Late Winter 2011

At least I hope it's late Winter now. Don't get me wrong, I love all of the seasons and I even really enjoy snow, but this year especially the winter months brought a significant lull in a lot of things for me - most specifically gaming and my D&D campaign. Now that it's February I'm happy to be getting back into the swing of things as people's schedules generally open up a bit more and weather stops becoming such a big threat for plans being canceled.

One thing that I did start doing in January was training at the Bushikai dojo here in Frederick, last night as my 7th class there and I'm really loving it. I'm still quite out of shape and the warm ups are wearing me out but I'm slowly improving and losing a little bit of weight along the way. Most importantly I'm having a great time doing it and am excited to begin attending their Kenjutsu (sword training) classes possibly as soon as next week.

With my new job duties as PHP/MySQL web developer (or whatever you want to call it) I've had a lot of reading to do for training, which has stalled my recreational reading. First, an update on the training progress. At the very end of January I'd read 123 pages on PHP and 68 pages on MySQL. My progress at the moment is:

• 200 pages on PHP (123 in 1 book, 77 in another)
  
• 68 pages on MySQL
• 52 pages on integrating PHP & MySQL together
• 18 pages on Cookies, Sessions, & Authentication
  
• 11 pages on Javascript

Progress through the books themselves has been slow the last week because I've been implementing a lot of what I'm learning and re-building our website to use PHP/MySQL. Now that I'm getting into the Javascript and Ajax stuff though I'm going to be reading more to get through all the information and then hopefully implement what I can from that as well. It's pretty exciting being able to finally put together a website or web based program that can do a lot of the things I've wanted to do for the last few years.

Reading Update: If I'd been reading along with my schedule I would be finishing book 8 - Path of Daggers right around now, instead I stalled at around 35% for a few weeks but am now getting back on track and am 44% through the book.

New Work Duties

I'm being trained at my day job for PHP/MySQL now in addition to my standard architectural duties. This is incredibly exciting because I really enjoy Web Design and Web Development and it's been something I've wanted to learn in the last two years and haven't really had a solid reason to do it until now.

Unfortunately having to read training books for work has mostly stalled my personal reading, but this is something I'm aiming to rectify in the next few weeks. So far I've read roughly:

• 123 pages on PHP
• 68 pages on MySQL

I'm just getting into the sections about integrating the two together, and I've gone through a lot of examples of writing PHP and creating MySQL databases on my computer. I've also just started working on taking our existing company webpage and redesigning it/changing the code so that it uses PHP and connecting it to the MySQL database I'm putting together at the same time.

It's funny to me because I have never considered myself a programmer (and still don't) but I'm actually starting to learn quite a bit more about how things are programmed, specifically dynamic websites. This minor change in job duties came at a hilarious time for me as well, I was just starting to get back into creating custom maps for Starcraft II and had been banging my head against a wall with some minor things that I somehow eventually figured out with different programming in the SC2 editor. Then this comes along, and I was already in a programming / looking at a lot of code and seeing how it works mindset, so things seem to have worked out pretty well on that front so far.

January Update

I'm in the process of learning PHP/MySQL (and Javascript) for my day job so that I can help out with the web development stuff that my company does on a regular basis. It's interesting and as usual incredibly fun for me to be learning something new in programming (and my first professional training in any kind of programming).

Coincidentally, only a day or two before I found out I would be doing this for my day job, I got back into map editing for Starcraft 2 pretty intensely. It's a very interesting thing to get back into because I was doing a lot of map editing back in March-May while I was unemployed so it feels almost nostalgic to be doing it again.

Also last Thursday, January 13th was my first day attending Bushikai training for Nihon Jujutsu here in Frederick. In quite certain terms - I got my ass kicked. I couldn't even get through the warm ups (including a minute of push ups, carrying people around, all the fun stuff) and my body has been sore all over for the last few days. However I'm planning on going Tuesdays and Thursdays to start, adding Saturdays in once I'm a bit more in shape and hopefully even doing Mondays regularly as well. When I'm in shape I should be able to handle 4 days a week, I hope!

Reading Update: I am now 33% through book 8 of Wheel of Time, The Path of Daggers. For anyone that hasn't read the book series through book 8, I'm about to discuss a spoiler: It is on exactly page 207 of book 8 that the first mention of the weather finally getting cooler again occurs (mentioned by Faile). Now I just need to go back and re-read and keep my eyes open for when Jordan introduced the first real indication that the weather was staying warm into the fall. My guess is that it's sometime in book 4 (or even book 3) because that was the book that I read over a course of 9 months and so explains why I don't have a very good recollection of when it first started.

Overall that's probably one of the largest "plot" arcs that's happened in the books so far, really taking place over the course of 4-5 books, whereas most other things (so far) have generally lasted only 1-2 or at most 3 books excluding some of the largest plot points that are arguably in every book. To me that's pretty exciting, and is helping me propel through the middle of this book.

1 Month of Employment

Things are going incredibly, no actually I'd say insanely, well for us lately. My new job has done quite a bit, but I think the root of everything is that despite all the stress, pain, and anguish that being unemployed caused us - Becky and I were still pretty damn happy during that time. We spent 7 months pretty much the entire time being together 24/7, and we enjoyed it a hell of a lot. Possibly the most fun was in the beginning of the year when the 2010 Winter Olympics were on and we both were home all day. We watched nearly all of the events and it was awesome! So after that 7 months, despite the job and money concerns, we were happy and I think that is the root of why things are going so incredibly well right now. We were happy, and then a large amount of stress was relieved for us and I feel like we're finally able to use all that positive momentum we were building up over the first half of the year.

It really doesn't feel like that was half a year, and it's very nice to have so many good things that happened (with Becky for the most part) to look back on and not have that period of my life be a tarnish on things. A few other things that I enjoyed during that period of time:

• hanging out with Matt on random week days while everyone else worked
• Hanging out with our friends Andrew & Amber, and the birth of their baby boy Maddox on May 31st - also being free to spend a lot of time at the hospital and keep them company / bring them food during those stressful few days
  
• getting to play a few times in Dave's D&D game
• the last season of Lost
• working with our friend Ben on random house jobs for his home improvement company - installing insulation, doing (badly) drywall, painting - I quickly became comfortable walking around in attic spaces, which is a useful skill and helped with installing the ceiling fan for my home office
• working for Becky's dad the last month of my unemployment - doing drywall plan take-offs - it got me back into the idea of working every day of the week (haha)

I'm sure there are some other things, I may add onto this list later on.

Nerd-time: One of the things I'm really enjoying right now is running my D&D campaign more often since Becky has gotten a lot more into it and doesn't mind (or even encourages) me to run more often now. Just a year ago she was considering quitting the game, but now she's such an enjoyable part of the game for me when I run and an incredibly talented role player. With her and Dave in my party, it's clear everyone else is quickly improving in their roleplaying as a result. I started this campaign on July 4th, 2008 and after two years it's a treat to see how things have changed and relish a bit in the world Dave and I have built. His party (in the past of my game) is in the upper paragon tier and he will probably wrap his game up by summer or fall of next year. My party is just hitting level 14/15/16 but I'm hoping to speed things up and run more regularly so that it doesn't take another two years to wrap everything up in my campaign. Then again, if it keeps going strong and everyone is enjoying it - what's the problem with it running for 2 more years? We'll have to see how it goes...

Onto the reading front, you can see that things are going well because I'm 70% of the way through the first Harry Potter book and 5% through the entire series. Everything I do before July 19th is a buffer, once that date hits I'll need to have 25% of the entire series read by August 19th which evens out to just under 1% or 41 pages a day. Getting through the first book before that date seems reasonable, which would bring my requirement down to 38 pages a day which isn't much but it helps. The only reason this is even possible for me is that the books are easy to read and each page is relatively short on words, otherwise I'd be doomed because I like to read slow and enjoy my books (at least that's the excuse I use).