Stressed and overwhelmed

It’s funny how little I know about web design or anything involved with it. Tonight marks 3 nights in a row I’ve been sitting in front of this computer pouring over design sites trying to get inspired and instead I just end up with a headache.

Perhaps I should step back and admit that I’m not a very creative person when it comes to designing layouts, at least not on a very frequent scale. Some days I get a burst of design power but those days are few and far between.

Is design and the ability to see a good design in your head something you can cultivate and grow with constant practice? Or is it something you’re born with meaning the rest of us are destined to be mediocre?

I’m going back to my reading, here’s to hoping something clicks.

Can I click my heels and get this?

You ever really want to be capable of something that you’re positive you’ll never achieve?

I’m a guy who constantly has ideas yet never has the capability to make them come to life. Most of my ideas are web based and nothing ground breaking but if I were capable of putting that idea into an actual working form, I feel they would be useful to some people. Yet, I’m cursed with not having any knowledge of a programming language and this horrible inability to focus enough to learn.

I’ve spent this weekend reading online manuals for Ruby on Rails and trying to get an environment set up on my laptop to assist me in learning it, yet I don’t feel like I’ve gotten anywhere. I started doing something I’ve never done before, taking notes while I read. That seems to help a tiny bit but I’m guessing I don’t get very far anyway.

I’m also faced with the design aspect of things. Of all my ideas, the most I’ve ever done is scribble down a huge list of possible functions of these apps and never anything else. As I stand back and look at them, they’re usually lists full of unnecessary bobbles that the user won’t ever touch. If my reading this weekend has taught me anything, it’s that I tend to over complicate things that don’t need to be.

On the design note, my father needs a website built for his business and of course he turns to his son who runs a big car website and therefore must know how to do such things. Sadly, I’ve never churned out a website worth it’s weight in my entire time fiddling with HTML. I barely know CSS or how to properly leverage it into making my code actually look decent. So I find myself staring at design sites tonight praying for a spark of something, anything, to ignite my creative juices and let me have some breakthrough to use for my dad’s website.

Have I mentioned I’ve not drawn out an idea in years? I remember scrawling some basic shapes on a piece of paper in the past but it seems like years since I’ve even tried to come up with a UI to go with an idea. This week I hope to break that as I need to sketch out a plan for my dad’s site.

So with that, I urge you to read this if you have any plan of ever churning out anything web related. It’s a good book and free if you don’t mind reading it on your computer screen. Getting Real by 37Signals.

I’m just a stupid man

Does anyone else notice the heavy slant toward smart women and dumb men in almost everything in the media today? For instance, the Walmart commercial with the woman who buys steaks and the husband has no idea why but won’t say anything. Nevermind this couple’s obvious communication issues, it’s obvious this guy has no clue what’s going on in his life.

And of course, let’s not forget the innumerable sitcoms of idiot men with attractive, smart women by their side. King of Queens pretty much embodies this belief. You have a fat dumb funny guy who’s married to a woman way out of his league and just happens to be witty, sarcastic, and the only person with brains in the house.  I could list at least 5 that are on TV right now, it seems every sitcom based on a husband/wife team is like this.

The sad thing is, men are starting to live this way in real life. Want to go out with the friends? “Gotta check with the boss.” It’s a funny phrase and we all start using it to be funny but sadly it ends up that way in the end.

Uhoh, I have to stop writing now, my dark overlord wants me to take out the trash while she berates me about how fat, dumb, and slow I am.

Snow Leopard is here!

I’m installing Snow Leopard on my Macbook right now! I opted for a fresh install so I had to dump everything onto external drives but that wasn’t hard. Hopefully this is worth the time.

More after I’ve had time to play with it.

Success and how we get there.

I like to think I rarely use this space to get very personal but I think a lot of us suffer from this affliction and therefore I feel safe discussing it.

I’m the kind of person who has a problem with obtaining better and better items to attempt to assist whatever hobby I’m into. Let me give you the moral of the story up front; in most situations, the tools of the trade, no matter how expensive or fancy they are, will not suddenly give you super powers to be awesome at what you try.

Example: I have spent many months of my past 2 years very much into fountain pens and attempting to improve my handwriting. During that time, I’ve used $5 chinese fountain pens and $300 Italian pens and guess what? I wrote the same regardless of the pen. No matter how desperate I was to think that a $300 pen was going to magically transform my abilities, it did nothing except empty my wallet more than it needed to.

If you took a peek into my garage you’d see a fully custom BMX bike that I built from some of the best parts I could afford. This bike is strong, fairly light, and tailored to my needs as a 6′2″ guy who rides a 20″ bike. Regardless of the ~$650 I spent building this bike, I still can’t ride any better than I could on the cheapo bike I borrowed to get into the hobby. Sure, I had a blast building it and I learned a lot about bikes and fixing them which I don’t want to discount, but in the grand scheme of things, that bike brings very little to the table in terms of making my skills any better.

You know what would make my skills better? If I stopped focusing on the objects involved and started focusing on me. You don’t need 5 books on a programming language to learn it, the internet has probably everything we need and most of us learn better from trial and error anyway. You don’t need a $3,000 road bike to pedal to work, what you really need is a bike in general and the will and focus to get out there and ride every day.

The only thing that will truly make you better at something is what’s inside you. You can’t give up, you can’t stop because it’s too hard, you have to push and push until you get somewhere. Celebrate every little triumph but know that the big money bike, pen, gun, etc.. most likely did nothing to bring you that success.

I’ve been repeating a mantra similar to this a lot lately. Hopefully it sinks in and I can begin to spend my time learning vs spending money.

Fresh ink and a nib

Sometimes I’m not sure if there’s anything better than inking a fountain pen with a new color of ink. I don’t know what it is, I just love that feeling of holding a writing instrument that has been manually filled with ink and is ready to dispense words to my chosen canvas.

This post inspired by the fact that I just filled my Pelikan M200 fountain pen with Mont Blanc British Racing Green ink to take notes on a programming language book I’m reading.

I go through phases where a pen is most possibly the most romantic thing on this earth. I don’t know what comes over me when I hold a pen to a clean sheet of paper, but I do know I don’t seem to possess the capabilities to fill that paper with anything worth reading. Nevertheless, I can’t say there’s too many better feelings than that in the world.

I’m a pen nerd.

My Dell Mini 9 gets a new OS

A while back I purchased a Dell Mini 9 with the sole intent of turning it into a Hackintosh. If you’re not familiar with that, it’s the name given to machines that aren’t Apple products but are hacked to run OS X. I’ve had this little machine running Leopard ever since the day I got it and it even lead me to purchase a Macbook a few months ago. OS X is a great operating system and I can’t say I’ve ever been happier with a computer than I am with that.

Unfortunately the purchase of the real Mac left my poor little Dell sitting in the case 95% of the time, relegated to occasional use via tethering to my Blackberry for when I needed something off the internet but didn’t have a wifi signal.

Last night ended with me wiping the hard drive and installing Ubuntu 9.10 which I believe is currently in Beta form. I’ve been using Linux for several years, my web server runs it, my home server runs it, and at one point, I had 3 laptops running it as well. The introduction of the Macintosh reduced me to 2 servers running Linux and nothing else. For a tinkerer like me, eventually that’s going to need to change.

So now I have a little 9″ netbook running Ubuntu with no discernible issues that I can find other than it’s not auto mounting my SD card but I haven’t had time to check into that yet. It’s good to see that fact that Dell ships Ubuntu with a lot of their machines means that Ubuntu just handles most of the Dell hardware without any problems. No issues with wifi, blue tooth, etc.. it just works.

Oh Linux, how I missed thee.

Organization take 50

I’m a horribly unorganized person. You can probably tell that by reading my writing, I think it accurately reflects how my brain works.

One thing I’ve found is that my brain tends to stop and dwell on a subject once something has stuck in my head. If I just leave it in my head, I spend an abnormal amount of time dwelling on it and thereby taking up a lot of brain power that could be used elsewhere. That’s one of the reasons I have this blog, to dump things out of my head so I don’t have to dwell on it for very long.

Since you can’t always be in front of a computer or maybe the thoughts aren’t worth putting down here, I went out and purchased yet another Black n’ Red notebook. A side note; the Black n’ Red notebooks are some of the best I’ve found and tend to be very cheap at your local Rite Aid.

Anyway, the thought would be that I now have a notebook that I’m going to try very hard to use as a brain dump. Forget the quality of writing, nevermind the handwriting, it’s all about dumping my thoughts onto paper and hopefully keep my brain working on other things.

I don’t have high hopes for this but I’ll see what happens.

Octoberfest is here

As much as I dread the coming of fall and winter, I’m incredibly excited that Sam Adams Octoberfest is in stores now. I just picked up a case and am enjoying a nice ice cold glass right now.

One of my favorite beers by far.

Recipe for obesity

This weekend was overcast and cool yet most likely perfect for riding a bicycle.

I have a goal to learn how to 180 bunny hop before winter gets here.

My activities included lying on the couch reading a book and occasionally getting up to find food.

I suck.