Don’t Quit Your Day… School?
Thursday, September 11th, 2008 | Life | 1 Comment
I’ve got to say, this summer has been kind of frustrating. Not just because I’ve had to pay attention to increasingly tense political debate, nor just because we’re prolly gonna die in a month, neither is it just because I might finally get a working and (gasp) entertaining website off the ground again in a week or so, but because there’s oh so much more I’d like to do. AM PM likes to say they’ve got too much good stuff, but honestly hot dogs only go so far. I’ve always wanted to make an album of game boy version of At the Drive-In songs, program a video game for a mainstream console, play a concert for a crowd of people who aren’t just your parents and obligated friends, and make a movie about something that no one would possibly pay for, but it can’t all happen in one summer. It was probably asking myself a bit much even just to commute from Federal Way to Seattle to go to a class, do research, and have time left over by the end of all of it for my friends and loved ones.
A stumbling block of mine has always been transitioning between activities. My senior year I took four AP classes, was a member of like four clubs, came to school an hour early each day for jazz band and expected to get the most out of all of it. I’ve yet to find a way to be happy with getting one thing done at a time. If I could just work really hard on my Spanish accent and get that out of the way I feel like I’d have accomplished more than I did this summer. The fact of the matter is that I want to do all of it. The phrase “jack of all trades but a master of none” comes to mind. Familiar for some reason. You know.
That web site will probably be a good start.
I’ll keep y’all posted.
You, Your First Web Site, and You
Monday, September 8th, 2008 | Code | 2 Comments
This next month I’ve given myself the task of redesigning the front end of Rainy Dawg Radio’s web site. Don’t be fooled, the schedule is not current, the featured album is something like six months old, the current events aren’t current anymore, and “LISTEN NOW” means nothing, unless you want to hear the dead summer air that comes as a result of ASUW cutting our budget. No, I’m not getting paid this month either, unless you count karma points as currency. (I don’t.) The trouble with giving myself this task is having criticized the old web site so thoroughly and completely that I may very well refuse to design anything like it. This is probably a very bad idea. In the past I’ve tended to criticize people too harshly about something or other, proceed to fall short of the insanely high standard I’ve set, and then just leave everyone feeling bad about it in the end. This isn’t to say that I mean to sacrifice any functionality to just get this done, but damn it I want to come out of this feeling good about my work.
The Web 2.0 Mess
Monday, August 11th, 2008 | Code | No Comments
Why does nothing fit together anymore?
Why do we have to go out of our way to stitch together all the parts of our scripting languages? It feels kind of like we need a back-to-square-one sort of movement to drag ourselves out of this Web 2.0 thing. Of course, the people who have to deal with the messy parts (read: programming) have no say in the matter. All these people online want to see who their friends’ friends are and what they’re doing. Maybe send a message. Look them up on google maps according to their flickr photos that they found on facebook via some poor soul’s third party Google Web Toolkit app that their company has demanded of them. The fact of the matter is that programmers now, more than ever before, have to know how three different compilers fit together along with some weird voodoo library to generate “good” javascript to design their pages. All that Web 2.0 seems to mean is finding the easiest way possible to automatically generate javascript.
Let’s face it, the internet is aging, as are all the languages that come with it. › Continue reading