Something to Show

I found a great motivational post in my RSS feeds today. It’s from Kellbot, a fairly random blog I read. She popped up on my radar because she was mentioned on BoingBoing once about making a trackball input device for a PS2, and that’s cool.

Anyway the post is about being Self-Employed or Unemployed, and how to make it.
http://www.kellbot.com/2010/03/staying-awesome-while-youre-unemployed/

You should read it yourself, but one point that really hit me like a meaty punch in the gut was this:

“Either way, you should have something to show for the time you haven’t been rotting away in a cubicle. Make other people jealous of you rather than pity you.”

Holy wow. I always feel like I can be doing more, and some of my projects are taking much longer than I planned. And a lot of that has to do with me, and letting other things get in the way of my goals.

I should get “Make other people jealous of you rather than pity you” on a banner for my office/workspace.

long overdue

Posted by mobile phone:
So much time has passed since my last post that there is a certain amount of hesitancy to write here again.

Engaged and living with my wonderful fiance now, still in Berkeley. Our company, cog motive, is very much alive and is now the primary source of my income. Have a meeting tomorrow with Brian Tanaka about collaborating on some, hopefully many projects of a web application nature. As this is my primary passion, I have high hopes.

Nickelpinch is undergoing another database redesign. I learned about many SQL based things over the last several days that renders my current structure woefully at fault. The problem with self teaching yourself things is that some times important elements can be overlooked. In my case it was with unique keys and indexes.

What I didn’t realize is you can set up relational tables in a way that makes certain things automated. When an entry in a parent table is deleted, it can also delete any related entries in ‘child’ tables as well. (Utilizing the ‘ON DELETE CASCADE’ option during child table creation) This ability eliminates almost a 1/4th of my code for Nickelpinch.

So, work on this is going well. I’ve remade many of these functions several times over by now, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to get everything up to date with the new structure soon. Also I’m making some minor UI adjustments, to make more sense to the user. Not looking at things for almost a month gave me fresh eyes for this.

Otherwise, working on a new mobile application for Energy Operations Management; an entirely new interface and login system for their realtime SCADA information. It is really exciting to see it come together, and the graphing option really sets it apart in the field.

Well I don’t want to burn out by making a crazy long entry, so this’ll do for now.

Short update.

Posted by mobile phone:
I’ve been working a lot on the financial app lately. Progress is going very well, and I’m shooting for it to launch by the end of October. Stay tuned.

Goings on

So, How are things going in timland, you may be asking? Why the lack of blog posts? Well, the answer to that last one is simple. I met a girl. Her name is Tara. We’ve been together almost four months now. She is amazing. Things are going well!

As to timland, things are going mostly well. I’m really enjoying living in Berkeley, with my awesome house mates. I’m a big fan of the area as well. I like having part of my day being a walk to the Monterey Market to pick up fresh fruit.

Work wise, cog motive is steadily rising to meet new challenges. We’re getting a real portfolio of work done now. We just need time to put our site together, heh. We are also learning a lot about how long things really take to complete, and getting a feel for appropriate billing. Which is good.

Financially, things are interesting. I’m learning a lot about how I deal with a slightly negative income, which is to say, I don’t deal well with it. Lots of preoccupation. I have planned for this possibility, and savings is a good thing, but obviously the less time this goes on the better. I have a second job thing I’m working on, and I’m pretty confident this will bring me back to a more comfortable, some might even say positive, financial position.

One thing that is not so well is my current reading status. I’ve only read two books in the last three months, which as we all know is highly anomalous. I’m making more of an effort lately. I have two books from the library I plan on reading quickly. I need to at least get to one book a week. Otherwise things just aren’t right.

I’ve been working on nickelpinch.lite, and I like how it is looking. It’s so easy to use and simple now! Almost all the mockups are done, then I can start making the scripts to generate the pages. I used to do it the other way around, and boy was that time consuming.

Okay, not wanting to jinx things but I would like to try to update this once a week. We’ll see..

Weekend!

Tara and I are getting ready to head up to Sacramento for the day. It should be pretty fun.

What the blogging? I know.

In other news, had a big breakthrough on Nickelpinch. Instead of focusing on this mythical interface that I want, and as a result is keeping me from working on it, instead why not make the mobile version first? I’m calling it the lite version, a simple version with the same functionality that I want in the finished product, just not so ’shiny’. It will work on mobile devices as well as comps identically.

Really though, that’s sort of my calling card. Very simple interfaces for helpful web apps.

It’s a new week

I was going to write about all my plans for work this week, but then I realized doing that would rob me of even more time. So, just know that I am working hard. When I have more time, hopefully later in the week, I will do an update.

Stay classy.

Opera at the Park = pretty cool

Last night was Opera at the Park. It’s where the San Francisco Opera simulcasts their performance to AT&T Park. This might be my favorite way to watch opera now. Because! Because during the good parts people clap and cheer, which makes it really fun. Also, I was quite impressed with the San Francisco Opera’s production quality. The sets were incredible. It also became freezing cold.

There was one part where Tosca was lamenting her decision she’d have to make; the moon came out from behind the clouds and the birds started flying all around the park. It was, dare I say it, magical.

Tara and I left after the second intermission and walked around, and I took some neat photo’s of the bay bridge.

Photo’s of the evening.

A day late, but here.

Ok, so I sort of missed my Wednesday post. But I’m doing it now, and that’s what matters.

I’ve been doing mostly research related things on the work front, playing with Python and learning its syntax. Also I’m reading “The Unconsoled” by Kazuo Ishiguro, and this book is driving me crazy. Weird things are happening, but I can’t figure out if it is all in the main characters mind or what.. It’s a great read.

Tuesday night our household started running a Dungeons and Dragons, 4th Edition game. We have four players, two of which have never played pen and paper style before. I am the DM, running the story, and so far I am having a lot of fun. I spent hours preparing for Tuesday night, not realizing how long combat encounters can be. I’m prepared for the next couple months now, heh. Justin did his daily sketch on our game, check it out on his site. I think it looks amazing. It is sort of crazy to see something you described through another persons artwork. It’s exactly how I was picturing it too.

Today I want to gain understanding on how plugins for Wordpress are made, and begin work on a plugin for the Wordpress theme Prologue. I’ve made a lot of changes to it, and I think other people might find them useful.

All this means I should really get busy today. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s post.

June 2009

It is June, a new month!

Here are my personal tasks that I want to accomplish this month:

• Write here at least every MWF
• Read at least six books; only half can be considered ‘fun’ books
• Finish writing the second half of the children’s story
• Work with some tutorials to learn the basics of Python
• Do final polish on the Caravans & Crossbows story
• Research Desertification to the point that I write up something on it
• Begin work on my section of the HOVER story

As the things I write are finished to a level I am comfortable with, I will post them up here. It’s so revolutionary, but you know the more you write, the better your skills become. Shocking.

The research on Desertification is a part of my “keeping the brain from turning to mush” protocol. It is also something I want to learn more about. I was reading (somewhere on the internet) a counter-argument for why suddenly switching to a simpler way of life as a nation is not sustainable. One of the points it discussed was that simple agricultural methods cause desertification, something I vaguely remember, but I don’t know any details. So, learning will commence.

On the work front, we at cog motive are in the process of renovating our site, and setting up a portfolio of all the work we’ve done. Once that is complete, we will be actively pointing people to it, and acquiring new projects to work on.

Here are some pictures of the new place. At least the outside..

Update time.

I haven’t written on here for a while, because I’ve been reluctant to write all that has happened in the last months. So, instead I will do a quick sum up in one sentence.

I am now living in Berkeley, CA, where I and my friends/housemates/co-owners of cog motive are working to make our company help others and support us.

How about that? There, now that it is out of the way, I will feel more inclined to write here again.