Brain Dead

I have been so out of my element this week. I'm a client-server programmer stuck in a TN3270 world. As in IBM mainframes. CICS screens and other assorted horrors, like transactions. In the UNIX world, we called them daemons. It was so much more fun.

I've been stuck in a training class all week. (The very term "training class" is redundant, I might add.) And to make it worse, I'm not even training on the programming end of things. I'm training in a 30 year old end user CICS application. No getting into the guts of CICS (whatever that stands for), which might have been mildly interesting. No, I'm training in how to use the actual application.

My mind is fried. It's like its being rewired, or rather, reprogrammed. I'm used to doing GUI design--figuring out whether the best approach should be to use a combo box, a list box or a group or radio buttons. Trying to anticipate and prevent user errors from ever occurring in the first place. And now I'm learning how to use an application where you select a field by placing an X next to it. (Why X? X isn't necessarily easy to type and it's awfully far from the Enter key, which you must press after you press the X. But I have spared you that rant by deleting it after I wrote it.)

Anyway, for these reasons, I'm going to give my brain a break tonight by playing an older game called Morrowind. And maybe on Saturday, I'll give the game a review, just for fun.