Curse you, nomad!
This week has been both fun and frustrating. On the one hand, I’ve had my new computer to play with, which is good for hours and hours of fun. On the other hand, it seems that my new computer doesn’t like my old CD-writer, since it hangs at boot, trying to boot off a non-existent CD. Also, I’ve discovered that my new MP3 player connection software doesn’t support Windows 2000. It says explicitly on the box that it supports every version of Windows, but I tried installing it on both of my Win2k boxes, and it hangs during installation on both, but works fine in Windows ME. It only frustrates me because it means I have to funnel all my mp3s through to my ME box, instead of directly offloading from my 2k machine, but if some normal customer ran into this same problem, it would be significantly more aggravating. Part of me wants to write a scathing encomium to the company, but I think laziness and sympathy for the poor tech-support people will probably win out. (Did I mention that their website doesn’t have software/drivers for Win2k available for download either?)
The rest of the week has been spent recoding a friend’s website. Brad is the newbie on the job, and he’s been running a Mac-based website MacMonkies for a couple years. When I showed him some of the cool stuff I could do with scripts and CSS and the like, he got really excited and asked me to give his site the once over. In case I haven’t mentioned it enough, I should say that WYSIWYG editors suck. I can’t count the number of orphaned tags, random font tags, nested tables, and general crap that I cleaned out over the course of a day. I literally reduced the size of the html file by 15% for the non-CSS version, and an additional 25% for the CSS enabled version. I can only hope that when I get into script-generated HTML code that my pages can continue to be so small. Anyway, I had a lot of fun working on the site, if only because I got to show off my mad-phat webcoding skills.
On a similar vein, the web department at trib has also discovered that I’m something of a coding phreak, and has begun consulting me on random minor conundrums. They haven’t asked me to take over the site, nor do I expect them to, but it is somewhat gratifying to be known as the coding guru.
Lately I’ve been spending my free time (or rather, that time not dedicated to the above-mentioned tasks or work) reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’m only on Habit #3, but I’m not entirely sure I agree with the whole premise in light of my recent bouts with my bipolar.
In habit #1, Mr. Covey (the author) intimates that everyone should be proactive in their endeavors, and not let outside influences control them. There was even a section where he intimated that a large variety of mental and physical illnesses were merely side-effects of not living a proactive life. The whole time I was reading that section, I could not help but hearken back to recent memory, and remember how hard I tried to sublimate my depressive cycles and work for the positive. To my knowledge, I was being about as proactive as I can imagine any person to be, yet I kept hitting some unseen wall after a few days, weeks, or months. In looking back, my real depression came as much from sheer frustration over not being able to follow through on my goals as from the bipolar mood swings. Until I learned that my problem was as much a chemical imbalance as any personal failing that I was able to focus beyond the problem and actually get out of the cycle.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that all the positive thinking in the world won’t fix some problems. It can be helpful, even semi-miraculous in some aspects, but it is not the universal panacea it is sometimes made out to be.