The Empty Stage

The sixth time in 16 something years.

I think the strangest thing I heard was that has been to William Shatner’s house for Thanksgiving.

Haven’t used this damn blog thing in forever (which seems to be the internet norm), probably should make an effort.

General posts get cool song titles and nifty lyrics. I bet that is original. Right?

Posted another review on Opiate. This time for Dead Space. Took about an hour this time.  So faster but probably not any better. 

I was trying to sleep but apparently the noise ordenance is my area is from 6PM to 7AM. So at 7AM on a Saturday your neighbor is free to use as loud of a saw as they want on their front lawn. Yes yes I actually called the police department (non emergency line) to find this out.

Sometime in the last year my father has become a reader. Seems to be baffling him as much as the rest of us. Growing up I read books like a junky has to have a fix. All the time. My mother read fairly frequently, and my brother and father pretty much never cracked a book. I do recall while I was in high school my father did read one book about Vietnam and we got him other books hoping to get him hooked but nothing came of it. Now though he is a junky and struggling with it. He can’t get past the fact that as soon as he finishes one he has to get another book right that minute and start reading it. It’s all rather strange.

Friend stopped by my house last night, hadn’t been over in a while so he had to look at the LEGO stuff that is scattered around my office. I was showing him some of it and handed him a Mario I did. Like every other person I have ever handed one to he held onto OK for about 2 minutes then dropped it on the ground breaking it into ten pieces. So I need to rebuild it, not a huge task since it’s small but it got me thinking it might be cool to do a guide/tutorial on how to build 8 bit LEGO game characters. Probably too much trouble.

Been working/looking into iPhone programming. Really not that excited by it. I like the platform but the programming seems a pain. 

So this has been a random smattering of stuff. Weeeeeee.

The Dresden Files 

Took a hell of lot longer then I thought it would.

Pretty sure my mastery of the English language is poor.

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.

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.

So I have always had this problem with keeping my sleep cycle in sync with the real world. Give me some time off with no place to be and next thing I know I am going to sleep at noon and waking up at 8pm. 

That’s where I am now. Did an all nighter yesterday to get stuff done so I went to bed at 10am, woke up at 6pm. No clue what time I will go to sleep today. Noon maybe?

Utterly fantastic.

I have been working from home on a contract gig for the last several months. It’s one of those things that in the past would have seemed like it would be awesome. Hasn’t been as much fun as I would have hoped. The job itself is fine, it’s the being alone in my house all the time that is kind of getting to me.

Is all I want to say to you”

Anytime I have any time off (IE being unemployed) my sleep cycle gets wacky.

I woke up yesterday like 3pm and its now 9:30am and I am still awake.

So while I am not going crazy I need to find something to keep me on a sane schedule so I am actually awake when people actually call about jobs.

Had two interviews this week, one was probably OK other went bad bad bad.

Someone how I got my phone to dial a friend’s number, get his voice mail while doing a phone interview. Person I was interviewing with could hear the whole thing. Beyond that flubbed more questions then I got right.

Brilliant.

To keep him from going insane”

I have been online since the summer of 93.

Out of this 15 something years I have primarily made my living off the internet.

4 years at an internet based retailer managing the website, almost 4 years at a consulting company building corporate (mainly commerce) sites, and the last 9 months working on web based medical software.

In this time I wasted a college education my parents were paying for and several years later worked my butt off to get a college education I paid for (OK there was some loans and credit cards involved).

In all this time I have never really overtly participated in any part of the internet.

Sure I have built or been part of building 20 plus sites that surely have been seen by fair amount of people (OK nothing super popular but still…), wasted a TON of time playing online games, but I have never blogged, added a comment, digged anything, participated in a community or done anything personal.

So this morning I do this.

Why?

Well two weeks ago I got a lot of free time. 

Company I worked for went BOOOOOOOM.

Gone baby gone.

Not so much fun.

3 week pay owed and a job I really enjoyed gone.

So anyway I figured I would set up WordPress on this domain I have had for a couple of years and start a bold and exciting journey.

…OK I have no idea what that last thing means.