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  In five years PHP will probably have been replaced by AJAX or Ruby or the next best thing we haven’t even heard about yet.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?

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 :)

Why Twitter is easy for me and blogging isn’t:

1. No worries.  I don’t have to think about the design of my tweet.  Everyone is looking at it in their own app for the most part.  I don’t even have to particularily care about the content.  If my tweet isn’t interesting to someone, it’ll flow right by them in the twitter stream. Spelling is also optional.  Gotta love it.
2. Instant feedback.  No begging for comments and insights.  If what I’ve posted is interesting, someone will retweet it immediately.  If it’s really interesting, the post will be retweeted many times. Probably without giving me credit a few times, oh well.
3. Not being confined into subject matter.  If I say this blog is about WordPress, most of what I publish here better be about WordPress (or whatever the subject matter of my blog really is).  On Twitter, I’m not locked into anything.  I can post a CSS site I find interesting one minute and a YouTube video of Long John Baldry the next.  My Twitter stream is much more me than my blog is as strange as that sounds.

I am going to find a way to make my blog more comfortable for me and to share my tweets with people here on my site a little easier.  In the meantime, maybe you’d like to follow me on Twitter.

I am still writing a lot. On Twitter.

Seems I can manage to find time to write 140 characters at a time. Too bad you have to look at that ugly little box down there in the sidebar to see what I wrote.

I’ll have to fix that.

Best laid plans of mice and all, the next Tweetdeck minute, I’m having major problems with my Internet connection. Can’t connect at all.

I’m no hardware kinda geek but tried the few things I know. I released and renewed my address, rebooted my modem that isn’t and my ‘puter.

Turned to software solutions. Ran Network Magic. Network Magic has been a miracle cure to setting up a home network for me but it couldn’t connect me to the ‘net either. I even tried Qwest QuickCare Client (whew, say that fast), the software my ISP provides. :(

Finally, I dialed up Qwest customer service and, as I’m struggling on my bad connection to make myself understood to the voice recogition software on the other end, the Internet magically connected.  That’s what I was calling for, so I hung up.  So did the Internet.

I rang the Qwest computer back again.  The magic connection to the Indy 5,000 came back again too.   I’m thinking, “Wow, a customer service computer with a sense of humor.”

So I hang up the world and dial it back again a couple times just checking.  Even called my cell and talked to myself long enough to download my email and check my sites.  Connection was a little slow for what I pay but fast enough not to whine about except for the fact that I have to be on the phone to be connected. What the heck? Isn’t that just about the opposite of how DSL is supposed to work?

If they are worried I might be dangerous when I talk on a cell driving on the street, wait until I get on the info-highway talking to myself. Sounds like a wreck just waiting to happen. Or, don’t I, and hasn’t it?

Anyway, I call customer service and keep talking and pushing buttons until I get a real person very far away.   From a different continent, she runs tests on my line and, after two hours of my moving things and jumping through hoops, knows more about my problem from a googlezillion miles away than I do sitting in the middle of it. I need a new modem.

She explained that the “internal filter” in mine was bad right after she asked if I owned or rented the modem. I think it was about when I thought she said “yes, but you didn’t pay enough for it” that I started wondering but, bottom line was, call customer service in the morning and buy or rent a new one :)

Then we got off the phone and I got right back on my phone to access the Internet for some research. By then, I was really wondering if she knew what the h* she was talking about and how the heck DSL works anyway.

Track 2 – How DSL Works