Wednesday Dec 03, 2008

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Ah dammit. Wrote a blog then stupidly opened an image in the same tab. Lost blog. Rewriting what I can remember of blog:

Well my previous blog was crap. After reading Start_Today's blog I felt rather sheepish and mostly like a whiney turd with no real problems in life.

It's often difficult when things are shit to remember that you're probably more fortunate than 90-odd% of the world's population. I was born an upper-working-to-middle class white guy. That puts me ahead of, well, most everybody in terms of advantages from the off. I'll never know what it's like to be racially or sexually discriminated against. So far, a lot to be thankful for, and that's at a few minutes old.

I live in a flat with no central heating and no double glazing and that's still better than countless people with homes, never mind the homeless. I have no idea how they cope in this weather. We have no television signal - by choice. We have a tv, but use it only to play games and watch dvd's on, but that's our choice. Some people don't have even the actual necessities, like running water.

I have a job I find very stressful at times, to the point where I do seriously consider walking out, but I haven't just been made redundant in the face of the oncoming recession (oh who are you trying to kid media? It's already here.). That job allows me to keep the roof over my head and affords me other interesting opportunities, like being able to afford to buy subscriptions to websites and post blogs.
Geeky work bit:

SPOILERS! (Click to view)

Currently at work I'm trying to connect to a Micro$oft Access 97 database, (Yeah we use 12 year old software and then wonder why we get problems...) with a PHP script and it's not been going too well. I've been doing a bit of reading tonight though and I've got a couple more ideas to try and get it to work tomorrow. It's pretty interesting but I wish I could just put my headphones on and get on with it instead of being interrupted every five minutes by a mundane task I need to do, or somebody asking me to do stuff when I'm already busy or mostly, just to complain about how slow their computer is running. (I swear if I hear one more person whinge about it...)
It's funny how your interests and tastes change over the years. I recently read a chapter in a PHP/MySQL book on relational database design and normalisation. Yeah I can see you glazing over already and a year ago I would have been exactly the same:
"What? Database what? Who fucking cares about that stuff?"
But I got so psyched from reading about it I came home and read a few articles online, just so I really understood it.
It turns out I created the database for my task logging application wrong. Well, not wrong - it does work but I put everything into one table, thinking that would be more efficient - you only have to query one table and everything is in one place. Well the conventional wisdom says you should split your data into tables, by topic, so to speak and then link them. This way you cut out repeated information and make it more difficult to input errors - you can't have multiple prices for one thing if there's only one place to set the price.
After reading this my first thought might have been:
"Oh fuck I'm going to have to create my database again!"
Or even:
"It works so I'm not going to fix it!"
but instead, my first thought was:
"Awesome! As soon as I get some down time at work, I'm going to re-do that sucker, along with recoding the session handling and cookies functions! smile"
Weird.



There's a thread on SGUK about what people's personal hell is. Mine is frustration. Pain I can handle, rejection I can cope with, fear I can rationalise and depression I can work through, but frustration is the thing that will reduce me to tears. My actual idea of hell would be constant crushing frustration, but with a little glimmer of hope. It's the hope that really makes it hell. If it's just constant frustration with no hope of improvement, then you would just resign yourself to the situation and accept things, despite how bad they were. With a little hope though, you keep ploughing on, so long as there's a chance, no matter how small, of a change for the better. Some days that's what things feel like.

But when the shit hits the fan, I can rely on these people to cheer me up:






VIEW 4 of 4 COMMENTS
fenstar:
you have three gorgeous felines in your life love
i think my personal hell is anxiety... ARRR!!!
kittyvalentine:
I hear ya on the frustration. Though I find rejection hard to deal with, though rejection always inevitably leads to frustration.

I think the thing with frustration is that the way it lingers inside of you and leaves you in a state of limbo. Just a destructive feeling, ultimately.

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