Anyway, he expounded on the 10,000 hour rule from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, which I was also unfamiliar with.  Turns out that Gladwell says you need to practice something for 10,000 hours before you become a master.

Whoah! Do you realize that if you are talking about an average work week and year, that’s five years?  Yep, 5 years.

O.K., so it’s going to take me 5 years to get comfortable with PHP?  How’s that gonna work in computerville?  In five years PHP will probably have been replaced by AJAX or Ruby or the next best thing we haven’t even heard about yet.

And, since I think I’d like to become proficient in all 3 of the foregoing, it’s going to take me 15 years?  I don’t think so, I don’t even plan on being that old.

Nope, I don’t think we can apply the 10,000 hour rule to computers or old people.  Sorry, Maxwell.  Just ain’t plausible in my world.

I’m a compulsive computer packrat. I know I am because I took the test.

Actually, I didn’t need the test.  I only needed to consider that I have every version of every program I’ve ever installed on my computer.  Also weighing in are every version of every web site I’ve ever built, launched or not, and programs I never installed.  And I suppose I shouldn’t forget 7,890 ebooks (literally) and close to a million emails

I read through all the help for packrats that is available on that page but I don’t think it’s going to quite do it for me.  If I spent the recommended half hour a day de-cluttering my ‘puter while not saving anything, I figure the computer would be clean in 2017.  Then I could start in on my external hard drive.

I received an email from a Chinese company letting me know that someone in China wanted to register one of my domain names, with the .cu extension, of course. But still, they thought it might be a trademark infringement and wanted to let me know.

How sweet!

Except, not really. A quick Google for chinese domain scams brought plenty of results but I think this one lays it out the best as they actually followed it through to the end.

Started on a new project last week with all the sudden “free time” I had on my hands. Decided to build a new product site based on Oscommerce, a free Open Source shopping cart, as I’d not really gotten into it enough in my 4 days OJT to know how configurable to SEO it might be.

I also decided, for the sake of fast development, to base it on a template.

One of those two things was my first mistake.

The thing I’ve always hated about most shopping carts is that they all look the same. I once spent hours and days reconfiguring Zen Cart to never achieve presentation perfection. I thought I’d get a “jump start” on OSC by finding an OScommerce  template I could stand and modifying it to my needs from there.

You know how you right click  and view the source on a PHP based page you can view just the HTML code for  the page?  Well, I musta’ forgot how to do that because I bought the template.  Now I can print out all 13 pages of that page’s HTML code anytime I want to be totally baffled.

I’ve yet to figure out how to print out just the PHP code.  Learnin’ NetBeans as time allows so I will probably get that accomplished in time for my further befuddlement.

How the hell could you possible need 13 pages of HTML to structure a simple page like this: http://hoopshelters.com/index.php/cPath/1?osCsid=4b4a1d601cbe190f02c90c0a93000987? Although there is obviously nothing simple about a URL like that!

So far, I’ve not been able to install even the most basic Oscommerce contributions without breaking my local test site.  Now, I’m agonizing whether to start over with Zen Cart, another free PHP cart based on Oscommerce but with many of the contributed enhancements already added in, or to tear this one apart and start from scratch.

So, yep, Gramma, you were right and this could get to be a long story.

That’s one of the silver linings of being fired from that coveted first job yesterday.

I don’t really have to remove the wannabee tag if I worked there less that 3 weeks and only helped get the site online and process the first sale, right?

Oh, you think so, do you?

Well, what if I tell you the site sucks? What if it’s based on a free template, but ugly, and the store’s plugged into an I-frame? See what I mean?

O.K. That’s settled.  Still a wannabee.  Still need to redesign this site :)

On the other hand, did learn a lot from the 3 weeks.  Tshirts are hot business on the web.  There is a nice little OS Commerce plug in available that would make a tshirt site really fun!

The other perk was finding this guy. Dave Reeder was the designer of the template (which wasn’t really ugly until you added my former company’s logo). He’s a for-real designer with a brain, the actual code for the template was sweet and clean. Read his post about FTP’ing a virus to some of his client’s sites here. I never thought about Filezilla being infected, did you?

"I wish she'd just send the funny ones!"

FOR THOSE WHO DONT KNOW OR NEED A REFRESHER……. I wonder how many people know about this

A 36 year old female had an accident several weeks ago and totaled her car.. It was raining, though not excessively, when her car suddenly began to hydro-plane and literally flew through the air. She was not seriously injured but very stunned at the sudden occurrence! When she explained to the highway patrolman what had happened he told her something that every driver should know – NEVER DRIVE IN THE RAIN WITH YOUR CRUISE CONTROL ON. She thought she was being cautious by setting the cruise control and maintaining a safe consistent speed in the rain.

But the highway patrolman told her that if the cruise control is on when your car begins to hydro-plane and your tires lose contact with the pavement, your car will accelerate to a higher rate of speed making you take off like an airplane. She told the patrolman that was exactly what had occurred.

The patrolman said this warning should be listed, on the driver’s seat sun-visor – NEVER USE THE CRUISE CONTROL WHEN THE PAVEMENT IS WET OR ICY, along with the airbag warning. We tell our teenagers to set the cruise control and drive a safe
speed – but we don’t tell them to use the cruise control only when the pavement is dry.

The only person the accident victim found, who knew this (besides the patrolman), was a man who had a similar accident, totaled his car and sustained severe injuries.

If you send this to 15 people and only one of them doesn’t know about this, then it was all worth it. You might have saved a life.

HIS NOTE: Some vehicles (like the Toyota Sienna Limited XLE) will not allow you to set the cruise control when the windshield wipers are on..
HER NOTE: If you’ve never had this happen to you, it isn’t quite like that but close enough. This is more like what happens on ice with cruise control on, still I bet that girl was a purty blonde and had maybe had a glass of vino or something.

Some of the designers that I know do a great job with their Follow Friday blog posts, fancy pictures and the whole bit. I’m not quite up to speed with that but I am going to make some follow recommendations today because Twitter really can be a useful tool if you use it right and the place to start with is who you follow.

The people I’m recommending today are all online business people and have been for a long time. I’ve known most of them almost since I’ve been on the Internet and know them to be reputable and reliable.

So, in no particular order, my Follow Friday recommendations are:

Will Bontrager publisher of Possibilities Ezine and programmer extraordinaire. I was introduced to Will and his wife, Mari, by a friend in 2002 and they are warm, wonderful people who will bend over backwards if necessary to keep their customers happy. Just great people and their “story” is great too when you dig around and find it :) Will doesn’t tweet a lot but I’m sure if you’ve got a coding problem and you holler “help!” he’d come running.

J L Scott of iCop.org has been my friend just as long as the Bontragers and she’s just as honest though she’s a lot rowdier! iCop is an organization of online professionals who have all been checked out and approved by JL. Anyone could be proud to earn the iCop seal and you can trust a site with an iCop logo displayed. JL’s new to Twitter but she’s an old hand online and she’s a great person to know on Twitter too!

Sharon McPherson is a Twitter expert though she’ll probably tell you differently. She’s also the driving force behind many websites and operates Templates, Themes and Graphics.com. I met Sharon years ago on an email discussion list (yes there was social media before Twitter) and she’s outstandingly knowledgeable and helpful.

Ed Dale is my last recommendation for today and he is also the reason I’m on Twitter. A few years ago, I participated in a 30 Day Challenge and Ed told us Twitter was going to be really big. He was right about Twitter and a lot of other things he taught in that 30 days. There’s a new 30 Day Challenge free every year and, in the meantime, Ed’s teaching new things all the time on Twitter.

That’s it for my first Follow Friday blog post. Hopefully, there will be more as there are a lot of really great people on Twitter to follow.

Thought I’d share my new passion in dog-less hunting with you. I’m not going tramping through South Dakota’s cornfields and sloughs this year. No siree! I’m going to stay at home nice and warm in front of my computer and dig up bones of dead relatives on the Internet.

O.K. so I’m joking about the dog. He never lived, but I am doing a little genealogical research online. Just updated my profile at Ancestry.com. Whadda ya think?

For those of you who are link lazy, the bottom line is: “Therein lies the problem with genealogical research, a lot of what people write down in public records is not indeed a fact.”. My mother and grandmother were not necessarily Native American even though it says so on their South Dakota marriage licenses to Natives. Either that, or the census taker was lying. Who ya gonna believe; all the people who’ve asked me if I have Native heritage from my physical appearance or my grandma who told me I was “a little white girl, now act like it” perhaps too many times?

No, seriously. This shit makes my head hurt but I found an ancient family photograph album and how else am I going to figure out who all these people are? I’ve already managed to hook into another person’s research in one line of the family and taken a giant leap back in time. Kinda fun, in a sedate sort of way.

Oh, yeah, back to my point. This new profile at the genealogical site makes about my 800th online profile. Will all these millions of “public profiles” solve the public record lies problem or will it just add to it immensely?

In other words, FB users will finally be able to direct people to their FaceBook page via a url similar to http://facebook.com/yourusername. Providing that your chosen user name is at least 5 characters long and is not someone else’s trademark. More here.

I’m a fairly avid FB’er.  I have been since most of my kids and some of my friends finally got FaceBook accounts.  It makes it easy to keep up with their lives when they post regularly (*big hint, kids!)

Regardless, I’m really having a hard time getting excited about this opportunity to have a great url.

Perhaps I’m blasé because, like Twitter,  I use FaceBook for fun and not for business.  Another reason could be that I already have an unusual name so I’m easily found via a search on FB. Whatever the reason, I hope I can shake it off long enough to think of a really great url :)

“This is no time for ease and comfort. It is time to dare and endure.” – Winston Churchill

And that’s another thing about Twitter. Quotes in my face allala day and night.

I love it!

I wouldn’t go searching for these on my own. I’m not even smart enough to know I need ‘em.  But there they are and sometimes just when they’ll do the most good. For instance, I’m going to have the Churchill utterance above, posted by my friend @freelancesquad, tattooed on an inconspicuous part of my psyche.

For the most part, the quotes are well chosen; usually inspirational and motivational or humorous. Occasionally, they are original wit that should be quoted. Or, as we say in the ‘verse, retweeted.

I try to do my share of that :)