My new blog: Sustain Myself
I have launched my new blog SustainMyself.com . The blog is about living in the city in volatile environment and doing all I can to live a sustainable lifestyle without giving up on all my creature comforts.
Microsoft Expression Studio Web 2
Through my University, I was able to get a bunch of Microsoft development and design software for nothing. This is obviously a vain attempt by Microsoft to lure me to god-awful .Net development or something similar. But, at the end of the day, I am an open source developer and a big fan of the GPL and GNU etc, so I'll stick with my Java and PHP thanksverymuch.
But, while browsing dzone tonight, I happened to notice an interesting article titled "Expression Web 2 for PHP Developers-Simplifying Your PHP Applications".
Well, my first impressions were that it was like a lightweight Dreamweaver. ick. I am a text-editor user. I like IDE's, but when they are IDE's and not pretending-to-be-tech-savvy-drag-and-drop-designers-come-IDE's.
The fact that Web 2 has drag and drop html components. Ergh. Who in their right mind would choose to scroll down a list of available tags and click-and-drag one instead of simply typing '<p></p>'?
Anyway, for an HTML editor, it might be fine. But you dont need anything other than Notepad++ (for syntax highlighting) for coding HTML.
Anyway, I am looking for a new IDE, so I thought I'd give this Expression Web 2 a go (even though the thought of coding PHP in a Microsoft product made me feel a little queezy).
Well, I got as far as this;
1: <?php
2:
3: ?>
And thats it. Wanna know why? Because it wouldnt let save it as a .lib while keeping it registered as a PHP app. Come on, you expect me to consider this a 'serious' development application when I can't register my own extensions? If I select 'php' in the 'save as type' when saving, it either removes the .lib extension and replaces it with .php or it adds .php to the end (ie form.lib.php). And, heres the best part, if I type the php opening and closing tags in and then try to save, it gives me an error saying that because I have php tags, I need to save it as a php file.. ARRRGH!!!!
Searching and viewing the help files gave me nothing. And I'm not going to start giving my libraries a .php extension, sorry Microsoft.
At least now I can try Netbeans 6.5 Beta with PHP support. I hope they dont still force every file you edit to have its own project. So painful. Maybe it's time I wrote my own IDE.
Christianbiggins.com moved to Wordpress platform
I have been toying with the idea of moving to a self hosted wordpress blog for quite some time and I finally bit the bullet and did it. The main driving force behind this decision was;
- More control. I can edit code, add plugins, modify anything I want,
- Owned posts. With Google owning everything posted to Blogger, I preferred that my posts remained mine, on my servers. Blogger didn't even provide an export service to make it easier to remove your blog.
- Pages. I can post on pages about my work and my projects without needing to follow a blog-style 'post'. This means I can have non blog content.
- Hosting on my server means that I can integrate with other sites and services that I own or host.
- Still works with Windows Live Writer. This was a must. Live Writer is used for all my posts.
- Solid codebase. Wordpress is used extensively throughout the web with a huge community base. There are heaps of available plugins, widgets, themes, tutorials etc and as its PHP based, I can tinker myself.
So, as Wordpress provided an import script from Blogger, it was a no-brainer. Of course the import failed a few times and I got a fair few duplicate comments, its all here now.
So, the site is now Wordpress with the BloggingPro theme and a few other plugins used also. It is very much still a work in progress as I move over all the changes I made on Blogger. I am also going to add more content to the pages and other stuff too. Keep watching this space.
Putting your past behind you
Why is it, that as a 28 year old ‘grown up’ guy, I can still get choked up when I reminisce about the past?
I recently added an old boss of mine as a friend on Facebook. Now, I am not a big facebooker but I like seeing what people are up to these days. I haven’t seen this guy in 5 years or so, probably more actually. He meant a lot to me in my old work and was hugely supporting of me when I was going through some rough times. He means a lot to me and we just lost touch. When he accepted my friendship request and I looked over his profile, I got a bit funny. I realise now how much he meant to me and I never really recognised that. The worst part is that I work now about 200M from his old place. I didnt know it was his 'old place until I looked at his profile today. He is actually now in another state (Melbourne) and this upsets me a bit because I thought that I could see him at some stage and go and have a drink. We are extremely different people, for the most part, completely opposite, but I always felt a common understanding and connection with him.
This phenomena has got me thinking about how it doesnt take much for me to reminisce to the point of being depressed. When I think of how things ‘used to be’. Whether they are good, bad, ugly, regrets, whatever. I just constantly feel like I have wasted a lot and I have done and seen things that I either want to do or see again, or change somehow. I cant move on because there are so many things that I focus on that are in the past.
A few years ago, I drove past the house I grew up in. The house was sold under bad circumstances (ripped away from myself and my mum, basically and there are a LOT of good and bad – very bad, memories in that house) and I have been unable to even look at it for a long time. The sheer thought of going there fills me with panic and I get all sweaty. Its so odd as I cannot put my finger on what it is about that place that freaks me out. I just know that everything in my being is telling me to ‘STAY THE FUCK AWAY!’.
Odd.
So, how does one, seemingly grown up, guy move on and let these things go? Why, when something from my past draws my attention to it, do I just drop to a low, want to listen to 80’s music and drink myself to sleep? Ergh, they didnt teach you any of this crap in school… Not that I was there long enough to learn it anyway.
Thats my emotional rant of the day…. Actually, I’ll try to keep these to a minimum, maybe thats my rant of the month. 
Web applications that I could not live without
I thought it was time I post about the web services that I could not live without. Basically, last week I bought a new Nokia E71 so that I could do as much work / organisation from my phone as possible. So, my ongoing drive is to have as much of my web accessible data available on my phone. This list is almost as much for me as it is for you, so I don’t forget things.
I seriously could not live without gmail. I have gmail check all my email accounts so that my mail is accessible from everywhere. It took a while to pry Outlook from my hands, but once I had done it, I never looked back. I am also able to check gmail from my phone with ease.
iGoogle, or google.com/ig is my start page. I have everything on it from all my news from Google News, all my latest RSS updates from Google Reader, all my latest statistics from Google Analytics, plus other things like the weather, a Remember The Milk widget and even a ‘This Day In History’ widget (I love my history). This is the absolute centre of my internet.
Remember the milk is an online task manager which can be as simple or as complex as you like. I am terrible at remembering ideas and todo’s. I originally tried todoist which was good, but I much preferred RTM. I have based my RTM lists on this awesome post on the RTM blog. I can share tasks or even entire lists with anybody else on RTM which makes working with the task manager so much easier as others can update my tasks for me. Also, RTM have a widget for iGoogle and a plugin for gmail (providing you use firefox, which you should) and can add tasks to your Google Calendar. I have definitely become more productive since using this and I continue to try and hone my RTM skills to get more from it. I am also trying to get RTM to sync with google via the iCalendar service and the Remote Calendars plugin for Outlook 2003 but have so far been unsuccessful. Doing this would allow me to put my tasks on my phone.
Google Calendar is a very good online calendar but because I use Outlook via an exchange server at work and we have Outlook on the home machines, I dont get much opportunity to use it for a primary calendar. But, what I do use it for is synchronising my home Outlook with my work Outlook using Google Calendar Sync which runs on my machines and updates my Google calendar with my Outlook appointments (which then gets sync’d to my other machines!).
Twitter is an odd one. People love it, hate it or just don’t get it. There are many sites offering ‘how to use twitter’ advice but its up to you. Basically, it is known as microblogging and you get 140 characters to update your audience with. I use it to post about new blog posts or news and I follow a few web developers, designers and other influential people to see when they have updated their blogs and sites. I use it with TweetDeck which is a desktop client for Twitter and makes Twittering much easier. Me on Twitter.
Flickr is an image hosting service. I started using the service this year as an alternative to Picasa web albums. As I have started dabbling in photography, being able to view images on Flickr based on the camera used is a big bonus for me. I can also upload directly from my mobile using the mobile tools. Me on flickr.
Delicious (formally del.icio.us) is an online bookmark manager. It seamlessly integrates with firefox using the available add-on. As I have crazy amounts of bookmarks with lots of design sites, code references, inspirational sites or even just sites I like, I can tag them and find them easily. Also, as its web based, it doesnt matter where I am, I can always get the link I need. I previously used Google Bookmarks but found Delicious to be better, easier and more intuitive. I can also share bookmarks among my friends (I have 2!). Me on Delicious.
Honourable Mentions
- Zyb – For backing up and managing contacts from many different sources. Great when you go through phones as often as I do. Me on Zyb.
- Plaxo – Another contact manager. This used to be my primary manager but I found that lately it has started adding so many new features that doing simple contact management is getting to be a bit tricky. Keep it simple, Plaxo! It is also great for updating your contacts with any activity on your social networking services. Me on Plaxo.
- Last.fm – The greatest music site ever. Listen to music via the site or the client based on bands that you like. Over time as you listen to more music, your own personal station becomes more tailored to your tastes. This is almost a ‘could not live without’ but I already had too many in that list. Me on Last.fm.
- Shelfari – This site is for book management. I read a lot of books, but I also find that a lot of the time I see or think of a book that I’d like to read at some stage but then I forget it. Not anymore, I just add it to my ‘like to read’ list on Shelfari. I can also add books and reviews. Me on Shelfari.
- LinkedIn – Linked in is more of a social networking site for professionals. You create connections between friends, associates and business partners. Its like a big online resume where you can give feedback about people you have worked with or look for jobs. It is a good way of keeping in touch with other professionals and see whats happening in your industry. Me on LinkedIn.
- Skylines Australia – Shameful plug for my own site. The greatest automotive site in the history of the internet.
Thats my list. I’ll create a new list soon of web sites that I cant live without (as opposed to web services or applications).
What can you not live without online? Do you use any of these services? Got any alternatives?
isearch, the people finder
Lifehacker today posted about a site called iSearch which allows its users to search for people online.
I read the post and I thought “great, there are a bunch of people i’d love to contact”. I went to the site and was a bit bummed that it thought that ‘Sydney’ meant ‘Sydney, FL’ and not ‘Sydney, NSW’ but anyway… The site kinda freaked me out a little bit.
Not only did I find myself on there with incorrect details (I was never the treasurer of Skylines Australia, I was president of the club and owner of the site) but when I noticed that it had a list of ‘Associates of Christian Biggins’ and they were people I knew, I felt a little strange. Sure, it called ‘SAU Cotm’ (Skylines Australia Car of the month) an associate of mine, it still listed real people there. This site knew my friends.
If that wasn’t enough, it offered an email address for me.
When you clicked on the link, it tried to sell you an email address for $1.69. Looking at the address and the strategically placed underscores, it does actually look like one of my addresses. Of course, anybody who actually knows me, knows that a simple google search of my name will bring up a helluva lot more info on me that this site.
But, it got me thinking. Where is this leading? What information of mine will be available to complete strangers (for a price?) in the future. I have always been a bit laid back about my online privacy as I am not an overly private guy to start with, but this has definitely got me thinking. Especially when you have contributed to as much of the internet as I have (and most of the time not using an alias).
Anyway. If you want to know anything about me. Just ask.
In the meantime, I am going to decide whether I respect iSearch or despise it.
Structured Procrastination
Anybody that knows me knows that I am a bit of a procrastinator. No, no – I am, really. So in my attempt at changing some aspects of my life (namely trying to adopt GTD methodologies) I found a site on Structured Procrastinating. I read part of the first page before getting distracted and now I have just realised that it has been an open tab in Firefox since last week and every time I notice it, I think “I’ll get to that later”.
Man.. This is going to take more work than I initially expected.
5 Day Working Bleak.
There is a bunch of things in life I dont understand.
- I dont understand how a human can mistreat an animal
- I dont understand how and why a human feels it necesary to hurt or kill another human
- I dont understand how many humans feel that global and environmental issues are not their responsibility
- I dont understand why people find money so important and let it control their lives and actions.
But the main thing I dont understand is the mentality of working. I am 28 years old, I have a mortgage and a daughter and I am the sole breadwinner in my house. I have at least 20 years of work ahead of me before I can contemplate retiring. I get up at 6am, I leave at 6:25am, I get to work a little before 8 and I stay there until 5. I get home around 6:30 and I have about 3 hours before I go to bed so that I can start it all again. And I do this FIVE TIMES A WEEK!
So, over the course of a week, I spend 5 x 3hrs travelling (15hrs), I spend 5 x 9hrs at work (45hrs) and 7 x 8hrs sleeping (56hrs) which leaves me with 47hrs a week of spare time. 15 of that I am too tired to do anything anyway.
I currently live for the weekends, so I can sleep in and spend time with my family. I spend the whole week wishing it was friday afternoon. I have panic attacks when I think of how many more years I have to go before I am in a financially stable enough position to do away with work, because by then all my children will have grown up and I wont be the young virile, agile person I am now (..kinda).
Dont get me wrong. I love my job, I love the company I work for and the people I work with. But I just cant help but think that this is seriously retarded (and by 'retarded', I mean slowed down, backwards - the true sense of the word).
I keep having to ask myself 'whats the point?'. I know what the point is. The point is that we live in a unit near the beach. We eat good food. We have a nice(ish) car. Could we do it all and work half the time? Absolutely not. To live and work half the time, we would need to make incredible sacrifices which we dont want to make. But why should we need to make sacrifices to live a healthy and prosperous life without working all week? It just doesnt make sense to me. Thinking about it makes me get hot flushes and panicky...
I have always been a non-conformist. I dont follow the crowd. I dont make it a habit to do this, it just tends to happen naturally. I always ask 'why?' instead of just saying 'yes'. But I feel like I am losing this battle. Maybe its time to conform. To say 'yes' and to not question what god-knows-how-many billions of other people do each and every day. Why should I be different?
If you have any ideas on an alternative life, I'd love to hear about them.