Blue Scream of Jeff: July 2015

Wednesday, July 22, 2015

Making it look easy, isn’t easy

Putting together a good how-to can be just as frustrating as putting together a jigsaw puzzle.

“Woodworking for Mere Mortals”

It’s no secret by now that I’ve become a bit of a YouTube addict who enjoys spending his very late Friday nights perusing the channels of his favorite DIYers and Makers.

The amount of creativity shown by the likes of Steve “Woodworking for Mere Mortals” Ramsey, Matthias "Woodgears.ca" Wandel, Marc “The Wood Whisperer” Spagnuolo, Izzy “Think Woodworks” Swan, Frank “Frank Makes” Howarth, Jimmy Diresta, and April “Wilkerdos” Wilkerson always amazes me and is a constant source of project ideas for my ever-growing, things-I-need-to-make list.

These often well produced, always entertaining and informative how-to videos which show various projects’ progressions from concept through completion, was the inspiration for last month’s “Giving Old Tech New Life” post.

Matthias Wandel

And while I don’t have a really good video camera, studio lighting or the software needed to professionally edit video (yet), I figured, how hard can it be to put together a small how-to on my blog site?

After all, part of my responsibilities at my day job is creating step-by-step documentation – complete with lots of screen shots – that show both our users and our tech staff how to use a particular program, install it and/or configure it.

I was confident I could knock the whole thing out in an hour or so.

Boy, was I wrong.

Unlike taking a series of screen shots and writing a captions for them describing what a user needs to click on to proceed to the next step, documenting a build as “simple” as the clock in last month’s blog was a hell of a lot more complex than I’d ever imaged.

“The Wood Whisperer”

I never realized the way I work in my shop is drastically different from the way I do things at work.

Almost by definition, working with computers requires approaching things in a logical, orderly fashion; following an exact series of steps in a sequential manner until the task at hand is done. At work, this is exactly how I do things.

But in my shop, I just wing it. I rarely if ever draw any real plans, make a cut list or plot out the order of the build. At most, I have a few crude sketches with dimensions scrawled on them and an idea that I’ve been turning over in my head for a few weeks.

I am well aware that this isn’t the most efficient use of my rather limited time in my shop. I know that if I actually spent some time to create a set of detailed plans in Sketch-Up or even Quark Xpress, I’d be able to avoid the slowdowns that always seem to crop up because I hadn’t foreseen some problem or another when I had “built” the project in my head.

“Think Woodworks”

This never seemed important until now. As long as I was making at least some progress on my project and ended the day the same number of fingers I’d started with in the morning, I considered it a really good day in the shop.

Yet even if I had made detailed plans and followed them to the letter, the clock build still would have taken me twice as long to complete as would have if I wasn’t documenting it. After every step, I had to remember to stop and try to get clear, in-focus pictures that showed what I was doing.

Once that was done I thought I was home-free. All that remained was to write a short introduction and 20 or so captions for the photos, then post it on the blog. I was sure I could accomplish all that in an hour.

Yeah, right…

Frank Makes”

By now I really should know that my sense of how long it takes me to complete a task has absolutely no basis in reality. I’m really horrible at estimating time, and always think I can do something much more quickly than it actually takes me. So I was a little surprised when I finished the writing part in the time I had allotted.

“Cool!” I thought. “Everything’s going to plan for once.”

I should have realized right then and there that things wouldn’t be quite that easy.

Instead of the five minutes I’d thought it take me to upload the photos, cut and paste some text and write some simple HTML to get everything looking the way I wanted, it took me over three bloody hours!

I freely admit I’m no IT genius. I’m a generalist who has a very broad understanding of all the various specialties that make up the Information Technology field, and while none of that knowledge runs really deep, I sure as hell know how to create a basic HTML table!!

Jimmy Diresta

My coding skills won’t win any awards, and I know the use of tables to format a webpage went out of style with Netscape Navigator back in the late ’90s, but hey, it’s a quick, down and dirty way to do it.

So why the hell Blogspot constantly kept rewriting my code and completely screwing it up is beyond me!

Hey Google. Leave my #%$@! HTML code alone, damn it!

I could have built my own web server from spare parts, bought and registered my own domain and created an entire web site from scratch using only Notepad in the time it took me to get Blogspot to format my last post correctly! (Yes, I know there are third party slideshow plug-ins I could have used, but I mistakenly thought it would be quicker to build my own table rather than learning how to use one of those.)

April “Wilkerdos” Wilkerson

My frustration in wanting to get that post to look even somewhat professional gave me even more respect for people like Steve, Matt, Mark, Izzy, Jimmy, Frank and April. As easy as these folks make it look to provide content that, in many respects surpasses cable’s DIY shows, I now realize it takes a hell of a lot of work and understand why many of them quit their day jobs to devote their full efforts to making these shows.

So to all of them I say a hearty thank you for keeping me inspired, making me want to get back into my shop and for helping me to wind down at the end of each week.

And if you’ve never check out any of their channels before, please do. Maybe they’ll inspire you too.