Regret

Disclaimer: Not technical or about technical writing.

Aristotle called us the "rational animal". I think few of us are worthy of the title. It takes hard work to think rationally. Especially when we are so vulnerable to our feelings. Sometimes, I have to work hard to let my feelings get the best of me, and quell that lizard brain of mine so that I can carry on with my life.

Regret is one of those irrational feelings everyone has felt before. It can be quite debilitating to your work. I regret not applying myself earlier in my life to learn things I wanted to learn and to do things I wanted to do.

I'm angry at myself for wasting part of my life so that I could sit around and watch movies and drink beer all day. I'm angry that I didn't do more with my life.

It doesn't make sense dwell on these things. The only thing you can do is learn from your mistakes and move on. The hard part is living in the moment and not letting your feelings get the better of you.

Ambition getting the best of me

I think I'm getting a tad too ambitious with learning programming. I'm extremely eager to learn but I'm trying to do things that I probably shouldn't do yet.

At the moment, I am going to put PHP aside and strictly work on Javascript, HTML, and CSS. I'll wait to learn PHP until I get comfortable with Javascript.

I may not even learn PHP right away opting for Ruby instead. My friend knows Ruby very well so he could help me when I run into a roadblock.

Coding roadblocks

Breaking in to programming is a formidable challenge for me.I tried for many hours to get a working setup of PHP on my computer but failed. Hopefully, one day I can look back at my trials and laugh at how ignorant I was.

I need a little break from learning for now. I think I'll pick it back up on the weekend with a fresh mind.

The War of Art

I'm in the middle of reading a good book called the The War of Art. Some might call it a self-help book, but it's more of a nice kick in the arse to artists that need it.

The book is for people who call themselves writers but never really get around to doing it. You know exactly what I'm talking about. Remember when you told yourself you were going to write a great screenplay or storyline for a video game? Chances are, that you started but never finished. Even more likely is that you never started to begin with.

The author of The War of Art tells us that it's something called Resistance that keeps us from doing great things. Resistance is what keeps us from doing the work that we need to do. Resistance tells us that your novel isn't going to be that good anyway so why start? Its that anxiety you get and nagging feeling you're wasting your time whenever you try to start something.

I always knew about Resistance but I never put a name to it.

I always assumed that people that produce great works never felt Resistance. But that's a huge lie. Everyone feels it. You don't overcome it. You just have to work through it.

PHP

It can be extremely frustrating trying to learn new things. Especially when you don't have that much time on your hands.

I'm learning PHP right now from this book published by O'Reilly. I was in the middle of learning Javascript, but this book recommended I start with PHP first. So that's what I'm doing. I'm finding that the syntax between the two languages is pretty similar so it's not much of a problem.

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In other news....

I have website up. Take a look.

Javascript

Learning Javascript is freakin' hard. That is if you have absolutely zero programming experience like me. I wish I started learning this stuff when I was in middle school. Back when knowing HTML was a big deal. Now everyone knows that stuff. Not well. But many know the basics.

Going through some problems on codecademy.com. After that, I'm doing the Javascript koans. We'll see where this takes me.

Mad skills

Learning more about the internets and web development by delving into javascript. I learned the basics of HTML and CSS and my sites don't appear as cool and flashy as most out there. Mine look like they're from 1998.

Programming (I know most don't consider javascript a 'real' programming language but I don't care) is the most difficult thing I have tried to learn. I don't know what I'm doing and I'm kind of going through the motions of writing code without knowing the underlying mechanics. I figure that if I keep at it, these programming concepts won't be opaque for much longer.