I know to a lot of people, I am more or less labeled “The geek” or “The computer guy”. I’m only useful to fix things! It irritating, sure… but I’ve learned to live with it. There’s not much I can do about it short of picking up and moving across the country, growing a mustache, changing my accent, and HOPEFULLY never running into anybody that knew me in my “past life”.

The good thing about this is that most of the time, people are nice about it. I say most of the time because there are always the occational “friend” that will “ask” for “help”, and go about it in the absolute rudest way they possibly can manage. When they are “asking” for this help, its really just “hey how do I do this”. No punctuation. Is that a question, or a statement? Hell, “How do I shot web?” works better in this situation; At least it has a question mark at the end! And the “help” is really more like “hold my hand for every step, and if it doesn’t work then it’s your fault”. I try to be as helpful as possible without being a babysitter, but apparently this just isn’t good enough. The old adage works well here… “Google is your friend.”

Best part about this situation? The complete lack of gratitude for my help! No thanks necessary, I guess.

Thankfully, as I’ve said before, this isn’t such a widespread problem. I would really like to find a better way to deal with, and ultimiately, eliminate these situations. I seemed to have grown into the habbit of being dismissive, subtlety insulting, and even just ignoring the culprit, but that doesn’t appear to be helping! It makes me feel like a dick some times, too. :-\ Oh well.

PHP for Android project (PFA) aims to make PHP development in Android not only possible but also feasible providing tools and documentation.

ASE (Android Scripting Environment) is a Google-mantained project which “brings scripting languages to Android by allowing you to edit and execute scripts and interactive interpreters directly on the Android device”.

PhpForAndroid-APK provides PHP support to ASE.

My initial reaction to this is… Exciting! I love seeing geeky projects like this. I know a lot of people won’t see any usefulness for it… but it seems like it could be a lot of fun. Is this software fit for any sorts of serious software development / deployment? No. (Not in its current state, anyway.) But with PHP being the one language that I am the most familiar with, it gives me a chance to dick around with the platform in my own way until I can find the time, focus, and motivation to learn Java and the Android development platform. It almost seems like those PHP extensions for Python or GTK. Just a tool to give your code another outlet.

Make no mistake. I definitely STILL HOPE that I can find that time, focus, and motivation to teach myself Java in the near future!

In other news, I’m thinking that if I do end up going into a new web project soon, that I want to use it to explore HTML5. With HTML5 becoming the a big & serious thing, and seeing just how powerful and useful it can be, it’s probably best to not dilly dally with it! I’m already far enough behind the curve… I still don’t know too much about JavaScript! Haha.

Here I am, up late on my compruder, listening to music and getting stuff done. Be it coding, blogging, or anything else, it seems I’ve never really been able to get anything done until its really late and everyone else has gone to bed. Most of the time I should have been in bed a few hours ago, which always has seemed kind of counter-productive for me… haha.

I’m currently in the process (again) of cleaning up my workspace and getting things organized for productivity. I’m wanting to get myself set up for tackling some sorts of technical projects again. I seemingly always and still are planning on getting back into coding for the web browser some time. Recently I’ve also had thoughts of getting into some Android development, too. Small stuff, like theme’ing and that sort of thing. Either way, I’m going to be using a Linux virtual machine as part my development tools. I’m getting that set up right now!

This feeling, though… So many memories. I remember when my family first moved to this house during the summer before my senior year in high school (since then I’ve moved out, and back home again, TWICE ). I was running my old meager separate Windows and Linux boxes. I had my Linux box set up with Slackware Linux and operating on three 15″ CRT monitors. Yeah, I’m hardcore like that. I had a good flow of productivity with my PHP development. My old project, “n0tgh3y profiles”, basically helped me teach myself advanced PHP and introduced me to MySQL database integration. That project ended up getting rather popular around my friends and some of the school! Had about 50 users at one point, I believe…

And ever since then, I’ve been striving for that… feeling, again. That same situation. It was such a fun time in my life! Many attempts at obtaining that, since then, have failed in one way or another. I get close… when i get into a good project, and make some nice progress, it feels great! Its always pretty short lived, though. Something else catches my attention, and that project fades away into nothing more than a bunch of files in a backup archive.

I hope things will be different, this time. If I can get my act together… I think it will. I now have a loving, supportive, beautiful woman behind me to encourage and push me in directions I’ve only taken baby steps in on my own. That will help, I think.

Sure, go ahead and call me lame… but I am genuinely excited for this! Limpbizkit have released a lot of crap over the years, but I really dug their first two records, and I REALLY enjoyed their last album, “The Unquestionable Truth, Part 1″. I was so bummed when I heard they broke up and I wouldn’t get a followup Part 2 record… Although, Wes Borland went on to make the fantastic debut album of his band “Black Light Burns” (which I am listening to right now, actually) so I guess it wasn’t all too bad.

I came across this info on Wikipedia (<3), which, funny as it is, I learned because I randomly decided to check the Black Light Burns page to see if they had released another new album yet! I love when things work like that.

Music and me… we’re at a funny stage again. I’ve been feeling that nostalgia again. Last year I went on that personal musical Renaissance of mine and culled a good portion of my music collection based on my matured and refined tastes as of late. Well, some of the stuff that I culled (mostly stuff that I really enjoyed in middle/high school) I feel like putting back in, all of a sudden! I find myself enjoying it again… I bet a lot of that has to do with the memories that flood my head when I listen to it. To this day I still cannot listen to Limpbizkit’s “Unquestionable Truth” without thinking of the PC game, Guild Wars. That album came out at the same time as I had just gotten Guild Wars, so I would play and listen to both for hours during that summer.

As I’ve posted before, my musical habbits are still pretty narrow. I can listen to nothing but The Good Year Pimps for weeks at a time, which I am perfectly fine with! I love their music, and my collection of their stuff is slowly reaching completion. I’ve just been getting that nostalgic itch lately… Who know’s how long it will last, though? We shall see.

Its awesome! I love it. Its a Zelda clone and is not ashamed to admit it. Has quite a bit of game time to it (I still haven’t finished it so I’m not too sure on a total) and it plays great. Looks gorgeous too, IMO. Joe Mad (veteran comic artist/writer) is the creative director and his art direction is truly beautiful. The comic book influence is … See Moredefinitely apparent in the environments and characters and just the range of color palette in use. An all-around great game… Damn, did I just gush about it or what?

To recap? It’s epic.

I think I might start doing this sort of thing more often. I’m not all that great with the long drawn out game reviews but a short, sweet, & simple paragraph or two of my thoughts on a game is a nice way to get around that.

Anyway, haven’t posted in a long time. That should (hopefully) change soon. I’ve had a lot of awesome projects follow through from start to finish lately and I want to document them up here!

My activities and focuses seem to go in…cycles.  Best example I have is my gaming habbits.  First I’ll play nothing but PC games, and have nothing to do with any consoles.  Then I start to feel ‘bored’ with PC, and only ever want to play Xbox360.  Then… all I want to play is World of Warcraft.  And from there?  Who knows!

A while back, about the time that I started playing with the Windows 7 beta, I started to get the itch for computers again.  Building them, playing with software, creating content… all of it.  I researched the current hardware and built a new desktop PC with the help of a Newegg credit account!  (Sweet machine, too… Intel Core i7 920… /drool)

Stress at my job has really got me itching for it again, though.  I don’t have anything to do with any technology at work, aside from running a cash register.  I started looking for computer focused jobs, and so far the only one that I’ve been able to apply for was a Geek Squad counter clerk.  Not very glorious, but I’ll take it.

Most of all, I’ve really been wanting to get back into programming.  I miss the old days of staying up late at night to just work on a website project… In an effort to help me get back to those days, I’ve taken a couple of new project ideas down and set a few goals for myself.  First and foremost: LEARN JAVASCRIPT!!

I’m also trying to spice up my computing experience and shaking up the routine a little.  I’ve installed the Feedly extension for Firefox to try thinning out my reliance on the iGoogle homepage, which is starting to feel stale I think.  I also have installed the Evernote clients on my phone and PCs, making an effort to utilize their service more and more.  I’ve found it to be a good spot to jott down any code ideas that I have while away from home.

I really hope I can get back into technology as much as I used to be.  It’s a new year, and everyone always tries to use that as an excuse to “better” themselves, right?  I really feel that I better myself with all this.  I’ve become too lazy over the years and I really don’t like that.  I want to feel like I’m making something of myself again.

The prime example has played out a number of times in the past.  A nice family dinner is wrapping up and all of us children in the family are sitting around being smart asses and joking with each other.  My brother says some extremely sarcastic remark that very lightly implies something to the extent of men being superior to women.  Nobody really cares except for two of my three sisters who are present.  They start tearing into him about how thats not funny and men and women are equal and he’s a horrible jerk for saying such a thing.  Finally it all calms down and the kitchen cleaning starts to happen… and the garbage can needs to be emptied.  Every single time those very same sisters will sit there with a straight face and spout off that “garbage is a boy’s job.”  They don’t do garbage.

Bull.  Shit.

How can you sit there with a straight face preaching equality between sexes and then write something off as a “boy’s job”?  That’s the same as if I were to sit there and say cleaning dishes was a “girl’s job” (not that I believe in that), but you would get viciously up in arms about how wrong I am.  Nice double standard there, girls.  Think a little more before you go off spouting your bullshit.  It just irritates me so much.

Tonight at work I asked the woman cleaning the bathrooms why she hadn’t changed the garbages yet so I could take them to the compactor.  “I don’t do the garbages.  That’s just not something I do.”  Excuse me?  That’s part of cleaning the bathrooms every night.  That’s fine if you don’t like to do it, but its part of the job responsibilities and it has to get done.

There are even some employees that don’t ever get asked to clean the bathrooms simply because it’s known that they don’t bother to do it right so it’ll have to be done a second time.  They know how to do it but it seems like they simply refuse to do it the way its supposed to get done.  So rather than train them, or bring it up to management and see if that brings them to doing the job that they were hired to do, other employees have to do it every night instead.

Even more bullshit.

If everyone in the department is supposed to be part of a team then we shouldn’t be forced to carry the dead weight.  Extra effort is required on our parts to fill in for their lack of it.  Its not fair to people who actually do their job and probably get paid about the same wage.  We’re all expected to do our part.  Somebody needs to bring it up to management so hopefully we could get some new blood in to replace them.

Ok… I’m done.  I apologize if it seems to be a bit disorganized and hard to follow.

I cut out a lot of people that I follow on Twitter, and turned off all SMS notifications for the ones I’m close enough to that would actually justify using that function.  Most of it was just family spouting off every single non-event of the day.  My phone is a lot quieter and I’m seemingly less irritated.  Since I live with the culprits you’d think I wouldn’t be missing much, but I still get that “didn’t you see my tweet?” bullshit from time to time.

I feel like cutting people out of Facebook too, but thats already confined to a very small group of people that I’m not sure I can do much to it.  Most of it is just stupid “Application” notifications that I don’t give a shit about and I’m not sure if you can cut that stuff out very effectively.  I’d really like to just cut the whole thing out of my life but it is still rather useful for staying connected with people that I would otherwise lose touch with… but I wonder if its that easy to lose touch then why bother?  Besides, what else would I do in my quiet time other than compulsively check it every five minutes?

I’m up real late right now and can’t sleep.  Cruising around my news feeds trying to find something interesting to read and I see all the same headlines repeated about six times over.  This is ridiculous.

I think I need some new hobbies.

Could be.

The Evacuate Chicago CD is excellent for blowing off steam.  It has become increasingly useful to me lately.

More songs about drugs with curse words is a fantastic album.

I got to see Psychostick and The Pimps in concert and it was amazing.  My friends and I hung out with Alex and Jimmy and Josh and Rob before the show.  I can die now.

Err, scratch that.  I still haven’t seen Local H live yet.  I can die later.

It was my dad’s birthday.

Fuck, I hate July.  What a terrible month.