Posted on by julie

Thinking About Old Thoughts

I’ve been tidying up today and was specifically cleaning my desk, because, uh, it was a disaster.

In so doing, I found one of my old notebooks. For a period of years, I’d carry a small, ringed notebook to write in while on the bus or metro, but also to write down quotable things my friends would say. Here are a few, names removed.

Don’t worry, it’s worse than you thought.

There are people who are home. There are people who smell like home.

You ever feel REALLY smart?
– Only around you!

I have a way with logic. Don’t get in my way.

He can’t be crazy batshit insane. She still has all her fingers!

I’m glad I’ve got some of these, still. Most of these made me howl with laughter. Some of them made me stop and think. And still others made me look at people very oddly.

Do zebras turn you on or something?

(Case in point.)

It’s a nice way to remember certain people, certain events, certain moments, lest they be lost to the fog of time. Instantly, I’m transported back in time by more than a decade. It’s amazing how just a small collection of words can do that for us. Or, at least, for me. :)

Posted on by julie

Hello World.

Ah, new beginnings.

It has been years since I’ve posted on this domain. Actual years. I was running WordPress 2.0.5 and there wasn’t any auto-update or export function, so we’re starting from scratch. No great loss; there were only eleven entries on the previous incarnation of this site.

I’m hoping I’ll actually post on this thing. It’s certainly my intent. I just don’t know if I’ll stick to it. I definitely need an outlet, though.

So what’s new with me? I’m looking for work and, while I do so, I’m taking classes at one of the local universities, working towards a diploma in web programming. I’ve already taken the HTML/CSS class (I was conversant with HTML and CSS up to versions 3 and 1 respectively and now am nicely up to date — I can make responsive websites! All hail media queries.) and the SQL class and am now somewhat suffering through Fundamentals of Java Programming.

As geeky as I’ve always been, I’ve never learned a formal programming language. This shit is hard, yo. I mean, it’s slowly coming together, but it’s still hard. Methods, classes, user input and keyboard buffers… Some of it is just like “wtf am I actually doing??” and some of it is “oh, well that makes sense”. Week four of my ten week class is now done and I’ve got about a week to finish up my first assignment. At least I feel that I’ve made some progress on it. I think I understand all the parts of it separately. Now I just need to incorporate them all together. Should be fine, right? … right?

In the meantime, I’m migrating all kinds of crap over to a new host, this blog included. I might actually try to post some photos and such, but in the meantime, you can check out my Instagram. (All of that gets cross-posted to my Flickr and Twitter, too.)

So yeah, I host something like 20ish sites and I’ve moved four of them entirely, two of them partially and another is sort of in limbo because I don’t want to go backup the database, but I’m going to have to force myself to do so at some point. I’m glad I gave myself a full month to do all this.

Hilariously, I actually had given myself six weeks to do it, but my new webhost was inaccessible from my home ISP. Worked fine on my cell network. Worked fine at school. Anyone I asked was able to access it, unless they were using the same ISP as I am. My brother? No luck, either on his home wifi or his cell network (both using my ISP). After two weeks of lots of phone calls, trying to discern what the issue was, the webhost and I figured out that my ISP is blocking the specific IP address my webhost had assigned to my account. This after my ISP was insistent it was an issue with my host, of course.

I swear, as soon as fibre is available in my neighbourhood, I’m switching from my current ISP. Of course, I’m not certain it’ll ever be available here. Every six months, a rep from the company who offers fibre calls me and is like “hey, you should come back to us!”

And I’m like “so do you have fibre in my area yet?”

“We should.”

“I’m betting you don’t. Can you double-check?”

“Oh, but I’m almost certain we do offer it there.”

“No, seriously. Go check.”

The invariably go to check and then come back and apologize.

I guess there’s just not enough demand in the area, which is ridiculous, but I do acknowledge I live in an area where there are a lot of older people, so that might have something to do with it.

Well, I think that’s a sufficient amount of ranting for the first blog post here since, uh, December of 2007.

Feel free to say hi. :)