Kalimat al-Mutafalsif

I'm sitting here on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon, with sunlight streaming in my window, working on a few programs. For the past two hours I've been helping a buddy I met playing World of Warcraft set up a portfolio website for himself. Its been ages since I saw him online, but I helped him build a guild website way back in the day, so he came to me for help this time. I've got hims set up with a few nice Open Source packages, and within a few hours he's got the knowledge to build his own site.

So what? I just ended up marvelling at how quickly he and I formed a relationship, me helping him on a site, that led to me learning more stuff. He's an architect, and was passing me sites of "famous" guys in his field, and I just found it really cool that by taking two hours out of my day to help him I've now opened up a whole new world of information.

The same thing happened when I set up a site for a photographer friend from church. He and I really bonded on many levels making it, and he wasn't the type of person I really identify with. Honestly, with both of them it'd have been easier to not pursue that relationship, but I'm glad I have for the information its opened up.

Moral: Take the extra 30 minutes, help someone, and get to know 'em.

Its been a few days since the massacre at Virginia Tech. I want to pass my condolances on to the families and friends of those students and faculty. I know I have readers in Blacksburg, I can see it from my logs, please know you guys are in my thoughts and prayers, as cliche as that sounds. To those readers that don't know, I was initially supposed to attend Tech, and I have many close friends there, so this has hit me harder than I expected, or can justify. In mourning, I've made a new theme, and will use this style for the forseeable future. Its nothing more than writing some code and clicking a button, but for my online persona, its as much as I can do. If you would like a copy of this theme to use or modify, email me at snarky(at)thesnarky.com and I'll send it to you. As for what I'm doing about this in real life, there'll be another post tomorrow.

Well, today's been Hell on me, though of course no where near how horrible its been on a lot of my friends. But I got back to my email around 1am, and found this tidbit regarding the web design job I left two weeks ago:

Hey [Snarky],

Sincerely,
[Boss]

So, yea... sadly, that's the high point of my day. But it makes me feel good because I'm really hard on myself and the quality of my code, and to have an outside source say its looking good brightens the few hours left until I pass out of my day.

As of last Thursday I'm officially done with the first contract as Three Planets Software. I've actually been done with the contract for a few weeks now, but they kept me on retainer for a few reasons. I had to end it due to my school load picking up, but the whole process was a great learning experience. Best of all, it paid for my car repairs, and I made contacts with two people who would hire me again in the future. In the end I handled it professionally, and everyone was happy with the code I put out. Now that's a happy ending.

And now back to my never-ceasing work for the next month.