Valentine's Day.

I swear, if I hear another person say, "Singles Awareness Day," I'm going to scream. The namesake of Valentine's Day was a Saint who, above all else, so valued the love between two OTHER people that he sacrificed his life marrying them. It is NOT candy, cards, and flowers. It is NOT in making sure that everyone gets a gift and feels special.

I only realize this now because it's the first time in a while I'm single enough to care what else might be a part of such a wonderful holiday. So how do you go about celebrating something like that? What commemorates the life of St. Valentine? What does justice to that kind of self-sacrificing commitment to the ideals of love?

Well, I'm all ears, because frankly, I'm stumped. My official position is that I'll be dressing as cupid this year, and shooting lovers. Depending on how things go between now and then, it'll either be foam arrows, or airsoft guns.

Love, life and the pursuit of drama.

What is it about my deep respect for chivalry that attracts the damsels in distress? Don't get me wrong. I see no fault in rescuing the occasional maiden. Today, though, I'm tired of the firebreathing dragon. I'm putting down my sword, my armor, and my codes, and adopting a "friend zone policy" that will hopefully give my heart enough time to mend.

What it's leaving me with, though, is a profound sense of unfairness. One that, as we speak, leaves me unable to even muster the desire for a wonderful girl that wants to offer me the world. Instead, I push her away. Do I want to fix it? Part of me is sure that it's in my best interests. Part of me knows I'll regret it. Every bit of me wishes she knew I was talking about her. So how do you do it? Rationally, there's a season for everything, and this obviously is no season for love. What happens if I push the envelope? I'm sure a disaster of lackluster proportions. Ever ended a relationship because no spark was there? It's sad, really.

So this leaves me with a very special problem this Valentine's Day. Unfortunately, it's my favorite season of the year. Much like the year before last, I am in no kind of committed relationship, and if the woman who recieves the most of my affection gets all I wish I could do for that special someone, well, it would be undeserved and a little overwhelming (in a good way, of course). So I need a better outlet. At least last time, I found some wise woman who knew how much I loved the holiday, and that I didn't love her. Easy enough to swallow. We played one round of Scrabble, a few dates, and one magical Valentine's Day where we pretended we had found the person we were searching for.

I've been on a few more dates with this woman, and I doubt she could understand. Maybe because it was so sudden. Maybe because the woman from the past was not very good at being romantic. Either way, I must find a way to celebrate all the romance of the coming holiday without causing trouble for myself or some innocent bystander :-\

Oh, snap!

Last blog in APRIL??? APRIL??

Can't say I'm surprised. I let ANYTHING be a good excuse for getting sidetracked. This is not a place marker, but a new beginning. So many plans, always going to the wayside. The goal is the same as always. I want to be the GoToGuy. I need be the guy people go to for answers. Who doesn't want to be?

Web administration was fun, but mostly a dead end. Someone once told me that the secret to success was to find something no one else wants to do, and do it well. Turns out I've been here all along- at the same wire rope job for years. Well, this year is going to be different. I've enrolled in a course to teach me more about wire rope, and I plan to spend the year becoming an expert- whatever that means.

I've been digging some angles, and there's so many ways to go about it. The different wire rope applications, the math for making wire rope work, the little nuances of wire rope as it's used in my own field. Any way I go, rest assured, I have my work cut out for me.

On an interesting side note, I'm going on a cruise!! I'm very excited to finally get the hell out of the country, and spend some time being mugged by people who don't speak my own language. I've asked a good friend to come with me. She obliged, and it seems so funny that by the time we make it to the ship, who knows what kind of relationship we'll have by then! Ha. As it stands now, she bought me dinner for my birthday, and surprised the hell out of me with a FANTASTIC kiss... then casually said, "Well, good night!"

Ha... Hooray for the unusual.

The joys of php

If you can get the basic script up and running on your site, it's worth it. What else can I say about this?

How about an example? I've got a basic php script that works a little bit like this:

*go to this folder and get content*
*post that content first as an image, then with this code using that image's filename*
repeat ad absurdum.

It looks a little bit like this:

myspacespiceshop.com/sitephp.txt **edit... link is broken. Site no longer exists.

I would have posted the code here... but I can't get it to disable on blogger. I'm such an awesome programmer, right?

Anyway, yoursite is your site's url, obviously, and the path after it would naturally be where you keep the pictures. With this code, I added some 26 pages of comments to the site pretty quickly. If you want to play around with it, feel free! This *relatively* simple program has made my life easier, and given me the opportunity to really dig into what I enjoy most, which is getting comments together, instead of building trivial page after page.

Don't get me wrong, site building is great, but site REbuilding is just annoying!

Discussion forums?

Ever tried them? By far, the best experience and worst experience I've had while looking for help were both found on forums. Forums are dynamic websites that you can go to, sign in, and leave messages with anyone who is a member. If you're looking for something specific, there's no better place than a well-traveled forum.

How can you find a well traveled forum? Tricky, considering most of that information is restricted to webmasters. A few tips to help you find the right community, though-


Go down the list. If you see one person who has made the last post in all of the columns, it's not a forum, it's a blog. If this person is updating regularly, great. You can go to them for whatever help you need, but expect that this will become less and less traveled without the right kind of traffic.

Check content. A forum with a great post count, but filled with spam, has been abandoned to the internet's lowest form of life, spammers. The most you can hope to find from this type of forum is a virus.

Warning levels/censorship. This is a personal pet peeve of mine. If the group over-moderates its content, it's going to feel a lot like being herded through a nazi death camp. Take what information you can get from them and run like hell.

Finally, if you've never run into him, you can expect to find him on a forum. It's the guy who takes things WAY too personally, and hates your guts. He probably hopes you'll kill yourself. People like this are all around, and it's the disconnected community of the internet that makes it that much easier for him to hate you. It's the internet. It's not serious business, so by all means mess with him back.

The Beauty of CSS

Think external style sheets are a pain to learn? I'm about to redo all of my pages, which is as simple as going in and taking a template, inserting the information into the style, and making sure I save it to the right folder. Quick and easy, right? Well, not as easy as changing the external style sheet for the website.

http://www.csszengarden.com/

This website is an excellent example of how easy it SHOULD be to change your website. You click on the link, and the reference to the style sheet changes. One line. VERY simple. Please, if you're looking at a dynamic webpage that you would EVER consider changing, consider css. For some reason, people telling me it was neater, and loaded faster never convinced me. When I'd already spent an hour changing web pages over, and I realized I was about half way done, I found this site, and I felt like a joke.

So what now?

I'm going to w3schools. I'm not messing around anymore. I want to learn to do things right, not just tweaking what everyone else has done.

Best of all, I've found FREE TRAINING for my asp.net certification right there at w3schools, and I plan to make the most of it. What does asp certification mean? Well, down here, it means $17-20/hr to start as a web designer, and a much better environment than the one I'm currently in. Good stuff, right?

Too old for this?

I don't know why I feel out of place. Maybe it's because I suddenly realized that the site I've been downloading ringtones from is run by a 20-year-old college student. Shouldn't really bother me. The girl I'm trying to emulate isn't even that old, and she's much more successful than he. Must be easier, though, for someone in school to learn something new. I'm a salesman that works 45, sometimes 50 hours a week, and comes home to a wonderful girlfriend who asks only that I spend time with her. With all these irons in the fire, that seems like a lot more than she knows, but I'm happy to give her that.
So where do you find the time, if you're grown, and out of school, to do all of this? Treat it like school. Remember when each class was an hour a day, sometimes half an hour of homework? Same goes for all of these projects. If you naturally find yourself getting so busy that you just don't know what to do with yourself, then you have a scheduling problem. I know this sounds a lot more like a diary entry today, but bear with me.
Part of being successful is moderation. How rich do you want to be? If that's you're biggest motivation, you're in for a long road, because nothing... and I mean nothing, is ever going to satisfy you. So, if you find yourself in this position, and you don't want to get burned out, seek out a time for JUST your project, and stick to it. Even if it seems small, you WILL be making progress, and your loved ones won't want to throw it out the window. Personally, I'm at it with all of these projects for about an hour and a half each day, and whatever I can squeeze in on the weekend. Tonight, that's going to change.
I'm sticking with an hour and a half each day, but the weekends belong to me, not my business. Instead of "whatever I can fit in", I'm limiting myself to the same hour and a half that's more than enough during the week. If you worry about getting burned out, I'm suggesting the same for you.
Take care of yourselves, and if you find yourself starting to wonder if your site will ever take off.... I'm right there with you.