Evil badness

[same_sky]

Why am I not getting anything done? I have plenty of time, right? It seems like everything I work on these days is thwarted, and half of those thwarts are done to myself by myself. The other half is an act of evil by the universe. I don't know why I'm the beneficiary of so much evil badness, but I guess that if I'm getting evil badness I'm keeping it from someone else. Of course, my evil badness (yes, I really do like that phrase) is not really all that horrible but I'm feeling constantly frustrated. My darling husband asked if perhaps just maybe there was the slightest possibility that, given the circumstances, it could be in the least bit related to hormones, but I bit his head off and threw it outdoors in the snow, so clearly that is not the case. Not that it's even snowing. The stupid weather can't get anything right. It's not really that I want snow all that badly, but if it's going to be this frickin' cold, it should at least have fluffy white snow to make it all worthwhile. I could make soup then. Soup is always best when there is precipitation. You might deny it but secretly you know I'm right.

Anyway. I bet you're wondering how the universe is conspiring against me. It refuses to implant all of the knowledge that I would find helpful into my head without actually working for it. Yeah, I know, yesterday I was saying that it was all exciting and fun to work on these projects and figure out what you don't know, but yesterday I was an idiot. I was lying. What I really want is to wake up in the morning knowing everything there is to know about the project I'm currently working on. (I'm not really trying to be vague--I just know that this is boring stuff that no one wants to read about, and if they did, they wouldn't want to read about it from me because clearly I'm not the expert in the subject, since I spent a large portion of the day fuming at things that refuse to work like I think they ought.) My geek quotient is just not high enough these days, and it's suddenly very very important to me to fix it. Perhaps that in itself is a horrible conspiracy planted by the universe to throw me off track.

Actually, that's the rest of the problem. Remember I mentioned thwarting myself? I'm supposed to be concentrating on writing things. I haven't even printed my book yet. I think I'm afraid to see tangible proof of how horrible the thing was. I really hold no illusions as to the quality of the work. I'm proud of finishing the thing, and I'm halfway pleased with the story. It just doesn't hold together very well through the middle--I couldn't figure out a crucial part of the plot until the book was almost over, and that kind of put a crimp in everything. There are some scenes--really stupid ones--that were just written to meet the daily goal and they will need to be ruthlessly ripped out. And furthermore, I didn't develop an interesting voice until the last quarter of the book. Well, better late than never, but now I need to make the beginning match. So I really do have some valid problems with the thing, and I'm dreading it like crazy. It's important that I do it, though. M's book suffers from verbosity--he loves run-on sentences and long words. That stuff is easily edited, though, and the underlying story is very very good. My book was reasonably well-written but I'm afraid that the story is weak--and I know that's much harder to fix.

That was much more introspection than I planned for the evening. I really need to start getting up at 8:30 again. I seriously think that's part of my problem--my routine is just shot. It's just hard to do that when I stay up so late. :)

Comments

[stephbairey.livejournal.com]

If it's HTML/JS/PHP/CGI/etc you're struggling with, I'm happy to help whenever needed. I don't know everything by any stretch, but I've got a good eye for debugging. :) Hang in there!

[same-sky.livejournal.com]

The main problem is that I'm not exactly sure what I'm looking for, actually. I have two goals for the site that I'm trying to get to. The first one is to get rid of the tables and use style sheets for layout. I almost had it before but then I decided I didn't have any more time to invest in getting it completely right. I'm not actively working on this part right now, actually, which I realized this morning is stupid since I should do this first to avoid doing it twice. The other thing (which I was looking for yesterday) is finding a lightweight content management system to use for this. I really wanted to keep my logical urls and directories in place but I'm negotiable on that, I guess. The portals are way overkill and are proving to be a pain in the rear to customize to fit the project. I have CuteNews (site is cutephp.com but it's been down for days) installed for the first page's updated links and working correctly (although it's not actually in place yet) and was thinking about ways to use it more widely since it fits into each page rather than fitting a page around something else, but then it was pointed out to me that there's a couple of security issues with it, one of which I don't know how to fix. (http://www.secunia.com/advisories/9150/) So anyway. I've spent quite a bit of time poring over the specs for various scripts and have tried a few of them to see if they might work, but at this point I'm not sure what I'm going to do. I just need something that will allow the editors certain permissions to update content, while not being too complicated for them either. (Not the most techie group I've ever seen!) Anyway, thanks for the offer.. if I come up with anything to ask about, I'll keep it in mind. One of my plans before was to learn php.. you might regret your offer if I ever get around to that. ;)

[stephbairey.livejournal.com]

Well, without going into too much detail.. my two thoughts here are that tables offer way more control than CSS, and PHP makes your dreams come true. :) It's REALLY not any harder than learning straight HTML. Once you know just a few things, you can create custom pages that do ANYTHING. It's the difference between buying a standard deli sandwich and having to take off stuff you don't like, and making your own from scratch the way you like it. :) Not more work when you figure in the time spent customizing vs. time spent building, and the end result is what YOU want.

Of course, as you say, the first step is defining what you want. :) Shoot for the moon! Settling never works, IMHO. :)

[same-sky.livejournal.com]

I'm lured by the idea of logically separating presentation from content and the whole standards compliance thing. Tables work, but now I feel guilty about using them, and I know that if I could just get a firmer grasp on making it do what I want, it'll be better in the long run. I'm a relunctant idealist when it comes to this. :) But.. at the beginning it feels like a losing battle. I have reasonable CSS skills, but not for the advanced stuff by any means.. that's one of my main goals.

I've played to small extents with php and it looks reasonably easy and quite fun. I do have programming experience, mainly with C++, so I'm not really worried about my ability to learn it. I just need to have a Reason to play with stuff like that--a worthwhile project to use to get started. There's only so many ways you can learn "Hello world" and the equivalent without getting bored with it! I guess I could try to cut my teeth with this, but I think that might be a little much to get started with. :) I was thinking just this week, though, that I'd like to see how I would like getting a little more involved with this, the dark half of web development. We'll see how it goes. :)