Ahhh, Star Trek. Scotty could work miracles keeping the trilithium crystals from exploding, and knowing just when to eject the core modules… sigh. If only our own lives were scripted so obviously that we could solve all of our own problems in a single hour, complete with commercials.
But in real life, we gotta figure things out. That’s part of the gig. Take this website for example. Back in the html-1 days, I could make a webpage sing! Tables. Javascript. Oh, and securing an e-commerce page was just coming out in html-2 days, so I kept up with it. Macromedia Dreamweaver was my coding weapon of choice, because there was very little coding at all since its interface was designed to look at WYSIWYG and the actual code behind the GUI. Websites were conceived based on visual interface and not to stay in the old college gopher page days. I’m dating myself, so let’s get back on point.
Have you ever seen Superman III? Richard Pryor joined Christopher Reeve né Superman, against the evil megalomaniac Robert Vaughn and his evil genius sister played by the indomitable Annie Ross. But all those are window dressing to the line that sticks out to me today. The great Robert Henderson, who alas died two years after the movie came out, holds my favorite scene. He is trying to explain the Vaughn’s billionaire character that someone has stolen $85,789.90 from the company. Here it is:
“In the old days it was simple. We kept books, we had ledgers, we could see what was going in and what was paid out. If somebody wanted to rob you, he’d come in with a gun and say, “stick ’em up!”. Nw they’ve got thee blasted computers to do their dirty work!”
One person cannot typically stay current on everything. That’s just a fact. You focus on something to do well and hopefully make a good living doing it, and you call that a career. Other things can’t take that premium space in your attention. That is exactly why a stock broker can’t look at an electrician with disdain, and a singer shouldn’t look down her nose at a pilot. People who can do everything well end up being James Bond, or Jason Bourne. In other words, an ideal that doesn’t exist in the real world.
So when I say that I’ve been focusing on some other things rather than continuing in the tech arena and web design and development, I’m not embarrassed or shamed – I’ve seen some amazing success at the *other* things I’ve focused on. But, and that’s a great big but, here I am putting up my own webpage for my VO business. I couldn’t go back with Dreamweaver since Macromedia got gobbled up by Adobe, and Adobe chose to make the software distinctly NOT user friendly on the front end. So I’ve put a WordPress page up here. That means I have to buy a license to own copyrights, and to unlock other features of a particular WP Theme. And addons? Yeah, gotta buy those separately too. Case in point: I wanted a Slider to showcase different Character Voices so I researched and got the one that a lot of reviews says is very good. It probably is, but these blasted computers do their dirty work!! In other words, I haven’t figured out how to do it right yet, and it keeps messing up the formatting.
So I’ll do what I can, learn, grow, master it. And then pay somebody else to do this stuff! Sheesh! A man can only be great as so many things, and web building is not where I’m going.
Hmmm. A whole post on *not* doing well at something. Well, I guess the Captain is going to have to negotiate with the Klingons while I figure out a work around. Meanwhile, live long and prosper…that’s one of the things I AM focusing on!
