I just got a new car!

I wrecked my 1997 Honda Civic last December on the “freak night of ice” we had before Christmas. Sucky, sucky end to a great day.

Since then, I’ve test drove a number of cars – Accords, Civics, Civic SI, Fit, Prius, Civic Hybrids… I hit up Honda Marysville (where I got my CRV) and I still favor them (because they’ve never let me down) but this time I opted for John Hinderer Honda in Heath, Ohio. Needless to say, they bear Honda Marysville in price, they beat CarMax in many ways (I was not real happy with my service there) and they beat Rousch Honda (I felt like I was “inconveniencing” the sales rep when I was there).

The Honda Fit wins on many levels.

My new car. Lovelovelove.

I decided on the Fit over the Prius – and many people may whine about how the Prius is “saving the world” and all, or at the very least argue that a Prius would get much better gas mileage.

My problem is that even a used Prius was damned expensive. I’d love to own one, I really would. But seeing how ever place I hit wouldn’t talk about any kind of warrantee or guarantee on the hybrid battery (and most sales people tried to bullshit me about the battery – c’mon people, we’ve got the internet, ou just make yourself look bad when a sales guy lies!)

I researched – a lot – about cars, and what I *really needed* versus what I really wanted. It took a lot of consideration and debate between the misses and I about which was a better vehicle – she was ready to concede to me about getting a civic or a prius, but I felt I needed to research it further.

Needs versus Wants

I wanted a car with excellent fuel economy. I wanted a sporty car. I wanted something a car seat would fit in (just in case, mind you – I have a CRV that transports my son 99% of the time. I didn’t need to haul anything large, I didn’t care about cargo. I wanted fuel economy, I wanted a comfortable drive, and I wanted the ability for fast acceleration if I needed it.

From what I was finding about the Prius, a lot of people felt it was over priced – the savings in fuel were lost in the price of the car. In terms of “saving the world” I felt that was moot – we should want a greener car period. Savings be damned! I tried to keep this in mind.

Unfortunately, I am not made of money. The cost was more than its worth and the whole “perception” of me as I drive. (I don’t need a car that defines who I am, I need a car that gets me where I need to be!)

Enter The Fit

The Fit Sport – looks small. Then we started messing with the seats.

It’s damn roomy.

I was comfortable, my wife was, and we had my son and the salesman (Jack) in the back. Roomy, comfortable. The back seats fold up in two ways for either more cargo space or more storage for taller items (a small tree, perhaps? Maybe a bike?).

It’s economical! It’s estimated at around 38MPG – a far cry from the Prius’ 50MPG plus, but at the huge price cut in cost? I could live with that. It’s more economical than my CRV, less than a Prius. Not bad.

On the drive home, I got to play with the “paddle shifters” – it lets you drop/increase gears on the fly without a clutch. It was fun on the highway – instead of slamming on the gas to accelerate, I dropped a gear and smoothly accelerated. Very cool.

The bonuses:

Nice sound system, it can “fake” being a manual, and it’s roomy when it needs to be. It brings back memories of my CRX (in terms of sportiness and exterior size, not in interior roominess).

All in all, day one, I’m loving this car :)

As a web developer, I get the wonderful job of constantly improving myself and my coding. I research, I test, I experiment, and I try to come up with consistent methods that, in my opinion, are a best practice in my work, and can be shown to other people to help them improve their skills. That being said, sometimes you are so damn busy you seldom have the time you’d like to properly coach (and be coached).

Personally, I love constructive criticism.

I really, really, really, do. It’s an excellent way to accurately better yourself – someone else critiques you. It’s even better when the person is someone you admire and respect – because then you’re more likely to take it to heart.

I know I’ve written bad code in the past (haven’t we all at some point?) and I know sometimes I’ll work on a bit of code and see a way to better myself, or improve upon others work (as I often do with mootools scripts, and jquery/javascript conversions). But I don’t just lock it away. I post on forums and groups. I send out emails to friends and colleagues. I ask for feedback, and I take feedback even when I don’t ask for it.

Because I have a desire to better myself. Because I recognize I am not perfect, and I can improve.

I could get all zen on you and go into a personal rant, but that’ll have to hold off for another day.

The point is – especially as a web developer in this new media age - you need to get criticism, give criticism, and improve your coding abilities. You can specialize – front-end, back-end, ATG, CSS, XHTML, WTF-Kung-Fu-BBQ, RoR, etc. etc. and so on and so on… but…

…unless you work on improving yourself you’ll always end up at the bottom rung.

I know I’ve made this into more a link dump as late – but I try to add a little flavor to my collections, and perhaps it’s time to reveal what’s been taking up my time.

I recently returned from my brother’s wedding in Denver (Congratulations, bro!), was able to enjoy Wynkoop‘s
, check out the Denver Zoo and Denver’s Museum of
Nature and Science,
hangout with the family (one of whom
it’s been nearly two years since I saw him last).
If I paid for flicker, and if I ever uploaded my pictures, I’d share them. Needless to stay,
my break from school was quite full. I listened to a friend’s suggestion and picked up a couple Nintendo DS’s for the trip – and we’re glad we did, especially when my wife and I watched our American Airlines flight get delayed. And delayed. And delayed. At least it was delayed later in Chicago, otherwise we would’ve ended up there for awhile.

School has began once again at Columbus State,
so I’m still paying for my “sins” of taking the interesting stuff early, so I must trudge through more math this quarter. At least I’m in my groove and busting through it quickly. The ball is rolling for my transfer – but I’ve decided to get my Associate’s Degree in Science before transferring.

Work’s been busy, but in terms of “code outside of work” I’ve been working on flexing my Adobe Flex, Actionscript and MooTools skills. I’ve got a good plan of attack on that front, which lead to a few side projects.

1. BestPract.us – a site dedicated to best practices. Why BestPract.us? Because everything else was taken. It’s built on DokuWiki! No databases. It’s totally open to be edited, and I haven’t settled on the format, the theme or anything.
2. MooForums – I’m *really* not happy with what’s been going on with MooTools. I plan on taking PhpBB and merging it with MooTools flavor and hopefully getting the MooTools community on board with it. Google Groups is not the home to a community – it’s too unorganized and closed off. It’s lost the family feeling it had (well, on the MooTools forums it was often like talking to your older brothers, sometimes you get help, sometimes you don’t).
3. MooTools Classes and Plug-ins – this ties into bestpract.us, as I plan on using it to hold my code and host it for general consumption. From my own findings, I can hopefully accurately document the best ways to write code (with everyone’s help).
4. TheFirmStance.com – when I get this fleshed out, I’ll get something there. For now, it’s a planned site ;

Now outside of work, I’ve been reading more – The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin – watching some Weeds, Venture Brothers, and Paul Giamatti‘s AMAZING performance in John Adams.

I’m debating joining up in StartUp Weekend Columbus – the jury’s still out. It’s looking favorable.

So, that’s what I’ve been up to. How about you?

• 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 becomes the paradigm of blogging in general – and I’ve pondered this thanks to a comment Andrea Hill left me the other day.

Why do you blog?

I maintain a few (I have a Livejournal, too!) and I determine what I want to put where, and why that blog exists. I determine what vibe I want the blog to portray. I originally kept a very rigid divide between anything I ever wrote – I wanted it to be anonymous, I wanted to be untouchable. Now I write for a few blogs (some more than others).

This blog is mine – it’s all about me, and I use it as an outward facing blog so I can write about my successes and failures, my writing, my thoughts, and whatever I think is amusing. I use it as an excuse to write about what I’ve learned, code I’m learning/playing with.

On another blog, I may focus on a niche topic. Something that is introspective, or a topic I want to learn more about (and share what I’ve learned, still).

It’s a matter of personal freedom to stand behind what I write
and if I’m wrong – so be it, lesson learned. But you can’t be proven wrong unless you put it out there.

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.

I signed up for email alerts for The Personal MBA. I did so because they present this list of 69 business books (called – surprise! – the Personal MBA reading list) – and a few of the books I happened to all ready be reading. The emails aren’t exactly gold-star material, but they essentially spark a conversation well enough to show the true quality in the content.

The Personal MBA is basically a reading list compilation of some excellent books on a wide range of topics. The benefit of the email list, is some of the tidbits – like a story of a certain student who dropped out of college (because he didn’t like that the college tried to tell him what he could study) and focused his studies on what he wanted – to one day be asked to be a professor on the topic. Check out more on Joseph Campbell, a professor on comparative mythology and religion.

The point is not that this series of book will make me some kind of genius – the point is that perhaps some of the information will stick, make me think, and make me a more informed individual. I may not be the next Trump – but I could be a better boss, a better leader, a better employee, or maybe even a better teacher.

I am bloody exhausted.

This week, I’ve dealt with some rough issues, some weird projects, weird code, and a lack of sleep. My eating’s been better, though, except a couple iced coffee drinks and a “50 cent no-joke” McD’s ice cream cone.

My son was sick, so I skipped class that night as it was one of those “really don’t know what’s going on” issues. We did our best to hold out on freaking out, but last night while we were out our baby sitter called us and let us know he was getting sick (and I must say, she handled it like a trooper). This morning we opted to take him to the Doctor’s office (mostly for my peace of mind) – it’s something viral, and we may end up getting it. If it’s just a matter of keeping him fed and hydrated – I can deal with that.

Today, my focus is on class work – catching up, preparing for tests, wiping out issues, etc. etc. If I’m lucky, I’ll have time to play with PHP and break out my guitar (I had a late nap, I’m feeling a bit invigorated). So right now, I’m trying to take a break from, well, everything. Maybe I’ll get some writing, drawing and other creative outlets flowing as well…

Thanks to a blog post I’ve ran across – totally by accident, through the route of “six degrees” – I read about Issac Kelly’s thoughts on blog commenting, and he mentions Disqus which utilizes OpenID.

I’d like to pause, for a moment, and thank the developers of mozilla firefox for their creation of tabs (or, I should say, the popularity of tabs). I would not be able to organize my digital life nearly as well.

Back to our commentary

I dig how a lot of the “bigger blogs” (read: lifehacker, boingboing, consumerist) add threaded comments, and blogs/sites are integrating OpenID. One stop shopping, right? At the same time, I find it amusing that people want to associate their online life with all they do – yet at the same time, we have people clamoring for their privacy. They want to have it be easy to use every web service, have total anonymity, but also only want one user name and password!

In this age where our government is able to snoop our emails, phone calls, IMs, ISP transfers – do we want one ID?

Now, of course, there are two groups – the people that say “If you have nothing to hide, you should have no problem” and the people who say “I shouldn’t have to worry about what I may have or have not done.”

Ben Franklin put it best:

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

But in this digital age, that’s somewhat difficult to do – we’re tracked by our actions, our search terms, our blog posts, our IP address – some blogs are banning anonymous replies – forcing an email address, at least (yet one MORE thing that ties us down!). During Ben Franklin’s days, he was able to create a myriad of identities to suit his needs – his public face was different from the personas he created for political/financial gain. He had anonymity. He could claim that the letter printed were mailed to him, dropped off, or spoken directly – and who could claim else wise?

Nowadays – you can google. Google your name, an email address, a screen name, an IP address. You’ll get postings, you’ll get history, you’ll get names, addresses, friends, family – a truckload of information. So what can we do to combat this? Is this even a battle at all? This of course relates back – do you have anything to hide? I’m interested in how politics will play out in the next five years (ten? twenty?) – “We have proof that the candidate was googling ‘how to kill your husband.’” – and the reply “I was googling that for a short-story I was writing at the time.” “Well, what about your searches for ‘lesbian porno’?” “That would be my husband, thank-you-very-much.”

The future of the net is changing – as is our idea of “identity” – virtual or otherwise.
The old tricks we used to play to skirt around, will die. New ones will arise – “fake” email addresses can be generated. You’re a point-click away from creating a fake identity. Of course, businesses aren’t so lucky – they get busted editing their own wikipedia entry. At the same time, celebrities are branded – by the news, by their own blog postings. Internet celebrities are no different. You’re called out for your mistakes, your mis-givings, your typos.

What’s my opinion? I’m not a celebrity. I don’t know if I’d ever be in a political position to worry about someone trying to google my deep, dark history of multiple identities, lives, and flip-flopping of political positions (We have a blog post stating Catholic values, yet he claims buddhism! He’s a flip-flopper!). I, of course, won’t stop studying this phenomenon, this future of our digital lives. It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out…

I’ve written online for many years, ever since the days of dial-up and a few old BBSes. Recently, I started thinking about the kind of impression one leaves on the internet – often anonymous, often random. This is my attempt to create my digital impression on the web on who I am – as a thinker, as a coder, as a person.

<strong>This is my digital life.</strong> I want something to be around long after I’m gone, and with the way the ‘net changes there’s a chance it’ll outlive us all. So if you’re reading this, here’s to new beginnings, and memories that never fade.

-keif