTML”
Any files you’ve saved so far should be on your desktop.
Double-click on the HTML file you saved and it opens a web page with the browser of choice. A quick and dirty way to create web pages. Coding in HTML [HyperTextMarkupLanguage] is another matter but its not hard. Your computer decides what to do with the file based on the extension [.HTML, .EXE , .JS, .XML,.TXT etc.}
Shortcut Keys
Last, but not least, ShortCut Keys. I am a touch typist. [An ability worth cultivating for a programmer.] The use of shortcut keys however is a trait I have not cultivated a lot. Time to change that.
So this was typed in Notepad, copied to Wordpad for enhancements — screen captures and then to WPS Office for tables. Then cut/paste to Medium. I’ll try out Google Docs &/or Open Office in the future. Hopefully learn to do this right in Medium. In the meantime, I’ll move ahead with what’s right in front of me.
Next, we’ll open the Command Window, run notepad, Wordpad, and start batch files. Discuss support and Resources available. I call it R&D.
Submitted for your comments, editing, suggestions, etc. I’ll see if I can figure out how to enter profile info etc. in Medium. Looking forward to your reply. Remember, I’m old enough to realize that I don’t know everything and can take criticisms gracefully:
Submitted Dec 12, 2021 10:26
