I’ve finally ended up with K2 for the theme. The less upkeep I have to do in between versions, the better, and K2 helps with a lot of the administration. Also, it comes with a lot of things built in, like a beautiful archive page system, as well as some ajax components. There are some flaws (like the ajax search sometimes doesn’t do anything), but I’m looking to fix those myself, and maybe even submit the patches.

So What Is This Blog About Now?

As time passes, I’ve realized that this blog needs to become a lot less personal, but at the same time not so professional. And so, the subtitle has changed to include “Web Development & Technology”. This covers pretty much everything I would talk about… from something frivolous (I’m almost to 5K groupies with Guitar Hero 3… So close) to something more important (my company is picking up steam, and I’m having a great time managing/developing).

I’m going to have to start retagging some things, as well as moving some posts here and there to streamline the experience. I’m well on my way to bringing some of my older posts, just to keep public because they were once public. It’s a nice historical backlog of how stupid I was, and it’ll keep me in check.

The personal stuff, well, I think they might make a comeback somewhere else. Just not here. I’ll post not short posts on the links of interest, but more thought-out articles.

Upcoming Post Topics

• The Status of Status
• FeedSt: The Death of a Project
• Desktop vs Hybrid vs Web Applications
• Prism: The Future of Applications?
• MAMP + Whatever: Why Not Installable Web Applications?
• Polling on the Internet

I hope to post on about half of these in the upcoming week. We’ll see…

At least, with working out, you didn’t really have to think. You’d count, and memorize. And push yourself to your limit. But there wasn’t any of this planning or thinking or critiquing…

Programming with the crew at HanMeta is FUN. But man, it’s freaking draining after a day of work at NCSA. I might be able to get a few hours in every night, plus all the other personal crap I have to do.

And just because it’s fun, it doesn’t mean it’s draining. I guess I signed up for this when I made HanMeta anyway. My eyes hurt immensely.

Yeap. That’s all that you’re going to get from this blogger today. Wee.

Pendulum: a weight hung from a fixed point so that it can swing freely backward and forward, esp. a rod with a weight at the end that regulates the mechanism of a clock.

• Figurative used to refer to the tendency of a situation or state of affairs to oscillate regularly between one extreme and another : the pendulum of fashion.

There. Properly defined. JK = Pendulum.

On Caffeine

Oh… that fateful day when Craig and Alex decided to be Venture Capitalists (more like… drug pushers…) in my journey to stunt my growth… I still remember it quite vividly. Front row, Honors Physics, Refrigerator in the back room… Yikes.

Caffeine has become synonymous with hardcore programming. I mean it. You have to be a caffeine junkie to be an awesome programmer it seems. The healthy programmers are few and far in between, and those are the pansy ones. (I’m kidding!)

During my crazy PHP coding years (senior year in high school, freshman year in college), I probably… drank… quite a bit of Dew. I feel like I needed to be up at 7 AM, writing code to properly handle FTP through a HTTP GET request. I remember that Saturday to this day… and how aggravating it was, unable to keep my hands steady as I typed away.

Sophomore and Junior year… not so much. Junior year I got caught up with being all healthy, and so that’s when I reverted back to going hardcore non-carbonated/non-caffeinated. This is the first pendulum swing of this story.

But when Senior year hit… I found these. And I started keeping them in a nice little box, until the day I moved out of my apartment in August of 2006.

I have no clue how many bottles of Bawls I drank that year. I remember some crazy Operating Systems MP (Machine Problems, what UIUC calls programming assignments) which required some Buffalo Wild Wings and two bottles of these lovelies. (Kurt Becker, I miss you!) I remember some crazy case studies I had to pull out for some of my business classes… only brought to you by these blue bottles.

Sidenote: The reasons why I like Bawls so much is that they:

• Taste Great: I hate Red Bull for this reason. They taste like crap. Bawls, though, taste fruity and delicious. You don’t know that you’re getting jacked out of your mind
• Bottle: Plastic bottle FTL. Glass dimpled bottles FTW
• Guarana: Much less jittery than normal caffeine, IMHO.

Very recently, I fell in love with these 59 cent fountain drinks at the nearby gas station. Derek and I would hit them up while we had our Spinter Cell: Choas Theory Co-op fun. Then… I bought three 2 liters, just to start drinking STRAIGHT OUT OF THE BOTTLE. How recently? Try… last month.

However, I’ve gone hardcore hard turkey again. Only things that I drink are milk, water, and juice.

Second pendulum swing.

Maybe the next time I start taking caffeine again, it’ll be in small doses… I mean, come on, caffeine does help when you need that extra kick!

Oh right… I like tea, though. Tea and honey makes me all happy and warm inside.

On Lessons

I’m a proponent for growth. I think this is why I love learning: ANYTHING. I’m afraid I’ll find something that I don’t want to learn… but that’s going off on a tangent.

But as I desire growth in life, I think I’m unsatisfied at times at how slowly I’m growing. Even then, regardless of the pace at which I’m growing, I feel like there are lessons to be learned.

I can’t stop shaking the undeniable fact that I won’t be able to learn all of the lessons. This is why I started writing really really long entries in my journals to begin with: It’s because I wanted to write them down, so that maybe I’ll figure it out, then and there, who I am and why I’m doing such and such. I wanted to find the equations to Josh Kim… more like… the Josh Kim algorithm.

if (JoshKim.getEmotion() == X)) return Y; else return Z;

But it all goes back to pride: I want to be able to tell myself, “Yes, Josh Kim, you did it all on your own. You used logic and philosophy to deduce what the next step is to come.”

What the heck? I have to learn to understand that if I miss the big lesson the first time, it’ll come back and hit me again. The little ones… just stop worrying about them. Prioritize your issues, and then attack them top-down.

Wow, Josh Kim, you’re quite the motivational speaker, even to yourself!

Irony

The irony is that as I just typed that last paragraph, I felt just a little bit better about myself. Yes… I feel like writing is my escape: Heck, it’s the only “art” form I can be somewhat coherent at. I can’t draw, take pictures, make movies… even though I want to… learn…

Maybe one day my dreams of becoming xkcd with a programmer’s twist will be realized. But until then… JK^extreme.

Time to get myself to the gym, and then sleep to the extreme.

Okay, let me vent a little bit, before I go back and start to cry, looking at my code.

Right now, I feel like my code is shooting me in the face. With an AWP. (Oh, I miss those days… sorta kinda… all those wasted hours on a silly game from the 90s…) I have no weapons to speak of. (Do I get points for really bad metaphors, too?) I’m having one of the hardest times figuring out why my “include” and “require” aren’t doing as they’re supposed to be.

Sidenote: Currently working on: Google SOAP calls to customize the Google search page. All I have to do is include NuSOAP. What the heck is going on? (And like half the links to the sourceforge for NuSOAP is down for some random reason…)

Now… Wasn’t That Roundabout

Okay, back to the point of the post.

• WASD: the four buttons needed for any first person shooter game
• ASDF: just another ridiculous computer nerd “joke”… I love typing “asdf”…
• FPS: first person shooter

Add the three together to get: wasdfps. I have no idea why this is funny. In about 30 seconds, I’m going to look back and say, “who wrote this garbage?”.

Regardless, this sucker’s copyrighted JK 2007 style.

Okay, back to work.

He’s taking this sweet class called Programming Studio, a class I would have dearly enjoyed. You see, my education at UIUC comprised of quite a bit of theory, and very little hands-on-ness. I mean, there are benefits for being taught hard-core theory, but there’s nothing like actually putting code to compiler (in my case, code to browser incompatibility insanity).

I had the pleasure of talking with him on the intricacies of web mashups. What little knowledge I had of JSON and REST and other subjects to do with cross-site scripting methodologies, I tried to pass on to him.

Of course, this was no one way street in terms of information exchange. I keep looking at Derek, and am amazed at how deeply he understands the code. He is the closest thing I have to a hacker: I’m so thankful to have a friend that can give me this kind of point of view on the subject.

We jokingly talked about how a couple years from now, we’d be talking about this past Thursday night, when wearing our maroon hoodies we came up with the idea for the next big thing. We didn’t, but I’m still searching.

Whatever we talked about, whatever we joked about… it seemed like it was towards something. I definitely need to find many more friends like this… not in separate geographic locations (like Texas and Ohio), but all in the same place. Well… at least, leverage technology (uh oh… Josh is using the word “leverage”) so that we could all sit down and talk about these issues. Maybe I’m wanting too much… can’t have all my friends work together.

Manager JK is slowly being cultivated, spouting off buzzwords and management techniques like no other. Uh oh… time to go learn some more Ruby to stave it off.