An exhausting day

Good grief! Give me a break! I’m too old for this!

Those are my exact sentiments which came up again and again today as I trod through the confusion of putting together a cgi script on our Web site. What’s a cgi script? It stands for “common gateway interface.” Whenever you fill out a form on the Internet, you’re probably using a cgi script. I had never done one of these, even though I had been designing and maintaining several sites for the past dozen or so years. But it was decided that we take credit cards over the Internet. We signed up with a provider that would link to our already-existing credit card provider, and launched into a mass of confusion. They offered a bunch of scripts, without really explaining each of their merits. I chose one that, after modifying it to death, I could use. But modifying the script carried with it many potential pitfalls, each of which I fell into.

Finally I got it to work the way I liked. By then, though, I was a basket case. Ask Karla, who withstood the yelling and stomping and table-pounding and door-slamming and general nastiness that I exuded with gusto. Boy, I tell ya—learning can be exhausting, especially for a geezer.

Thanks, Karla, for not kicking me out of the house.