The quote went something like the following: ‘The best way to teach yourself something is to write a book about it.’ I found out the truth of this statement over the past few days, when I was designing the Inquivesta 2011 website.

A week back, I knew more about shearing sheep than I did about writing HTML and CSS.

Today I am more or less familiar with both, and I rather like doing it. It is, of course, difficult to sit down to design a website without having had any sort of training, formal or informal, in HTML or CSS. But one wonderful thing about this approach is that you learn fastest this way. Yes, there remain loopholes and gaps in the thoery and understanding, but the fact that you change the code and continously check how it affects the result is a quick and interesting way to learn the code. If you go for a class of Web Designing, it’ll be boring. It’s the same way with drums. I found out that playing the lessons and studying the notation was boring. Of course, it’s important for a solid grounding, but it requires patience, which everyone seems to be running out of these days. Instead, you think of a pattern and try to pick it up, jam with some friends, have fun, it’s great that way. It’s just like health food doesn’t taste great, but junk food is heaven.

Debsankha, who is also part of our Design Team, once came up with the idea of learning French by watching Frenchmovies with English subtitles. It’s the same attitude. But now you see why it’s not health food: you learn it quick, but you don’t learn it well. Anyway, I guess he dropped the idea because foreign movies are hard to find. But an idea just struck me: why didn’t he just watch English movies with French subtitles?

Anyway, some crap monkey in the system is blocking the website that provides the hit counter for the Inquivesta website, so that’s a bit irritating.

It’s taking up a lot of my time, this Inquivesta. Sure, I’m learning stuff. I learnt to design documents and brochures, and HTML and CSS, and now I’m indulging in a bit of Webmaster tools, but it’s pushing out the other stuff that I must do for the grades. I keep recalling the Stay Hungry, Stay Foolish speech, but I know inside that it’s not going to help me when my Karma comes around.