Friday, January 01, 2010
"Big Wing Boy"
¶ 12:01 AM Well I originally stopped writing in the blog in order to write the novel in a month. But I kept saying I to myself I should really be reading and spending all my time studying the giant pile of MCSE books I spent a large sum of money on. So I spent some time on the book, and a very small amount of time on the MCSE books but really ended up doing neither. I think I should have done the book thing. For some reason I just wasn't motivated to do the book. Nor much the MCSE stuff quite yet.
For pretty much the whole month of December I have been house-sitting for a family member about 45 minutes from where I normally live. Largely I was alone for this whole time. Actually as i write this I am still really living there, although right now I am at my mom's house, some place else entirely.
I was hoping the change in scenery and relative lack of distractions would be more conducive to things like MCSE and other books. Well that was at least partially right in that I have studied some books rather extensively. Just never seem to quite make the progress in the span of time i would have preferred.
I had this one "Teach yourself SQL in 10 minutes" type book. I got the vendor-neutral book since maybe I would have to use something other than MySQL at some point in the future, who knows right? At with chapters only 8 to 10 pages in length I figured it would be relatively easy. Unfortunately due to the differences in vendor implementation of SQL the book contains a lot of "see your vendors documentation for the differences" and "MySQL hasn't implemented this yet". Apparently the book is for or five years old and was covering a rather out of date version of MySQL.
Any I would read a chapter, highlighting as I went then go back and re-read it this time taking notes in a word document. Even this felt rather tedious. Of course at some point due to the above mentioned issues with the currentness and attempted vendor-neutralness I bought a different "10 minutes" book this time specifically about MySQL and from 2008 or so. This was a much better book. At least, it's nice to have it as an option. I'm not sure I want to go through the ENTIRE book so soon after the first SQL book. It's nice as a reference though.
What I have been for at least the past week or so is reading a new PHP/MySQL combination book. Sure, was reading the Headfirst book on the same subject but I kept putting it aside for days or weeks at a time and I wasn't exactly making progress. Apparently the Headfirst books aren't so good for picking after a period of not using it. And it's not especially easy to skim through trying to get caught back up.
So I bought the "Visual Quickpro Guide" for PHP/MySQL. And actually it's pretty much exactly what I was really looking for. There's paragraphs introducing and discussing new topics, then a script demonstrating the concept; in fact each little code segment has its own explanation; and on top of that actually the script in its entirety is listed in the book with the name of the script in plain view. Which is kind of something I was the Headfirst version would have done.
I bought that book on December 23rd. Didn't do a lot with it because of Christmas. Finally started seriously working on it Sunday and Monday. Right now I've read through chapter 3 and I'm not just working through the scripts and taking notes in Word. This is the part that takes an incredibly long time. I do after all want to actually learn all this content. It takes literally more than two hours of taking notes and working through scripts (I insist on actually typing all the scripts out). I have a hard time finishing a chapter in a given day.
To apparently make this even more difficult on myself I had the bright idea to write equivalent scripts in the form of an HTA using VBScript. Ya that was my "bright idea". Well really it's only slowed me down. Seriously. Although I have learned at least a small amount about VBScript.
I still have that HTA idea circulating in my mind ya see. And I figure it's at least passingly similar to ASP. Or something. Anyway I'm using VBS and that's it.
Some-what fortunately Chapter 2 of the PHP book covers forms and input validation for forms. So making the equivalent form in an HTA should teach me alot on how to do this.
I'm starting to lose my train of thought from I assume being tired to I'll end this now by say I'm hoping to somehow write in this blog everyday of the year 2010. I suppose some posts will be rather short, whilst others will be even longer. Ok realistically I'm sure I'm going to be away from a computer and/or internet at some days in of the year so it won't literally be possible. But it doesn't sound all that ambitious to say I'll write in the blog almost every other day of 2010 now does it? So, acknowledging I'll likely miss a few days here and there I'm going to write in the blog rather extensively for the year of 2010.
And now that I see it's apparently two minutes untl the year 2010 I think I'll just keep writing for a while until 12am at which point it is in fact the new decade and also puts me on my way to starting up this sort-of-resolution.
And by the sound the neighborhood setting off noisy explosions I think there's a good chance it's 2010. So happy new year and good night.
For pretty much the whole month of December I have been house-sitting for a family member about 45 minutes from where I normally live. Largely I was alone for this whole time. Actually as i write this I am still really living there, although right now I am at my mom's house, some place else entirely.
I was hoping the change in scenery and relative lack of distractions would be more conducive to things like MCSE and other books. Well that was at least partially right in that I have studied some books rather extensively. Just never seem to quite make the progress in the span of time i would have preferred.
I had this one "Teach yourself SQL in 10 minutes" type book. I got the vendor-neutral book since maybe I would have to use something other than MySQL at some point in the future, who knows right? At with chapters only 8 to 10 pages in length I figured it would be relatively easy. Unfortunately due to the differences in vendor implementation of SQL the book contains a lot of "see your vendors documentation for the differences" and "MySQL hasn't implemented this yet". Apparently the book is for or five years old and was covering a rather out of date version of MySQL.
Any I would read a chapter, highlighting as I went then go back and re-read it this time taking notes in a word document. Even this felt rather tedious. Of course at some point due to the above mentioned issues with the currentness and attempted vendor-neutralness I bought a different "10 minutes" book this time specifically about MySQL and from 2008 or so. This was a much better book. At least, it's nice to have it as an option. I'm not sure I want to go through the ENTIRE book so soon after the first SQL book. It's nice as a reference though.
What I have been for at least the past week or so is reading a new PHP/MySQL combination book. Sure, was reading the Headfirst book on the same subject but I kept putting it aside for days or weeks at a time and I wasn't exactly making progress. Apparently the Headfirst books aren't so good for picking after a period of not using it. And it's not especially easy to skim through trying to get caught back up.
So I bought the "Visual Quickpro Guide" for PHP/MySQL. And actually it's pretty much exactly what I was really looking for. There's paragraphs introducing and discussing new topics, then a script demonstrating the concept; in fact each little code segment has its own explanation; and on top of that actually the script in its entirety is listed in the book with the name of the script in plain view. Which is kind of something I was the Headfirst version would have done.
I bought that book on December 23rd. Didn't do a lot with it because of Christmas. Finally started seriously working on it Sunday and Monday. Right now I've read through chapter 3 and I'm not just working through the scripts and taking notes in Word. This is the part that takes an incredibly long time. I do after all want to actually learn all this content. It takes literally more than two hours of taking notes and working through scripts (I insist on actually typing all the scripts out). I have a hard time finishing a chapter in a given day.
To apparently make this even more difficult on myself I had the bright idea to write equivalent scripts in the form of an HTA using VBScript. Ya that was my "bright idea". Well really it's only slowed me down. Seriously. Although I have learned at least a small amount about VBScript.
I still have that HTA idea circulating in my mind ya see. And I figure it's at least passingly similar to ASP. Or something. Anyway I'm using VBS and that's it.
Some-what fortunately Chapter 2 of the PHP book covers forms and input validation for forms. So making the equivalent form in an HTA should teach me alot on how to do this.
I'm starting to lose my train of thought from I assume being tired to I'll end this now by say I'm hoping to somehow write in this blog everyday of the year 2010. I suppose some posts will be rather short, whilst others will be even longer. Ok realistically I'm sure I'm going to be away from a computer and/or internet at some days in of the year so it won't literally be possible. But it doesn't sound all that ambitious to say I'll write in the blog almost every other day of 2010 now does it? So, acknowledging I'll likely miss a few days here and there I'm going to write in the blog rather extensively for the year of 2010.
And now that I see it's apparently two minutes untl the year 2010 I think I'll just keep writing for a while until 12am at which point it is in fact the new decade and also puts me on my way to starting up this sort-of-resolution.
And by the sound the neighborhood setting off noisy explosions I think there's a good chance it's 2010. So happy new year and good night.
