Yeah, so obviously: I cannot hold to a self-motivated-blog-deadline whatsoever. I could go on and on about how I’ve been busy, how I’ve had tests and assignments and whatnot, but it’s all boring mumbo-jumbo that I doubt anyone has any real interest in.

I’ve been messing in Photoshop with some possible new layouts. Sooner or later (you can already bet it’ll be later) I’ll get a new layout up on At0mica.net, revamp everything with, what I feel, is what I am now instead of leaving everything as the way it is. That sentence didn’t make sense whatsoever, so here it is again: lots of stuff on there was made or written several years ago when I was a fledgling in the world wide web, and I feel that now I am more than a fledgling, and I would like my website to reflect that. Better? I think so.

I am fully aware of the issues surrounding talking about work or employment, but as I am in throes of pain over this particular “project”, I can’t help but write about it. I’ll just refrain from mentioning names.

I have been recently contracted, rather: coerced, into building a website for a particular group. I enjoy doing this type of thing, but this particular project is seeming more and more of a pile of bullshit than anything else. As is usual, I’m sure, the group in question is no idea whatsoever about web design, web development, and seemingly even about web sites. Some people have no idea about how to go about making web sites but they are still able to distinguish between a good one and a bad one. These people apparently can figure out what they like, but they’ve literally hired me to duplicate another web site’s layout and put in their own information, logo, etcetera. It’s not so similar that I would say it’s copying by any means, if it was I would have refused, but the thing is that the web site they want their web site schemed after is one that has lots of little content areas and pictures everywhere and a doodad here and a doodad there… and quite frankly, they don’t have enough to show off in those content areas for it to be worth it to have them there. But who am I to judge? There’s random links everywhere, random images, random pictures… but if it’s what they want, that’s what they’ll get. Another roadblock is that they don’t have any means of editing/updating these web pages (like Dreamweaver or Frontpage) and they also do not have the capabilities for a content management script - and it goes without saying that they’d be absolutely clueless about how to update a web page manually (editing the HTML.) So I’m stuck with the task of creating a nice looking web site with lots of doodads and making it so that these people can update it themselves, because I told them up front that I don’t have the time to be a webmaster for yet another group of people.

Don’t get me wrong, I love web site design and development, but this project is more of a pain in the ass than anything else. I’m not even getting paid anywhere near what I should be. (I guess some people more experienced in the field would be telling me right now that I’d better get used to situations like this.)

On another note, I’m really sad that I didn’t get around to my little thing from my last week. My intentions were to take photos every day of the week and make it a “photoblog”. That Monday ended up being terrible and I didn’t take any photos; I took some on Tuesday but things were just really chaotic and it just never fleshed out the way that I had wanted it to. Hmm.

Lately I’ve been absolutely fed up. I know what I want to do. I’ve known for a long while. I want to be a web site designer/developer. I want to learn PHP, MySQL, Ruby, AJAX, Javascript… and anything else relating to developing web sites. I want to learn more about graphic design. However, I also want a Bachelor’s degree, and apparently that’s very difficult to get in Kansas in relation to web development/design. I’ve known this for awhile, of course, and so the solution was apparently to just get a general degree in computer science and call it good. Computer science involved more math than I cared to learn, so I switched to Information Systems - which at Kansas State, is pretty much the same degree but with more business classes instead of math ones. Looking over what I was supposed to be enrolling in next semester, I began to wonder - what the hell am I doing? None of the classes I’ve had this far or what I’m supposed to be enrolling in relate to web design/development directly. I’m learning about programming which relates indirectly, I guess, but it’s just like if you were a microbiology major and they were making you learn about elephants. It’s still biology, but definitely a different kind of biology.

Kansas State offers no courses relating to web site design and development. I’ve been all over their course web site and catalog searching for something, anything that I could take that would make me feel like I’m going where I want to go in terms of a career. Nothing. I’ve tried explaining this situation to several people, but they don’t seem to get it. I know what I want to do, I want desperately to learn anything and everything to do with it, but there is no curriculum here or at any of the other universities in Kansas for it. I know because when I was deciding on what college to go to I searched and looked and pored over what each university offered and none of them had it. I chose Kansas State because of the reputation it had for being an outstanding engineering and computing school. I figured I’d be able to take some classes, at least, if I couldn’t major in it.

I am also fed up because it seems whenever I say what I love to do in front of other computer science/information systems majors they give me this look of “you’ve got to be kidding” and/or “that’s not real programming”. Jesus. I sat and programmed a PHP calendar application for my part time job as a webmaster. It required the same type of programming that I learned in my classes here, but more of a practical application of it. My application may not have been the most outstanding thing in the world: but it worked, and that’s all that matters. I was more proud of that little application than anything else that I’ve done here at KSU because I did it completely by myself and I loved every minute of it. I would love to learn more, but it’s just been so hard to try to learn everything on my own with absolutely no one to sit down and talk about it with. I don’t know anyone here that knows PHP. I don’t even know anyone else here that loves to develop web sites and knows anything about it.

I don’t like not being taken seriously and I honestly don’t know why I’m not. It probably falls back to the stand-by of most of the male computer people here that women can’t do computer stuff as well as men. That quite frankly pisses me the fuck off.

I am female. I love web site design and development. I will become a professional in this field, no matter what it takes.

I am planning something special for next week, and if all goes as planned, I will have a whole week’s worth of blogs. I’m quite excited about it and as soon as I had the idea while trying desperately to amuse myself in Biology this morning I became rapt with the idea.

I simply cannot wait.

I’m also trying to figure out what I want to do here. Ideally, I want to move all the posts here to At0mica.net instead of having a separate blog, which seems sort of stupid. It’s going to take some “finangling” (heh, American slang for messing with / fiddling with) to get the posts to import properly, though. You see, I’ve already got some posts in the WP installation for At0mica.net and those posts will have the same IDs as some posts found in this WP installation, and that will be a problem when I go to import posts from here. I don’t want any posts to lose their way between here and there, and so I’ll have to figure out what to do with these “overlap” posts. I really want to get a new layout up on At0mica, move this blog over there, and then have my little special thing next week. Of course, as usual, this is just what I’d want to happen ideally and, also as usual, something might come up or… well who knows what. We’ll see.

In other news, I’m building a PHP event calendar as part of my job and I’m thinking that if it turns out well enough I may decide to put it up for download. I’m quite happy with just getting as far as I have with it, even if programming in python these past few months has made it incredibly frustrating with the whole semicolon situation in PHP. (Python does not require semicolons at the end of lines/commands where as PHP does. For instance, if I wanted to make the screen print a sentence in python:

print "Hello this is a line of text in the command prompt."

While in PHP, there’s a semicolon at the end:

echo "Hello this is a line of text - don't forget the semicolon!";

It just gets irritating because I’ll be coding along in PHP and load it up in my browser only to get several errors screaming at me for forgetting the semicolons. At least I have the logic right, I guess.

…I’ve been away for a long time. Too long. I was actually thinking about this a few nights ago, about how I hadn’t blogged in a very long time. It really is a stress reliever: to be able to put down your thoughts, any thoughts, and get it out of your system. It’s always good to be an idiot every once in awhile, too, I guess.

I’m still at Kansas State University and it’s been great so far. I had my Calculus exam Thursday night which is the only thing so far that hasn’t been fantastic. I’ve heard from several people, however, that the first exam always sucks. I’m just going to have to do something different the next time. I did study, I did all my homework, I went to every class, but when I got to the exam I just blanked on a certain type of problem. From what I’ve heard around campus, though, the problems were sort of bullshit - but it’s just something I’ll have to deal with. I want to get Calculus I under my belt so I can move on to bigger and better things, like more computer science classes

I would talk about how working is going but I don’t want to end up like dooce. (By the way, I love her blog. I visit regularly and it’s always interesting. In a sarcastic way.) However, I don’t think there’s any harm in saying that I work for the KSU yearbook as the webmaster. It’s been very interesting so far and I’ve learned quite a few things (including how I strongly dislike Mac servers for their bugs with PHP/MySQL.)

I am going to make a genuine effort to blog more frequently now and indeed I’ve already added a note on my bulletin board with an orange marker that says, “BLOG!!”.

On a sidenote, I would really like to start adding photos to my blog posts but am contemplating the best way to do this. I’ll mess around with it. [Edit] Just installed a lovely plugin so I can now have photos in my blog. Yay! [/Edit]

Today was my official last day of high school. (Unless you count May 24th when I have to come back and take the AP Government exam that was postponed due to the flooding here in Northeast Kansas…) It was melancholy, to say the least, I’ve spent 13 years with some of these people and it’s just sad to think that I might not see some of them, if ever, again. (To those in-the-know, I’ve posted Facebook photos of all the photos I’ve been taking recently.)

I’ve been doing a lot recently, as far as social things go. My graduation party is tomorrow (and again, for those in the know, come on over! There will be food, fun, and uh… lots of OMGZ pictures.)

I went over to David’s house after school today to play with his birds. I completely enjoyed that - will have to post pictures here, but that’s more or less an empty promise right now as I never get around to such things. Anyways, his birds are wonderful. I just wish they liked me more. Apparently I’m a very, very scary person to them. I don’t care, I’ll try to pet them anyways One of them flew right onto my shoulder, it made me so happy. It was the funniest feeling having a bird hopping around on your shoulder.

I ended up calling up Wrylie and Jake and then Candace and I went and picked them up, and then went to Best Buy and Sonic. (That was a really badly worded sentence but I’m far too lazy at the moment to fix it.) Anyways, it was a good time. I purchased a Sansa e250R MP3 player with the graduation money I’ve got so far. I’m really enjoying it. I just need to finish uploading all the stuff to it. It’s just so sleek and shiny, I enjoy just playing with it Anyways, I got lots of pictures of all of us messing around at Best Buy and Sonic, including one of me riding the electric pony thing. I got a picture of Jake riding it, too. Yay! Photos!

I really don’t know what to say anymore. I graduate this Sunday… my party is tomorrow… and there will be lots of parties between now and Sunday besides mine that I’m going to. Fun stuff. Exciting, yet sad stuff. It just makes me upset to think of all these people that I’ve been spending so much time around and that I probably won’t be seeing them. At least a lot of us are going to Kansas State University next year so that will make the transition a little better. I know I’ll be back to see Jake and Wrylie frequently.

I don’t know, it’s just sad, but these things have to happen, I guess.

On a sidenote, I’ve already preordered my copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows (Book 7) from Barnes and Noble. I’m going to the midnight book release [insert geeky smile here]. I’ve also heard a snippet of the Smashing Pumpkins’ new single, Tarantula and I’m liking what I’m hearing. Very nice.

I’ll see you kids around.

Ick, I hate Mondays. At least I don’t have to play at any basketball games this week ^.^ And I’ve only got one more to go to, anyway.

I got my driver’s license! Hells yeah! The test at the DMV was easy. He just made me drive around the block. I was so nervous before, but now I know there wasn’t any reason to be lol. I’m so happy, my dad is going to get a car for me to drive and finally I’ll have at least a little shred of freedom.

I’m thinking of making a new layout for my blog here. Any ideas? I might do a layout similar to the one already on At0mica.net, just mix it up a little bit. Or something, I’m open to anything really, as long as it somehow relates to myself.. like it doesn’t have some music artist I’ve never heard of or something on it.. I’m just tired of this one. Its too plain >,< I wish David would get on lol. I want someone to talk to. Or Wrylinator. Wrylinator is finally coming back to school tomorrow! Yay! I'm so happy because she hasn't been at school in forever. I miss her!

My sister is so loud she’s giving me a really bad headache. Everything with her has to be bigger, louder, more obnoxious… hasn’t she ever heard of a little peace and quiet? Sheesh..

I guess I better explain the title of this entry before I forget. Its a lil shred of text from the game Mystical Ninja for N64. Its a pretty cool game for that system. As a matter of fact, I think its my favorite game for N64 next to the all great Legend of Zelda series. Gah, I LOVE those games. I want a GameCube just so I can play the next game in that series. I’m Zelda obsessed.

Does anyone know how to incorporate smilies into B2 (not the latest version.. the version before that, that doesn’t have all this weird PHP crap that I don’t understand)? Cuz, I’ve been looking all over the net for a tutorial. I just want like some clickable smilies or something so I don’t have to make dumb emoticons like this or be inserting image codes all over the place to put in a itty bitty smiley. If anyone can help me out I’ll love you forever ^.^

[EDIT]I got the smilies to work using the tutorial from Remixx.net

Plug Love  Renee, Mona, and Anna.