They say if you put a hundred monkeys with type writers in a room...

That they would eventually type out Shakespeare.

This is the case when it comes to me and "programming" HTML.

Something I never remotely anticipated with this blog but it seems that computer programming has caught up with me after all these years on the lam.

Now I will in no way claim that my programming skills are as prolific as Macbeth or as romantically tragic as Romeo and Juliet or as comedic as A Midsummer Night's Dream but believe me when I say,.....figuring out how to crack the HTML in the sidebar section of this blog in order to post links was a major accomplishment for me.

I remeber struggling back in junior high in a very basic computer class. I mean,...they gave you the answers and I still screwed it up.

All I remeber is a bunch of "if x=y then" and "If this = that then goto line 5" type of thing and while everyone else was beaming proudly at their little basic calculators they had programmed, more often than not, I was sitting there going through lines of code trying to figure out where the heck I had gone wrong and lamenting the fact that I couldn't wish my way into the cornfield and be rid of all this numbers madness.

The weird thing is,....over the years,.....I became, well,....."computer-competent" without knowing it. They say that necessity is the mother of invention and while I wasn't looking, I learned things like Photoshop and Pinnacle Studio and a bevy of other programs that today i wonder what I ever did without them.

I started low level designing my message boards with color schemes and borders and sidebars and I started talking to my parents over the phone saying things like, "Well what's the error message say?" and "Did you try rebooting?" and "Well try running it in safe mode."

I'm adding graphics and images and pictures and links to my online messages and I'm using words like RAM and Terabyte and Broadband and what's more, I actually understand them.

I use "hot keys" and "shortcuts" and I can make "jpegs" and "mpegs" and "wave files".

There are times when I step back and I say to myself, "who is this person?"

Even the simple act of typing has increased ten-fold in people. My mother used to do medical transcription and I remember hearing her speed typing at an alarming rate and while I'm nowhere near that,....I'm amazed at the speed with which I DO type.

The reality is,....people learn by doing. They learn by repetition and all those e-mails we send out every day, all those times we upload software and download applications, all those times we pull anything off of a camera or a disk,...all of that stuff, is truning the average person into a basic level computer expert.

And that's pretty amazing.

To think that I've gone from gnashing my teeth over a screwed up calculator program in seveth grade to using a multi-layerd video editing program and outputting it as a jpeg for the web is simply astonishing to me.

If I had to sit down and learn that,...it would be a struggle worthy of Atlas shouldering the earth to me but having learned it over time on my own only serves to show me how much presentation can present a mental roadblock.

If I have to learn it,....it's a chore.

if I want to learn it,....it's a hobby.

And we all know that hobbies are fun.

I wish I could learn to look at everything I hate to do as a hobby.

I think I'd get a lot more done.