“Stress to muscle failure to maximize mass gain”, got it, old SGU episode; lift until you can’t lift any more. Done. Arms hurt. Got it. Later, my nose itched. *lifts finger to about mouth level. Arm gives out.* *tries again with other hand* Fail.
*pan head left to right*Â AHA!
*scratch nose against 600 page Objective-C programming book on desk*
Let’s see you do that, Ruby on Rails.
Yesterday’s ennui over programming has been replaced with a stronger sense of determination.  I began looking into a solid reference for the framework I was using and wasn’t sure which to pick as there were hundreds so I started looking at reviews.  Almost all of them had reviews between four and five stars which is close enough to noise to not show much so I hit upon the idea of analysis of grammar: I’d buy the book who had the most five star reviews from people who had no command of grammar and had few negative reviews from people that seemed to have graduated from the sixth grade assuming that if an idiot found it useful, I would.  This algorithm seemed quite powerful and I whittled the field to two.  I’ll find out tomorrow if my selection method works.  Thank you, Amazon Prime.
I don’t program, at best I script and I’ve made a reasonable career of this when called for by any of my jobs. Â This Rube Goldberg-esque methodology is not helpful when learning to program with a capital “p”. Â “Programming” seems to involve things like having “data flows” and in some case interaction with these dreaded “objects” I have heard so much about. Â Whenever I create a new class I feel like I have a new structure that has to be bargained with, that is holding my data-children hostage that only through an intricate set of calls and handshakes may I actually see them. Â This is the way “programmers” do things, and people far smarter than I have ordained this the way of the world.
I created my first “Hello, World” program in my target framework and have gone so far as to change both the point size and font of the text.  This isn’t even crawling, this isn’t even breathing.  This is the programming equivalent of the moment of silence where the baby is alive but has yet to be slapped into cognizances by the doctor.  Then the pain begins, and I get to become some sort of journeyman bit-wielder who will spend the next years hating pound signs and import calls but will miss them (dearly) when removed from that element.  I never felt this way about chemistry, as I considered each compound, extract, and experiment to be a friend.  The calcified laws of nature were perfectly content to merely repeat their one line of “a 10°C translates to a doubling of the rate of reaction” until you realized this truth and its manifold implications.  Programming has yet to introduce me to those friends with their quirks (crystallized iodine compounds make wonderful party tricks) and qualities (acetylene and chlorine react as gases to produce a color that I can only describe as “bright”) and I wonder if this happens in programming.  If it does not, I will petition for a change to the second word in “computer science”.
Starting on Tuesday I got emails asking me to participate in a survey about costs of college. I emailed the provider because I thought it was phishy as the name listed in the email wasn’t the same as the one in the letter and each directed to a different domain. So, I fought back.
One question was “why did you take out student loans?” to which I responded “to pay for college”.
Another was “why did cost influence your decision?” which is poorly worded, I responded “money is a scarce resource”. I think he or she wanted to ask “how”.
Once I saw the progress tracker move irregularly (it started at 10% at the first question and increased by 5% then 2% then 1%) I started fighting back. I viewed the page source code to see if there was anything amiss and inspired by XKCD I went to work. My total loan amount was “/$.00); DROP TABLE survey_data;–“, which is a common command to delete a table. If he or she has failed to remove code from inputs I’m hoping he or she lost his or her data. I tried a couple variants like data, survey, finance, report and so on in the successive slots. I felt bad for a moment as I could be destroying someone’s final or term paper data until I finished the survey and was directed to Penn State Harrisburg’s Home Page.