Rant - Depression

I've hit a low. Some sort of depressive state that's inhibiting my ability to be positive about positive things. For example, I spend my life in front of this keyboard, so computers mean a lot to me. Yesterday, my new laptop arrived, and really I couldn't care less.

So what's my problem? I don't really know. Nothing substantial enough that it grants immediate recognition. My eating habits lately lick ballz, and I'm certainly not exercising to any acceptable degree. My girlfriend tells me I'm strong enough to just bite the bullet and get over it and I need to do so or it'll just get worse. She has faith in my strength. I don't know about it getting worse, but I feel more affection for this state than I do for the people around me. The idea of putting up a strong front sickens me.

On an emotionless level of raw logic and truth, the state itself has me thinking about the complexities of the mind and what could put me in this state. Something that's hurting me that I'm denying to see? Possible, but I doubt that. Maybe its some sort of weight-lifting necessary to flex my brain to an extreme, an unavoidable system diagnostic that I just have to live with. Maybe that's where the affection for it comes from, so my brain gives me what I need to let it roll to completion.

The question is do I fight it or wallow in it. We'll, I'm not taking any major steps I can tell you that. An all around good idea is to take a couple multi-vitamins and swim a few laps, so I'll give that a shot after work today. I could use the time to think.

Rant - On Life and Love

I'm a great starter of projects. I'm a powerhouse of energy and ideas at the beginning of a project because I can fill in all the fun pieces. As soon as the project gets moving and we start hitting problems, I'm useless. I lose all hope. I have no will power. I have no desire. I just want to waste time watching movies, reading geek news, playing video games or avoiding anything that would give me any real sense of accomplishment. I'm weak. I hate it.

I complain a lot, and sometimes with a level of abrasion that is difficult to counter. I find it grounds me, keeps me striving, and in a very real way I believe it helps people gauge how they act around me. To some degree it keeps people in tune, and I believe forces many to over-evaluate my opinion before presenting their disagreement of it. This is due in great part to my opinion having more respect than it deserves (I say more than it deserves because I am quite often embarrassingly wrong) and people generally not wanting to confront me. Naturally, my attitude has a noticeable share of arrogance coupled with it. I attribute much of that to fearfully accepting a position to manage 13 developers when I was 26 and having a lot of trouble maintaining order. It is how I adapted, and now a part of who I am. But that’s just an excuse. In short, I’m arrogant. I hate that too.

Here's one: I'm also overly affected by how people see me. Odd for an arrogant type eh? Not really. Most of us arrogant types are hiding our insecurities. I try to make myself immune to opinion, but that can, for example, lead to me laboring to build and maintain my indifference while anguish tears my heart out. I can't stop mulling over opinions, let alone ignore them. And try as I might to form my own opinion, I'm horribly quick to adopt the view of someone else. I've listened to two intelligent people debating with remarkable effectiveness and shifted my opinion at the end of each rebuke, looking forward to the end of the discussion when I could squeeze and love my shiny new opinion.

So I'm a weak, arrogant, conformist. And I know it. I aim for otherwise, but I can't ever find it in myself often enough to make it real, to make it a part of me. Who do I want to be? Someone truly strong on the inside, humble, and a free thinker. Meet my girl friend, Nicole.

I called her last night and she was crying. Life is kicking her in the shins. Her employer just her changed her sales quota to make it near impossible for her to make the kind of money she has depended on the last 5 years (reduced by about 20k a year, no joke). She is having problems with her roommate and her roommate’s dog (or yap engine, whichever you prefer) but can't afford to move right now and in a town with a population of 6000, money isn't the only problem. I sooooo want to deal with the roommate situation, but Nicole doesn't want that. She's right in what she says: that she has to live with her. I can't get involved; I'll just make matters worse. Virtually all of her friends have moved away, and lately she has been trying to build new friendships. Again, in a town this size that's difficult. That works out to her spending a lot of time with her family and with me, or locked in her downstairs apt bedroom to avoid the roommate and the yapper. I went over and spent the night with her, and tried to cheer her up. I don't think I did a good job. :(

But today she comes to work all smiles (I'm fortunate enough to work in the same room as her … small town). She's all about a new business idea she has, business plan already underway. Her strength humiliates me.

I can't imagine not loving her. I roll my usual opinionated arrogance and she crumbles and submits. Then I realize I’m an asshole and try to retract. Then she’ll either carefully tell me I’m wrong, or agree that I’m right. She doesn’t have my arrogance. There is a guy who works at a low paying job next door. He's a very large guy, balding at a very young age. He is made fun of a lot. She makes every effort to talk to him. She mentions what a great guy he is and wishes people didn't make fun of him so much. She can think for herself. Yet, she doesn't think anything of herself, she asks why I like her. She has humility. That melts me. I see her as a better person than I am.

She has every strength I admire. I love her completely. She is everything I want to be.









TPC

Complaint - Blogger Sux

Ok, I write my second posting of all time, spend a solid 30 mins writing it, and it vanishes. The publish button brings me to a nice generic and completely useless timeout screen, which is nothing new. Naturally I click back to try again. The problem is the editor window is cleared out. The blogger compose control did not retain my text. My effort has been completely wasted. 30 mins of my life (not to mention the additional 30 mins I spent scanning my temp files folder for some cache dump copy of my text, and then coming here to flip my lid about the whole ordeal) that I'll never get back because the web developer/architect who created this horrible control did not have the ability or foresight to deal with a timeout caused by -- you guessed it -- blogger.com's slow ass site.

So now what? Do I have to cut and paste the HTML contents into notepad before I click Publish each time in case blogger chooses to timeout my request? Is this normal procedure for the average technology ignorant blogger?

My boss is always trying to argue how web applications will lead the future, how rich clients will take the back burner. That isn't going to happen.

For those of you who don't know, the web was created to be like the worlds largest online encyclopedia. Pictures and text, and the ability to download binaries. That's it. Now, Flash is great I'll admit. Adds a whole new flavor. But who's idea was it to run business applications in a gawd damn web browser? Some moronic admin supporting 300 computers who was too lazy to install a push technology client on them all? Give me a break. Web application development set a huge slice of the developer community back about 5 years (those stupid enough to jump on board). Even today they are only just catching up with the capabilities we've had in rich window apps back when the web was invented.

Want to know the next wave? It's called 'smart clients' right now. It'll likely come to be known by many names with many variations in theme, but either way it'll be what you use all the time with or without knowing it. Smart client's is how the best in the industry plan to allow rich client developers to build rich applications that can be launched from a web link. All the deployment benefits of 'web apps' but still developed as a rich client with just as much power, flexibility, and responsiveness as ever.

And in reponse to all my technical jumbo mumbo my boss says "but the basic user doesn't care what the technology is, they just want working apps!" Yes. Excellent wording of the obvious. Here's a simple response: smart client apps will be far more 'working' then any web app pitted against them: faster, more responsive, more adaptive.

So where will that leave web apps? The same place as my missing blog.

TPC

Rant - Dere be dragons here ...

So here I am in this brave new world of online (public) journal entry. It's a somewhat different take for me, as here I'll feel more inclined to write the truth vs. simply writing what makes me feel better (fear of public disapproval and mass flaming). So will that completely remove it's therapeutic value? I hope not. Maybe I'll wean some pride from those of you who share my views and encourage my opinion. If some of you are as miserable as I get at times, or expose via comments that your misery puts mine to shame, then I'll get tons of therapy from laughing at your troubles, the way I laugh at mine in hindsight.

Let the fun begin.