Gack! Attack of the Programmers

Aren't visions of sugarplums supposed to be dancing in my head right now?

Why then, do I have lines of code running amock in my head instead ?

Tell me, dear followers...

When you go to sleep at night, do you find yourself thinking,

"ControlChars.CrLF!"
"MessageBox.Show ("You're an idiot!", "Idiotic Warning Message")
"Parent, child, class, object, method, function...zzzz"
and lest we forget

"Instantiate! Instantiate! You must instantiate your object before you can use it!"

I can literally see these rampant lines of code behind my eyelids when I try to unsuccessfully fall asleep after attempting to tackle my programming homework for hours upon hours...

Things like this:

Public Class DVDBurnerForm
       Dim dvdObject As DVD
       Dim materials() As Bonus
       Dim lastAdded As Integer = -1
       Dim title, titleMin, bonus1, bonus2, bonus3, min1, min2, min3 As String

'Create an array of Bonus objects to store bonus materials
lastAdded += 1
materials(lastAdded) = New Bonus
materials(lastAdded).Description = bonus1 & "," & bonus2 & "," & bonus3
materials(lastAdded).Length = CInt(min1 & "," & min2 & "," & min3)

End Sub

Pretty, don't you think?


EXCEPT IT DOESN'T FRAKKIN' WORK, DAMMIT!

All the pretty colors to help you realize the different parts of code are doing/referencing/being different things.

You'd think I'd like that aspect, but all it does is serve to remind me that somehow my

materials(lastAdded) = New Bonus

is coming up with a NULL REFERENCE.

That's akin to the blue screen of death.

Okay, not really. But just as frustrating.

Programming is an art form. One I'm not good at. As was proved to me quite easily during my group project. My school is BIG on group projects & presentations. Apparently some of the big midwest company recruiters have told them that college grads are not coming to the workforce with the necessary public speaking and teamwork skills needed for a truly successful career in business.

In the spirit of the season...BAH! Humbug. I speak plenty good.

I shouldn't jest...I actually did have a coworker recently compliment me on my public speaking skills, saying I was good at it. Okay, fine, here's a begrudging Thank You to Carlson School of Management for forcing me to work with a bunch of AA-personality types who were overachievers their whole lives. You think it's tough being the quiet one in the group? Try being in a group entirely comprised of people who are all "natural leaders". Everyone's claws are out trying to grab as much glory/work as they can (not me, the only thing I over-achieve at presently is procrastination).

Anyways...group programming project. Amongst amatuers, basically. Nightmare on 34th Street!

Luckily for me, I got lumped in with three actual, honest-to-god Computer Science majors. Not psuedo-IT majors like mine (I'll manage the crap out of your Info Systems...someday) but people who will actually be doing the work that I'll hopefully manage someday.

So our programmed game of memory is done (complete with pics of My Little Ponies turned into Boba Fett, Leia, the Alien from the Alien movies, MacGyver and Chuck Norris...hmmm, can you guess who was in charge of grabbing images from Google for our game?) and it's pretty freakin' awesome.

No thanks to me!

I think I wrote 5 lines of code and my only other contributions were finding said pics and setting up the initial GUI (pronounced gooey, and means Graphical User Interface for those newbs out there. Who am I kidding? You could care less).

Also luckily, however, these guys are my peeps. Maybe not exactly my brand of peeps (my "Do you play Magic?" question got some stares that said "Uh...in high school!") but my kind of nerd herd distantly related. So in the spirit of group work (where 20% of the people do 80% of the work) they came up with a plan, implemented it, coded it, and tested it.

And Voila! Our very own 4x4 board of Memory (notice how I still say "our" even after admitting to doing hardly anything on it? Tell me I'm not ready for the real-world of business!).

Complete with Chuck Norris' baleful glare over his crossed forearms.

Once next Thursday comes & goes, I'll happily leave behind the world of programming.

Almost.

It WAS kind of neat to make an annoying program called "Catch That Button!". Still trying to figure out how to bypass my employer's firewalls & safety features to install that baby on my SVP's computer as payback for the "You're attractive too, Sarah!" comment the other day....

That'd keep him busier than a hamster with a wheel.