As part of the Government’s endless bureaucracy it was decided that PhD students just arent skilled enough for the world. So, as a result of a certain Mr Roberts I am required to jump through even more hoops in the way of a selection of transferable skills seminars. As I have a GNVQ, A level and years of hands-on computing experience I thought a seminar on computing methods would be an easy hoop.
So this morning 20 or so of us sat down, laptops in hand, expectantly waiting. After the first 30 minutes of establishing everyone onto the uni wifi, we got down to the nitty-gritty. And by that I mean, keyboard shortcuts. Yes that’s right folks. At the age of 22 and 12 years in Windows I was being lectured on the merits of Ctrl-C over clicking through menus.
Needless to say, once everybody was sorted on the merits and joys of keyboard shortcuts, we took it up a notch. And by up a notch, I mean the learning curve was a sheer vertical cliff; because next stop was full on batch processing in Python and Awk scripts having SSHed into the linux server via PuTTY. Which I could get my head around, but I felt a sympathetic twinge for all those supposedly intelligent people what had never got as far as keyboard shortcuts. No joke 3 of 20 of us there confessed to using keyboard shortcuts, see for yourself.
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