Archive for March, 2006
By Your Powers Combined…
March 9
I am Captain Quitter!
God, I hate coming up with those fucking intro paragraphs. Next design won’t have those. Assuming there is a next design.
Yeah, I’m gonna pull a John Oxton. Well, not completely. I’m just feeling like I’m not doing something right. I don’t want to give up doing design or programming or anything like that, I don’t even think I want to give up blogging. At least not all the way.
Right now, I haven’t done real, serious design work in a year. In a few days, we’ll have left GTR a year ago, and I won’t have worked since. I did that little stint for Sproutit, but that was bullshit on both sides. All I’ve really done since then is learn a new language, write half a novel, and troubleshoot shit for Max and Ray. And I don’t want either of them to take this the wrong way. I love helping my friends and I consider the two of you to be some of the best designers and friends I’ve known. I just feel like I should be doing something else.
Kinda funny, huh? Burn out from not working.
I don’t plan to disappear, like I said. Manny and I have been talking about doing a podcast. I really want to do this, so that’s my first concern. I hope at least a few of you will listen to it. It’ll probably be a bunch of elitist punk/hardcore ramblings from us and then music you don’t like being screamed at you, but, still, give it a try.
I also want to get back to where I belong in design. I’ve always loved Photoshop, but now I find myself starting up Illustrator more and more often. I’m not an illustrator, never have been, never will be. My early design was all about music, too. Music was my muse, more or less. So I want to get back to doing some stuff like that. So, any bands need a web site?
Two other things that I want to deal with. The first is my newest NaNovel, The Lazarus Process. I need to finish it. Most of my life, I wanted to be a writer/poet. I kinda gave that up in high school when I really started learning how to do web design, and college squashed it further. I think this novel is a lot better than last year’s Rat and so I’d like to finish it. Maybe I can have it finished before the baby comes. I’m not going to rush, though.
Secondly, Webpen. It’s my first real, first big Ruby on Rails application. It’s not finished. Remember all that stuff you hear about how fast development with RoR is supposed to be? It is…to a certain point. Then it slows way down as you try to figure out how to do something. I just spent two days trying to get an optional third-party part to work, and I know Manny (who’s been helping me) has spent a few days trying to get one form widget to work like we want. The problem is a lack of specific documentation. That’s not my goal, though, to write docs. No, I just want to finish the damn thing. So, I plan on spending a good amount of time in TextMate to get it done.
I guess I’m not really quitting. Not in the traditional sense. Mostly I just mean that I’m not going to be looking for real work for awhile. I’m going to build my portfolio back up, finally decide which I want to do: design or programming, and get back to my roots. So, look for more music here, less blogging, and I dunno what else.
Refreshing
March 3
I know I don’t write enough, but I’m tired of apologizing for it, so if I ever do it again, slap me upside the head. Thanks.
I was (still am, as I write this) talking to Max, telling him how glad I am that he updates his blog as often as he does. He seems to write a nice little post every couple of days, usually about being stressed or comics. They’re nice diversions from what I usually read — web design, programming, and the A-list bloggers. I wish more people I like updated more often. I’m guilty, too, like I said, but that doesn’t stop me from wanting to read what my friends have to write.
Life around here has been pretty steady lately. We’re trying to get ready for the baby, but I don’t think either of us is there yet. I won’t post a lot about that here, though, since it has an appropriate place. Things are definitely starting to change, though.
All of the fun programming I’ve been doing is still going on. I’m running into problems with the fact that I know shit-all about AJAX. Manny has been helping me, but he doesn’t know it either. There’s a lot of “hope this works” and “what the hell?” around here when I have TextMate fired up.