Apparently PayPal has decided to royally screw up Christmas for needy families.
PayPal, here’s the thing. Assuming any truth to these descriptions, one of your representatives was drunk with power and went off the deep end. Throw them under the bus as fast as you can, apologize, and fix everything. Fix everything in such an amazing way that everyone will want to entitle their blog posts “How PayPal Saved Christmas (from PayPal).” 1
I just searched for the Pet Shop Boys song “Opportunity” for adding to my late-night-coding-and-working mix. This was not the song I was thinking of. The song I really wanted was “Opportunities” by the Pet Shop Boys.
Let’s just say this, listening to “Opportunity” twice would NOT be a good as listening to “Opportunities” once.
…I don’t care what FakeGrimlock says.1
I finally updated the WordPress installation on this other blog of mine. 2 I’ve more or less neglected that other blog for almost two years – about as long as this blog has been in existence. ;) In any case, one side effect of not having an updated WordPress installation is that that other blog couldn’t take advantage of all the cool new features that make writing a blog much easier.
I’ve been using WordPress for about 4.5 years now and it has come an amazingly long way in this time. The ability to quickly search for and add links to prior posts is pretty huge. Anyhow, my point with this is that creating a post with a newer installation of WordPress is so much easier that I might actually start blogging on that other site more. 3 4
Everyone has to take a stand somewhere. Mine is with WordPress. Fakegrimlock, how could you?! I’m pretty damned sure the REAL Grimlock would NEVER say such a thing. 12
Just for this, I’m only going to keep your awesome artwork as my desktop background for a slightly shorter duration than my normal background.
And, for good measure, Kevin is now my favorite robot dinosaur.3
I have this other1 website for which I’ve been avoiding upgrading WordPress. 2 This is basically a developer sin, I know. I wrote some plugins and some features for this particular website and my concern was that by upgrading I might break some parts of the site.
Well, tonight I just upgraded WordPress along with all the plugins and themes. I’ve kicked the tires a little and I think everything is okay. There’s still a little apprehension about having missed something … but that will pass. I’m actually quite relieved to have finally done this.
The internet can be a big scary place when you have to google for “rubber eyes.”
A super big thank you to Sven Hecht for spotting this and sending it my way.
After bursting out laughing, I then had to explain to everyone around me just why it was so funny.
Here’s a tweet from Scott Berkun in response to my last post on being self-taught:
@kiostark @makerblock I’m impressed you’re self taught, but you readers will love it if you learn linespacing and whitespace for posts.
Here, this little addition of CSS is just for you!
p { text-indent: 2.0em; padding-bottom:10px; }
When it comes to programming, I’m a fair hand at several languages – PHP, MySQL, javascript, several others, and a number of frameworks. I ended up teaching myself out of what amounted to necessity. 1 I learned by looking at source code, checking some books out from the library, buying several books, going through several online tutorials, and pestering a friend of mine with questions.
I’ve found there are some very interesting upsides and pitfalls to having been self-taught. These things are brought to mind by two events of today. The first is finding out that Kio Stark is coming out with a new book about how to learn anything without going to school called, “Don’t Go Back To School.” The second thing I saw today was an article on Business Insider called, “The 20 Most Innovative Startups In Tech.” (Spoiler: MakerBot made the list!) The first startup featured is “Codeacademy,” which is a website for teaching people javascript.
Being a self-taught javascript programmer, of course I had to try out Codeacademy’s website. After all, how great could it be? The answer is, “pretty great.” The lessons are very short and presented in a very interactive fashion. As you complete each little interactive component you’re rewarded with immediate feedback and a nice little green checkmark. When you reach certain milestones, you get a message saying you’ve gotten a badge for this or that. The examples are short and whimsical – with the added draw of “leveling up” as you play/learn. In any case, these lessons really work on a lot of levels. Some people learn by reading (check), some by watching (check), some by doing (check). If Codeacademy lessons had a voice reading the material to you, they’d basically be a complete drop-in replacement for a classroom.2
But, back to the upsides and pitfalls of being self-taught. I think the biggest upside is that I tended to learn a lot of programming tricks, mostly from having taken apart other peoples’ work to find out how it worked. 3 I also ended up writing a lot of tools that would automate the writing of code. I don’t know if this is common practice for others, but I found it very useful to have developed them. I also did a lot of things the hard way… like building my own AJAX engine from scratch rather than using a library like jQuery. 4 But, doing things the hard way means you really get to know the how’s and why’s of what makes something work – and what causes problems.
There are two small downsides to having taught myself programming. First, there are some things I don’t know. After trying out Codeacademy’s website tutorial I found a pretty basic function that I would have learned the first day or so of a programming class. This means sometimes I’m doing things the hard way. Secondly, I am slightly self conscious about my programming skills. Admittedly, I paid about a bajillion times less for my expertise.
Doing the math here… I spent about $50 total on about four books. Other than those books, everything else was free. I read tutorials online, looked at other people’s code, and talked to some friends. I learned enough within three months to be able to build a small side business for myself, but it wasn’t for another six months before I was doing things well. Someone taking programming classes at a college would have had to spend money on tuition and books and would have had to learn at the same pace as all the other students.5
In sum, here’s the two most important things I’ve learned about being self-taught:
Also, if you get a chance, help fund Kio Stark’s kickstarter page for her upcoming book “Don’t Go Back To School” which will include interviews with self-taught people and step-by-step instructions on how to learn anything.
