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Archives / 2005 / December

  • An update on my life

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    I used to blog here so much when I was writing my book, and I've kind of slacked off ever since. I'm lame.

    The primary reason I haven't blogged as much here this year is because I had a really, really bad year in terms of my personal life. With that came a waning interest in coding and a lot of questioning about what the hell I'm doing with life in general.

    If you read this blog back in 2004, you'd know that one of the things I continually struggled with is what I wanted to do in terms of work. Working for The Man resulted in a lot of dissatisfaction. I spent a good portion of 2005 working a pretty good contract job, which I eventually left in the fall so I could concentrate on coaching volleyball. Fortunately my Web sites produce enough revenue to get by, but all this time later I'm still trying to figure it out. In the interest of just challenging my brain, I'm once again looking at some contract gigs. I don't mind working for someone else when it's interesting work, so I'm crossing my fingers that something I can really get into is at the other end of these recruiter calls.

    As for my own projects, I'm surprised at how many people downloaded my simple ghetto blog app. I've only really used it seriously, with some mods, for the CoasterBuzz Podcast site, but I'm pleased with the way it works. Not complicated at all, and shows how easy you can whip something up with ASP.NET and Visual Studio.

    Probably my biggest neglect has been toward POP Forums v8. I'm ashamed at how little I've worked on it in the last year. The shame is more inwardly directed because it's something I can use. I know others would love to use it, but it has always been secondary to my own use (you get what you pay for ;)). There are two issues that I struggle with in finishing it. The first is that there are so many features I want to add to it, and it just gets daunting. The second issue is that I'm not happy with the way the user data is tied into it. I just can't break it out enough without sacrificing performance.

    My ad serving software, while not having great UI, is surprisingly still kicking ass for me. If I could get the reporting to perform better, I think I'd release a beta of that. I've tried some tricks aggregating data, but the hold up is that SQL doing math is slow. I've never really taken the time to find a better way.

    So the truth is that I still have a lot I'd like to be doing, I just haven't had the motivation to stick to it. I'm hoping 2006 will be different.

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