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Subject:Re: If you were going to learn... From:"Bonnie Granat" <bgranat -at- editors-writers -dot- info> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 7 Mar 2002 23:01:59 -0500
Sella wrote:
I'm wondering what exactly your goal is.
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I have been unemployed exactly six months today. I need to become more
marketable. No project in particular, except the rest of my life!
Thanks to all for the good information and suggestions. I've started reading
online about data modeling (found a very good introductory article at http://www.aisintl.com/case/model.html#Contents
I had thought Access was a relational database. At one time I knew about
tables and keys, but I've totally forgotten it all (what little I knew).
I could not be doing this if I were not in fact interested in the subject.
Part of me is afraid that this effort will be as demoralizing as my efforts
to learn C and C++. I would still like to learn them, but as a student in
the late Nineties, I found that every single book and every single class I
took simply did not explain it. I always wanted to apply technical writing
principles to the books I read, but I couldn't, because I didn't know what
the authors were really saying. Why on earth do they assume that they can
skip over crucial information and only allude to it? Sorry to ramble.
So I hope this doesn't turn out like my attempts to learn a programming
language went. Oh, I dropped the first course I enrolled in (a course that
was teaching C and C++ at the same time) and a year later enrolled in a
course in C++. With a private tutor, I got an A (or was it a B). But I know
NOTHING, I tell you, NOTHING. Why in the world don't they get people who
know how to present complex information to write those books? I give up.
They don't want people to learn it. LOL.
So, I'm unemployed, a bit sad, worrying about my marketability. If there's
some knowledge and experience that I can acquire to spice up my resume, then
I'd love it.
Besides, I love a good puzzle, and this may just be the puzzle-of-the-day
for me. After all, my favorite (my *only*) computer game is Bomb Squad 2, a
hard-to-find little program of figuring out the right combination of four
colors that will stop a bomb from going off
(http://www.editors-writers.info/BOMB_SQ2/).
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