life

What follows is a conversation I found waiting in my IM when I got home the other night. This is my friend *speaking* - it’s not me, it’s not my replies, and I dropped his IM name for the sake of everyone involved ;).

so today I’m talking to my dad on the phone and he asks me “so you still like Obama?” 9:36
and I say “yeah, why?” 9:37
turns out he’s been letting himself be brainwashed by right wing talk radio while he’s at work 9:37
he manages to keep finding things to say to make me think he’s a jackass 9:37
haha 9:38
so I ask him, what don’t you like about him? 9:38
and he starts off by saying he disagrees with national healthcare 9:38
what???? 9:38
who in their right mind could disagree with that? 9:39
so I ask if he saw ‘Sicko’ 9:39
and his answer is “oh that’s just propaganda” 9:39
THAT’S propaganda? 9:40
how about the right wing agenda-pushing one-sided brain-washing wool over the eyes bullshit you’re subjecting yourself to on a daily basis? 9:40
so that shit went straight to the top of his netflix 9:40
I swear to god, he blows my fucking mind sometimes 9:41
I’d respect it more if these were opinions he formed on his own after educating himself on both sides of the issues 9:41
but he’s just blindly eating whatever bullshit they’re shoving down his throat 9:41
I’m fucking baffled 9:42
he’ll end up voting for McCain too 9:43
cause he’s too lazy and disinterested to actually form his own opinions about these types of things 9:43
he’d rather stick with the zero effort pack mentality 9:44
which means listening to all his nigger-hating backwoods no-brain Urbana friends and swallowing whatever self-serving Fox news bullshit Rush Limbaugh regurgitates every day 9:44
I am officially ashamed 9:45
while his wife is running for office on the democratic ticket no less!!

• A novice still has room to learn
• An intermediate knows his stuff, but can still grow.
• An expert can teach others.
• A professional gets paid to do it.
• Don’t fall in th e”professional” trap.

I bring this up because, as you may or may not realize, I code for Resource Interactive.

Now I’ve coded “professionally”
for a few years - meaning I’ve been paid to code. Now, in terms of technology, I don’t believe you ever leave the “intermediate” stage, as you can always have room for improvement. There’s always a “better way” or a “new way” or even “a new style.”
Coding standards change and adapt - one day, you think you know exactly how to lay out your CSS file. Then you realize - hey, it’d be a lot easier if I alphabetized my css attributes.

Then, a few weeks later, you stumble on someone’s tips about better architecture in your CSS. Now, you start commenting your code before you minimize it.
You add in indents to give it more rhyme and reason, making it easier to figure out if you should hand it off to a new developer.

Now, in all this “cool stuff” you learn and do and integrate into your coding habits - do you sign your work?

A lot of famous artists sign their work. Michelangelo had hidden meaning in the Sistine Chapel. Hell, the real reason I came to this is after I heard alltop.com gave a tip of the hat to popurls in regards to their idea, I started poking around popurls’ source code (they use mootools!) and stumbled on this in their source code:

<!–
__   __
(  \,/  )
\_ | _/  IN THE FUTURE EVERY URL WILL BE POPULAR FOR 1.5 SECONDS
(_/ \_)                          - thomas and the wise butterfly

–>

I dug this - the only people that really delve into the source code are those that are interested in it. I.E. other developers. Web devs. Code monkes. CSS ninjas. Etc. People who would see these things and think one of two things - that’s cool, I think I want to start signing my code - or perhaps - I wonder how many milliseconds they could shave off my leaving that out…

To be 100% honest, transparent, and true, I usually fall into the latter half. I’m trying to squeeze EVERY IOTA of performance in my pages. Optimize that PNG. Minimize that HTML/CSS/JS. Squeeze it! Shave a few seconds, if that!

And then I stumbled on that little quote from popurls. I stumbled on code from a few other people, and very often I see people signing their JS more often than their HTML. I can kind of understand - companies like to think that they have total control on the code they use.
I understand that the code I write - the designs I’ve worked with - may have been inspired by something else
. I understand that it’s very easy to reuse something multiple times. Theme based on theme X by Y. But ultimately, when does it become no longer theirs? When does it become a separate entity?
Is it when the original creator looks at it and can’t recognize his work? Or should you just accept that
maybe code isn’t copyrightable. HTML code can be written man different ways for the same effect (have you seen how many reset CSS files are floating around?)
There’s a point when you can’t just say “person X did this first” because often times you find out that the person who did it first, or so you thought, wasn’t first. Or was it?
Does it matter? I don’t think so. If I pour time and effort into it, it’s just as much mine. I may make a little money for my effort, but I also fix issues, fix problems, address the things that come up.
I contribute BACK to the community!

And here-in lies the problem. What if I stumble across professional site Z and I dig the code. I like what they’ve done. I want to learn more. How’d they do that AJAX effect, how did it work cross browser so smoothly. This is the professional problem. Why not put in your contact info? Are you afraid a bunch of “newbs” will inundate you? That’s just it. Developers like to be paid for the work they do, and not tell other people how they did it. Too often the
answer is “look at the code.” “Figure it out yourself.”
Or maybe no response at all.
Why not? Why not say “I did this - it may not be perfect, but my hand was in it.” Be proud. Stand up for your work in all its shapes or forms.

This is a tweet of a post - something that may not hit the record mark in length, but something I feel is noteworthy.

I’ve added a new link to my side bar.

That would be Genuine Chris. Every time I talk to Chris I get a little more excited and a little more envious.
What he’s doing is something I’ve always wanted to do - be his own boss, write a selling a Loan Officer e-book, and blog.

Okay, maybe I don’t want to write a Loan Officer Survival book - but the point is - he’s writing, he’s selling, he’s being successful at being an entrepreneur. Those are the little things that matter - and he (seems) to be having fun doing it!

Crazy - having fun at writing stuff you’ve got experience in?

Where that leaves me.

Talking to someone like Chris, and getting that vibe of “why can’t I do this?” has lead me to turn my introspection psycho-analysis a little more inward to see what my problems are and see about doing something about it. Will I get an e-book? Maybe. Will I write a tv pilot? Maybe. Will I quit my job and move to California to leave on a beach? You never know - as I know my son would have a blast playing in sand for the first time.

In my efforts to play with wordpress and blogging at large, I’ve suffered from the dreaded duplicate content. Not posting twice, not posting two versions of the same thing - but the tweet posts (and twitter sidebar). Watching it from my side has been interesting, and I get the dreaded sense of overkill that comes with the buzzword Web two point oh. I can’t believe people put forth the effort so that everything they do is broadcast on every available channel.

Overkill much? - the downfall of Web 2.0

I aim to set a personal standard to walk away from that - I’ve got accounts on nearly every social medium, but to tie them all together? People set up their accounts so that each is what the other is. So now, they’ve got one place to update, but if they’ve got friends with the same services, doing the same thing, we get a barrage of spam - the same message five times (or more)! Is that necessary? Is it useful?

Personally, it’s a waste. It destroys the purpose of the machine if you make it your magic bullet. These services aren’t meant to be tied together so when I tweet, I also blog, pownce, IM, email and digg. I use the ones my friends are on, the ones that are recommended, and I try out the new ones to see if they may replace an older one (i.e. my recent PC conversion from Pidgin to Digsby).

The REAL benefit to social apps

I use twitter as my thought application process. I throw out ideas just because it’s like saying them in a crowded room. Thanks to twitter, I learned about Zappos corporate twitter machine - a very

innovative, fresh use for twitter. How do I want to use them? I use twitter to post about when I update any of my blogs. I use twitter to pass links I used to email to a couple people or send a quick IM. I use it to network with new people. I use it to tweet. That’s it.

I have the same social sites you do, with my own accounts (and I’ll eventually get them all listed on the sidebar!). I use them for what they’re worth - and not trying to hack them into one giant useless application that does nothing well except spam the net that “ikeif twitters - what the hell?”