Random Rant
Here’s a few random things that have been on my mind that don’t fit anywhere else, so I’ll just spit them out here.
Redbox I am done with you. It seemed like a good idea at first, but now I’ve had enough. Waiting in line to rent a movie isn’t fun, but you know what’s worse? Waiting in line to return a movie. My personal favorite is systematically starting at the Redbox closest to my house and working outward to find one that is not out of order and not “full” and not inside a store that is closed to be able to return my movie and then having to wait in line just to put the movie in the slot. It’s been fun but Netflix is my friend now.
SuperMediaStore is having a contest to give away an iPad. The winner is to be chosen at random from all of the entries received during the month. The winner for April still hasn’t been selected though because they received “over 13,000 entries in total! still sorting thru entries”. I wasn’t aware that a randomly selected drawing required any “sorting thru”, and the funny thing about computers is that they can select a random number pretty fast. It’s their contest and they can run it however they want, it just disturbs me as a programmer. I wonder if I’ve disqualified myself from being the “random” winner with this post?
MegaTokyo I ordered a t-shirt 7 days ago and the order is still “processing”. Really?
Milk If they can figure out exactly to the day when my milk will go bad, why are all of the above having so many problems?
Pork Whoever thought it was a good idea to use pigs for anything besides bacon was WRONG
Lost I’m watching this show for the first time and I’m currently in season 4. I’m totally hooked and think the show is fantastic but seriously WHAT is going on?!
Popularity
Jul 30, 2009 Thoughts
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, blogging is hard (for me anyway). I’ve read a lot of articles about blogging and how hard it is to make a living as a blogger and all the tips and tricks and guidelines to make it work. I don’t worry about it too much because honestly I didn’t ever hope that I’d be able to quit my day job because of this blog.
I follow a lot of different blogs, and I was recently noticing that one blog in particular – not going to name names – has not posted a single thing this whole year (which is particularly annoying because there is no RSS feed so I have to manually go check the site for new posts). Looking a little further I saw that there were only 3 posts in 2008, 5 in 2007, 4 in 2006, 8 in 2005 and 18 in 2004. In 2003 there were 34 posts, which is a more “acceptable” level of posts by blogging standards, but even that many is less than 1 per week and that was over 5 years ago! The blog in question is still considered to be pretty popular and even scored the owner a book deal and corresponding book tour. So how is it that a blog with such a shoddy track record became so popular? My guess is that it’s just plain dumb luck. Someone in the right place at the right time by pure coincidence. I was watching an interview with a software developer recently where attributing his success he says he “stumbled into a big steaming pile of gold”. I think that sums it up nicely.
I know there are bloggers out there that really work at what they do, and there are also those who really work at it AND have a bit of luck to kick them up the ranks. Then there’s me, who doesn’t really do either of those. But I’ve got the making a few sporadic posts per year part down, so I’m ready for the dumb luck and a book deal part. Who am I kidding, I don’t have enough to say to fill up a book. At least there’s no pressure on me to blog more often.
Learning Curve
I really enjoy learning new things. I often miss the good old days of attending classes at the university, and even now I would still love to go back and take more classes just for the sake of broadening my knowledge. If only I could avoid taking exams and the astronomical cost of tuition. So it appears that for now I am stuck learning things on my own and attending the occasional seminar/webinar when possible.
The challenge with learning things on your own is discovering where the good knowledge is. In some cases there may be dozens of books pertaining to a certain subject and determining which one to invest your time in is a challenge. In other cases there may be very little information available and when just finding the information is a challenge it is hard to be picky about the quality. There is no mentor telling you what you really need to know, and the material may not be presented in the most organized manner (though I can’t honestly say that not all of my university courses met that criteria!).
In my latest endeavor, I had to start from the ground up. Learning a new language, using new hardware, minimal public documentation/tutorials (but that is steadily getting better) etc. I wasn’t doing this just for the sake of learning something new, I actually had a few projects in mind that I wanted to accomplish. I’d say that the learning curve has been a little more than I expected, and it is always frustrating to know enough to know that if you knew what you were doing already you could accomplish your task in a fraction of the time. I’m going to stick with it though, because the more I do the more sense it makes, and I’m almost done with my first project (don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll announce it here when it’s done). It isn’t as flashy as I would like and doesn’t have all the features I had planned, but those will fit nicely in the next version. For now I’m just looking forward to my next project!