End of Stagnancy

A couple of months ago, I noticed a dramatic and pronounced upswing in my interests and motivation. For various reasons I won’t go into here, the previous 18 months or so had been a rather stagnant stretch in my life. I don’t think that stagnant periods are necessarily periods of inactivity. After a series of changes or a flood of growth, it is sometimes necessary for a system to move into a period of seeming stillness while the lessons and changes of the period of growth have time to sink in and percolate through the system. Once that process completes, a new period of growth, learning and expansion can begin. Now that a new period of growth has begun, I find that my desire to learn as fast and as thoroughly as possible is really invigorating and refreshing. As far as technology goes, this has manifested in an interest in brushing up on skills, and on teaching myself new skills, specifically mobile app development. Stay tuned!

Always learning

I’ve been taking a PHP refresher class through a friend who edits a PHP magazine, trying to keep my skills current in an often-changing field. I found a couple other good online, “casual” courses that I’d recommend as well. Codecademy does a brief intro course in JavaScript that could be a good refresher or introduction. And Method of Action is putting together a series of courses for teaching programmers how to design. I took their kerning quiz and got 85 out of 100. What can I say – I’m a sucker for quizzes! Both of these online courses are free, as far as I can tell, and they’re actually kind of fun. They’re certainly not going to make you into an expert, but they’re a good way to brush up or delve into something you don’t know.

Tags: Codecademy, design, learning, Method of Action, online courses, PHP, programming

Fur balls

We’ve got a couple cats, and we’ll soon be adding a dog to the menagerie. I struggled for some time with a way to keep my cat off my desk. He’s a grumpy fellow and, while my desk is designed such that he can’t actually sit on my keyboard, he took great joy in biting my mouse hand. I got him a cat bed that bolts to my desk, and he thinks that’s the best thing since sliced tuna. I did have to add a fleece blanket, because the brown pad that’s included is apparently not quite luxurious enough for his refined tastes. So, now that we’re adding a dog, I’m considering tasking the other half with creating the dog bed that’s featured on unplggd. The article includes the cat bed that I use too.

Tags: workspace

Chalk Dust

I used to have a large amount of scratch paper on my desk to take notes while I’m on the phone, keep track of billable hours, etc. But, with cats who just view scraps of paper as toys, I moved to a small notebook. At least if it’s knocked on the floor by an errant cat swipe, I can find it more easily. But, lifehacker posted a couple really great ideas – chalkboard paint on the surface of the desk and, in the first comment, using dry erase markers on the glass surface of the desk. Since I have a glass portion of my desk, I’ll have to try that out. Now, to move the cat off the glass…

Tags: efficiency, organization, working habits

Writing

I like to write. And, I’ve been told that I’m passably good at it. I realize that this makes me about as unique as weeds. I published a couple of articles online: one on the reasons to select an eco-friendly wedding ring, an idea of my own, and one on paying off student loans, an article I received by assignment. Both of these were published online via those portals where you make money off people clicking on the ads running alongside the articles. They haven’t been particularly lucrative, but I suspect that has more to do with my difficulty in effectively marketing them than anything else.

I have a series of articles on green weddings that I’d like to see published, but I’m reluctant to publish the remainder via the method I described above. I originally had a publisher interested in publishing an entire book of mine on this topic, but his situation has changed, making that no longer an option. So, that leaves me deciding whether to try to submit the chapters individually as articles to bridal magazines or whether to finish up the book and try to find a publisher on my own. Anyone have any helpful thoughts they’d like to share on this?