Lead a man to fish… and then tell him how to eat it step by step by step.

Sometimes I feel like I am too nice for my own good. I know thats a horrrible thing to say, but I definitely feel that way right now.

I know to a lot of people, I am more or less labeled “The geek” or “The computer guy”. I’m only useful to fix things! It irritating, sure… but I’ve learned to live with it. There’s not much I can do about it short of picking up and moving across the country, growing a mustache, changing my accent, and HOPEFULLY never running into anybody that knew me in my “past life”.

The good thing about this is that most of the time, people are nice about it. I say most of the time because there are always the occational “friend” that will “ask” for “help”, and go about it in the absolute rudest way they possibly can manage. When they are “asking” for this help, its really just “hey how do I do this”. No punctuation. Is that a question, or a statement? Hell, “How do I shot web?” works better in this situation; At least it has a question mark at the end! And the “help” is really more like “hold my hand for every step, and if it doesn’t work then it’s your fault”. I try to be as helpful as possible without being a babysitter, but apparently this just isn’t good enough. The old adage works well here… “Google is your friend.”

Best part about this situation? The complete lack of gratitude for my help! No thanks necessary, I guess.

Thankfully, as I’ve said before, this isn’t such a widespread problem. I would really like to find a better way to deal with, and ultimiately, eliminate these situations. I seemed to have grown into the habbit of being dismissive, subtlety insulting, and even just ignoring the culprit, but that doesn’t appear to be helping! It makes me feel like a dick some times, too. :-\ Oh well.

This sounds like fun!

This morning I chanced upon a link on the Twitters for a newly released project called PHP for Android. It achieves this by using the Android Scripting Environment. According to the website…

PHP for Android project (PFA) aims to make PHP development in Android not only possible but also feasible providing tools and documentation.

ASE (Android Scripting Environment) is a Google-mantained project which “brings scripting languages to Android by allowing you to edit and execute scripts and interactive interpreters directly on the Android device”.

PhpForAndroid-APK provides PHP support to ASE.

My initial reaction to this is… Exciting! I love seeing geeky projects like this. I know a lot of people won’t see any usefulness for it… but it seems like it could be a lot of fun. Is this software fit for any sorts of serious software development / deployment? No. (Not in its current state, anyway.) But with PHP being the one language that I am the most familiar with, it gives me a chance to dick around with the platform in my own way until I can find the time, focus, and motivation to learn Java and the Android development platform. It almost seems like those PHP extensions for Python or GTK. Just a tool to give your code another outlet.

Make no mistake. I definitely STILL HOPE that I can find that time, focus, and motivation to teach myself Java in the near future!

In other news, I’m thinking that if I do end up going into a new web project soon, that I want to use it to explore HTML5. With HTML5 becoming the a big & serious thing, and seeing just how powerful and useful it can be, it’s probably best to not dilly dally with it! I’m already far enough behind the curve… I still don’t know too much about JavaScript! Haha.

Oh, how I’ve missed this feeling…

Writing that last post has got me feeling really good!

Here I am, up late on my compruder, listening to music and getting stuff done. Be it coding, blogging, or anything else, it seems I’ve never really been able to get anything done until its really late and everyone else has gone to bed. Most of the time I should have been in bed a few hours ago, which always has seemed kind of counter-productive for me… haha.

I’m currently in the process (again) of cleaning up my workspace and getting things organized for productivity. I’m wanting to get myself set up for tackling some sorts of technical projects again. I seemingly always and still are planning on getting back into coding for the web browser some time. Recently I’ve also had thoughts of getting into some Android development, too. Small stuff, like theme’ing and that sort of thing. Either way, I’m going to be using a Linux virtual machine as part my development tools. I’m getting that set up right now!

This feeling, though… So many memories. I remember when my family first moved to this house during the summer before my senior year in high school (since then I’ve moved out, and back home again, TWICE ). I was running my old meager separate Windows and Linux boxes. I had my Linux box set up with Slackware Linux and operating on three 15″ CRT monitors. Yeah, I’m hardcore like that. I had a good flow of productivity with my PHP development. My old project, “n0tgh3y profiles”, basically helped me teach myself advanced PHP and introduced me to MySQL database integration. That project ended up getting rather popular around my friends and some of the school! Had about 50 users at one point, I believe…

And ever since then, I’ve been striving for that… feeling, again. That same situation. It was such a fun time in my life! Many attempts at obtaining that, since then, have failed in one way or another. I get close… when i get into a good project, and make some nice progress, it feels great! Its always pretty short lived, though. Something else catches my attention, and that project fades away into nothing more than a bunch of files in a backup archive.

I hope things will be different, this time. If I can get my act together… I think it will. I now have a loving, supportive, beautiful woman behind me to encourage and push me in directions I’ve only taken baby steps in on my own. That will help, I think.

Music. Again.

Limpbizkit is back together again! And they’re releasing a new album!!

Sure, go ahead and call me lame… but I am genuinely excited for this! Limpbizkit have released a lot of crap over the years, but I really dug their first two records, and I REALLY enjoyed their last album, “The Unquestionable Truth, Part 1″. I was so bummed when I heard they broke up and I wouldn’t get a followup Part 2 record… Although, Wes Borland went on to make the fantastic debut album of his band “Black Light Burns” (which I am listening to right now, actually) so I guess it wasn’t all too bad.

I came across this info on Wikipedia (<3), which, funny as it is, I learned because I randomly decided to check the Black Light Burns page to see if they had released another new album yet! I love when things work like that.

Music and me… we’re at a funny stage again. I’ve been feeling that nostalgia again. Last year I went on that personal musical Renaissance of mine and culled a good portion of my music collection based on my matured and refined tastes as of late. Well, some of the stuff that I culled (mostly stuff that I really enjoyed in middle/high school) I feel like putting back in, all of a sudden! I find myself enjoying it again… I bet a lot of that has to do with the memories that flood my head when I listen to it. To this day I still cannot listen to Limpbizkit’s “Unquestionable Truth” without thinking of the PC game, Guild Wars. That album came out at the same time as I had just gotten Guild Wars, so I would play and listen to both for hours during that summer.

As I’ve posted before, my musical habbits are still pretty narrow. I can listen to nothing but The Good Year Pimps for weeks at a time, which I am perfectly fine with! I love their music, and my collection of their stuff is slowly reaching completion. I’ve just been getting that nostalgic itch lately… Who know’s how long it will last, though? We shall see.

Mini-review: Darksiders (Xbox 360)

New post! Nothing too major. Its just that my friend asked me the other day about the game Darksiders and what I thought of it. Scribbled down this little mini-review about it, and thought I would share it here!

Its awesome! I love it. Its a Zelda clone and is not ashamed to admit it. Has quite a bit of game time to it (I still haven’t finished it so I’m not too sure on a total) and it plays great. Looks gorgeous too, IMO. Joe Mad (veteran comic artist/writer) is the creative director and his art direction is truly beautiful. The comic book influence is … See Moredefinitely apparent in the environments and characters and just the range of color palette in use. An all-around great game… Damn, did I just gush about it or what?

To recap? It’s epic.

I think I might start doing this sort of thing more often. I’m not all that great with the long drawn out game reviews but a short, sweet, & simple paragraph or two of my thoughts on a game is a nice way to get around that.

Anyway, haven’t posted in a long time. That should (hopefully) change soon. I’ve had a lot of awesome projects follow through from start to finish lately and I want to document them up here!