Back when I used to work at Irresistible Ink during my first yearly review my boss referred to me as 95%.  He told me that I can do any project and fly up to 95% and afterwards wait until the last minute.  I sometimes feel like this is true about my life lots.  I can climb to near the top at almost anything I do.  Be it djing, working within the car club, or work.  It seems like it comes with relative ease as if I prove to myself I can be the best, then slouch off.  I wish I could explain why I do it, or where it came from.  I know that when I push myself, I climb over the wall but there have been few times I’ve done that.  I really don’t know where all of this is coming from either.  I should be in relatively high spirits.  I’ve been working a bunch of hours but beyond that, I’m on track for a very successful year in my life.  I love my job, Brandon starts work there next week.  My dj crew is growing more and more and we’re throwing 3 shows in the next few months which will put us at the 4 shows I wanted to reach in the beginning of the year.

For those that don’t know, I also signed up for a gym and I’ve already lost 6lbs in the last 2 weeks which puts me just a hair over the 2.5lbs / week goal I set for myself.  Yet at the end of the day, I feel dead.  I haven’t felt like going out for quite some time now and even playing out isn’t a priority.  I really think I need a vacation and may opt to take one in October.  I’m really considering just getting in the jeep and driving.  Where I end up, it really doesn’t matter as long as it’s away.  Of course, that means getting away from work, probably everyone I know as well.  I really enjoyed being away with an entirely new feeling.  Driving in downtown Nashville, not knowing what I was going to find was exciting.  Granted this would probably be a better plan if it was summer but maybe I’ll just go that far south.  Who knows, not me that’s for sure.

Well I decided to make a life change today and it’s a pretty big one.  It’s actually one that will have a huge impact on my life.  I really don’t keep too many secrets, so as an experiment, I’ve told one person of the change.  It’s something that if it goes well, will affect me for the rest of my life.  Have any guesses?  Anyways, it’s one of those things that’s for the better.  I’ve considered creating a separate category that’s private where I can write about it and then once I’ve decided to, I’ll open it up for others to see.  Here’s to my new endeavor!

My life has been pretty nuts lately.  I’ve been employed for almost 2 months with the new job and I still wake up in the morning excited to go to work.  I feel like they really appreciate me, and I keep getting to do new things.  Right now, I’m spending alot of our time reverse engineering the previous programmer’s work.  He wasn’t very good at keeping things organized.  There are no comments, and its like untangling a big mess of cords to figure out where things are.  Thus far I’ve been using the Zend Framework in favor of Cups or Code Igniter.  I made this decision based on a few things.  While I hate to say it, ZF is made by the creators of PHP.   Because of this, I expect the best support out of it as well as community.  Some parts of Code Igniter feel cryptic and the community around seems small.  Working with ZF and hanging out in the irc channel for it reminds me much of when I started learning PHP.  As far as where I’m at with our re-write at work, we’ve been doing a lot of planning on the show management side which will lead us into the call center manager’s portion of work nicely.  In a way it feels exactly where we should start so I think we get bonus points for that.

I’ve also written a search engine of sorts to search or data tables easily.  The existing setup is fairly clunky (which I’m sure is hard to  believe based on previous statements) so I rewrote it the way I think it should be done.  It’s not 100% but it’s definitely an improvement over our exisiting one.  I plan on posting the basics of the code here once I get a bit further along with it to share.

Beyond that, I purchased Bioshock today for Xbox 360.  It’s purely insane.  The graphics are unmatched and it’s the first game to scare me and make me jump in years.  Plus its a fun single player FPS.  It’s been a while since I’ve found that.    Anyways it’s near one oclock and I have another long day at work tomorrow so I’m crashing.

So I’ve now spent 2 days in Nashville and I’ve learned quite a few things. The first of which is if you’re ever IT and going to an area to be told their problems, you’re fresh meat. I’ve spent alot of time being told the seventeen thousand things the previous programmer of the application I now manage screwed up. I still like the job, in fact since I know how much of a difference it will make I’m pretty pumped to get started. However I have decided to re-write the application the way it should have been written so it doesn’t resemble a plate of spaghetti. I actually just got home from a joyous 10 hour day. I made a few tweaks to the system to improve it overall.

I did take an hour long break however to run to the bookstore. I ended up leaving with 3 things I think will help my career. The first being the heavily work related book, MS SQL Server 2005 Unleashed. One of the things I wasn’t told is that I’ll be fulfilling the role of database administrator, and my MS SQL is a bit weak compared to MySQL. Thus I picked up the book so I can brush up where need be. Secondly, an issue of HOW magazine, which is much like Cre@te magazine, a designer magazine I used to read. Lastly, and my favorite purchase in iWoz, the autobiography of Steve Wozniak. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Woz, he’s solely credited for the creation of the personal computer, and co-founder of Apple. Hopefully by reading this, somehow I can watch my desire for the iPhone subside.

Well I’ve had an excellent few days off. Played a few great dj gigs. I also splurged a little and picked up a digital camera. After doing a bit of research (i.e. calling my Uncle Mike) I decided it was time for me to own a digital camera finally. For a point and shoot, it seems to do fairly well with a bit of tweaking. Because of this, I also setup a Flickr account to host my pictures. They make it so easy, it seems to make more sense than setting up Coppermine or Gallery. Sometime this week I’ll probably setup a Flickr plugin with WordPress to share my pictures with everyone.

I’m flying out to Nashville tonight for work. It’s my first time actually being sent anywhere for work so I’m excited, and of course I’m going to take lots of pictures. Work has been going great although I feel a bit overwhelmed with everything they want to do. Everything has to be done yesterday it seems. The past 5 day weekend has been the recharge I’ve needed.