Opiate Media Review – The Dresden Files
So I have posted my first review.
Took a hell of lot longer then I thought it would.
Pretty sure my mastery of the English language is poor.
Part of Me
“I know you well.
You are a part of me.
I know you better than I know myself.
I know you best,
Better than anyone.
I know you better than I know myself.”
So I have finished and “launched” Opiate Media. The site where I will review the wonderful media of this world.
Original and awesome I know.
Just to be unnecessarily redundent I will probably post here a link to anything I do there.
Doing this reminded me of an important life lesson I have tried to stick by as of late.
Don’t reinvent the wheel.
I am programmer. I love doing it. I love the challenge of it. I love building stuff.
This unfortunately often gets in the way of actually getting anything done. At an actual job (that thing with the paycheck) this is generally not a problem, but when doing my own stuff it always is.
I am not the only one with this problem, I know plenty of other programmers who get caught up in building a better wheel. While it’s a fun pursuit, most will get board and find something else shiny to play with never getting done what they started out to do.
Sure there is sometimes need for a better wheel but in general you can reach the goal with the wheel you have ( OK beat to death the wheel thing ).
The goal was to get a site up. I could have written my own blog software (have in the past) and done my own site design. Neither of these was really the goal though and would have taken time and energy away from what I really wanted to do.
So use what is already available. When I am doing a java project that needs a DB I use hibernate, I don’t write my own DB layer. In this case there is plenty of easy to setup and use blog software (WordPress in this case) that come with good quality themes.
So I used someone else’s wheel and reached the goal.
To summarize: Avoid shiny objects and don’t forget what you’re actually trying to do.
Keep the Car Running
“Every night my dream’s the same
The same old city with a different name
Men are coming to take me away I don’t know why but I know I can’t stay”
2am. Can’t sleep. Seems to be a good time to eat pudding.
Needing to do something with my free timeand I have come up with a couple of fantastically awesome ideas:
uno – A website that provides definitions and usage of words. The “hook” would be that they are wrong. You would take two similar sounding (but hopefully with vastly different definitions). IE gravitas\gratis or fletching / felching. Make it seem like it’s a real site that is trying to help the user “sound smarter”. Already have the domain and another version of WordPress set up. Need to do some basic UI design and come up with some words.
dos – Create a web based isometric game written in java script. Thinking turn based exploring city building futuristic end of days kind of thing (yeah so simple). Age of Wonders but in the future. Have the domain, done some basic research into java script game engines, but no art or ability to create it.
tres – Website reviewing movies, tv, books, games etc, with maybe some general rambling about related things. Have had the domain opiatemedia forever. Can fairly quickly set up WordPress and whip together another one of my awesome site designs.
cuatro – One of my friends and I about year or so decide we need to do something. Last time was a social networking site for gamers (yeah yeah yea) but generally it’s a game. So we are talking about that again. The platform this time would appear to be the iPhone. We talked for a while, have a general idea, we are both programmers by trade and he has at least done one iPhone app (I tried but my Mac drives me crazy).
I have started somewhat on uno but not really feeling it.
Dos sounds like a major pain in the ass at this point in time. I do java script all the time and I find it an appealing concept to try but too much work for right now.
Tres ain’t that great but will be easy. I watch a lot of TV, read a lot of books etc so I am doing most of the work anyway. So will probably set that up and getting it rolling soon.
Cuatro cautro cautro. The last project with my buddy dragged in a couple more buddies and took a year or more of time (apparently not a ton or we would have had it done) and actual cash (unlike most of our hair brained schemes). But so want to do a game and as much as I dislike Apple the iPhone/iPod Touch is pretty bad ass platform. The basic idea we have seems sound so probably get into it.