I am pretty happy with my life right now. It is low-stress, high-happiness. I like our house and our lifestyle. I am enjoying being young, poor, and in love. Even my job is pretty fun and low-keyed. However, I am perfectly aware that said job doesn't make me enough money to live on. The only reason I've been able to subsist here in Iowa is because I've been getting steady web-work.
It is funny when people ask me how I know so much about computers. They all assume I went to school for computer science or at least graphic design. When I tell them I'm self-taught, they all smile knowingly and say, "Ah, one of those."
I'm not sure what that is supposed to mean, really. It's not like I can just open any program on a computer and figure out how to use it in five minutes. It's not like one day I just took the side off a case and started rooting around in there until I knew how it all functioned. The reason I know what I know is because I have a degree of curiosity, combined with the motivation to figure it out. My ability to build websites is the result of many, many, many, many hours of experimentation. I've rebuilt my own website from scratch more times than I can remember, simply to see if I can do something new and different.
Of course, now that I feel quite competent with html, there is flash to deal with. For a long time flash seemed impractical to me because it was accessible to so few people. Now it just annoys me because all those fancy transitions and sound and effects just seem... well... flashy. Sadly, some of my clients want flash, and I recognize that I should be able to give it to them.
But lately it comes down to a question of investment for me. Learning dreamweaver and photoshop happened because I wanted to learn. To decide to learn flash because I should seems so... mercenary. I know it will take many hours of many days over a many month period before I'm even remotely competent, and for years I will continue to develop my knowledge. What I can't quite seem to decide suddenly is if it's worth the time. I love computers, and the things you can do with them, but I also love turning them off and walking away from them. I strongly believe that computers, like TV, are the root of much evil in our modern world when they are over-used. On top of that, recent events have made me realize, again, that our own little slices of time are tenuous. Pouring all my lucid hours into a box that creates illusions seems a little trite in the face of the grand scheme of things.
But if I don't learn flash, I will soon be an outdated designer. And if toss in the towel on the web business, how do I buy groceries?
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It has always amused me that if you have any computer knowledge, people assume you have a computer science degree. Computer scientists rarely become web designers (in my experience anyway). They become software developers, programmers, system administrators, and a whole bunch of other professions.
As far as Flash goes...yeah. If you're doing web design and want to be current you probably need Flash as well as knowing at least one CMS (content management system), and a scripting language. The downside of web development is that everything changes so fast it's hard to keep up.
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