January 06, 2003
Aha!
I figured it out! Sort of. I have a feeling I'm doing this the long way around, but I have successfully created a file, and edited it. Get me, creating graphs.
Somebody shoot me, please?
Damn it, I'm not geeky enough!
I thought I loved computer geeks. I thought I WAS a computer geek.
Sadly, I am being disabused of this notion. Painfully. My boss is a fairly old-school computer guy--he's insisted that I work in Emacs to edit his work, and I've learned LaTeX, a sort of desktop publishing mark-up language. I can deal with this. In fact, I'm doing pretty darn well with it.
However, now he wants me to learn a statistical program/language simply called, rather ominously, R. It's essentially a programming language. I thought "Sure, I can learn this." Unfortunately, the manuals all seem to be taking a lot of things for granted, things that I don't understand. Questions that I have aren't answered anywhere, most likely because the answer is expected to be self-evident to anyone who has any business using this blasted thing.
I'm supposed to be using this to draw figures and graphs for the text book we're working on. Well, I managed to draw a figure to test it out, but now I can't figure out how to EDIT the damn thing. I change the text file that's holding the commands, but how do I recompile it so the changes are reflected in the actual graph? You don't know. I don't know. It's not in the manuals, because this is all geared towards programmers. I am not a programmer.
GRAR.
