Embacing my inner geek
I've been thinking again this evening about the fact that I get the impression that there is a lack of Welsh-speakers with good computer support skills. So for instance in various digitization programmes etc there are the people who have the academic skills (Middle Welsh) and those who can do the technical side (but have no Welsh at all). Or, and this is where it started this evening, there are people who design bilingual websites and content management without being able to read the Welsh half of the content (and so they lack proof-reading ability at the very least). For example, I noticed that the company that hosts/develops etc the Plaid website, the Welsh language Board website, the Assembly Website, the National Eisteddfod website does not itself have a bilingual website. This would seem a niche I ought to be able to exploit as I have the Welsh language skills and, I believe, the technical aptitude. But, I lack the specific knowledge and experience to get in in the first place.
I think the fact that in doing my PhD when I needed a stylesheet for BibΤεΧ which conformed to my departmental stylesheet (including author shorttitle references) I managed to achieve this by using makebst to get me part of the way to what I needed and then by hacking the unnamed postfix stack language used by BibΤεΧ demonstrates my aptitude, especially considering that I started from a position where I understood neither postfix nor stack; hacking got considerably easier when a former mathmo colleague explained that bit to me. However, that is probably not enough to get into those sorts of jobs. So I turn to the geeks amongst my f'list for advice on becoming a better geek!
I started well as a small child - I tried to write a database programme in BASIC aged 9 or 10 (but was frustrated by the fact that our very old telly didn't display the top and bottom lines of the screen) but when we got the Arc when I was 12 it was easier to buy Squirrel to database my books than write my own so my programming stopped because I didn't have anything I wanted to achieve by it.
Where should I start to get good all round geek skills, possibly with a web bias?
I think the fact that in doing my PhD when I needed a stylesheet for BibΤεΧ which conformed to my departmental stylesheet (including author shorttitle references) I managed to achieve this by using makebst to get me part of the way to what I needed and then by hacking the unnamed postfix stack language used by BibΤεΧ demonstrates my aptitude, especially considering that I started from a position where I understood neither postfix nor stack; hacking got considerably easier when a former mathmo colleague explained that bit to me. However, that is probably not enough to get into those sorts of jobs. So I turn to the geeks amongst my f'list for advice on becoming a better geek!
I started well as a small child - I tried to write a database programme in BASIC aged 9 or 10 (but was frustrated by the fact that our very old telly didn't display the top and bottom lines of the screen) but when we got the Arc when I was 12 it was easier to buy Squirrel to database my books than write my own so my programming stopped because I didn't have anything I wanted to achieve by it.
Where should I start to get good all round geek skills, possibly with a web bias?