Growing Perceptions

It’s been a while since I last posted an entry.

Over the past few months, I feel that I have grown into and have become more defined as an individual. I am more aware of my values and beliefs. Overall, I am more certain of myself.

Maybe this is the typical age (22) for that realization to occur. I know that life is a continuous growing process, but I recognize the growth at this time in my life more than ever.

A few things I have learned:

1. Writing things down is essential to reaching my goals.
2. The world is a playground: instruments for creativity are everywhere.
3. Society’s rules don’t have to be convoluted, they just are at the moment and will continue to be so until we do something about it.
4. The only way to live is with optimism, unafraid of opinion.
5. A relationship should only contribute to your happiness and knowledge of self.
6. It is important to live each day to its fullest potential. This diminishes fear of failure, missed opportunities, dependence, and mortality.
7. Complaining is useless, it’s better to understand the cause of distress and use creative instruments to imagine a solution.
8. Anything is achievable.
9. Everyone has something beautiful to offer.
10. It’s easy to make people feel good: compliment them, address their needs unselfishly. It only takes a small amount of effort. The positivity generated is well worth it.
11. Every person on Earth is as confused as you are when it comes to understanding reality: never judge anyone’s perceptions or beliefs, they are valuable insights for developing your own interpretation.
12. Take pictures, Take video, record audio: documentation is invaluable.

I’m sure there’s a million more life lessons I have instilled in my head. I’m also sure that a million more are to come.

I appreciate every person that has contributed to my knowledge of self, including family and friends.

Day after day, I awake to a relatively large list of ‘things to do’. I have this list scribbled upon my bedroom mirror in red dry erase marker. My current list runs 23 items deep with 7 items completed.

Some days I spend hours staring at this list pondering ‘Where do I begin?’ I spend so much time trying to figure out where to start that I let entire days slip by.

As an attempt to resolve my time inefficiency, I am currently constructing a time analysis program. The application is based off of a topone report article titled ‘An Exercise to Maximize Your Time‘ written by the Infomedia Staff. Once this application is complete, I will be able to analyze, in detail, how effectively I spend my time, and as a result, I will be able to adjust my workflow schedule to maximize productivity.

Any individual working from home would agree that time management is essential to maximizing productivity. I have learned this lesson, and I am making every effort to address this issue… despite having spent most of my time this morning playing guitar.

San Francisco view from Hotel Nikko

This past weekend, October 2nd to October 4th 2009, I headed North to San Francisco. I caught a ride with my uncle Hector and his good friend’s Mario and Rudy.

The drive North took about 5 and a half hours. Though most of the journey was through farmland and dry brush, it is always great to experience the scenery along the road. Arriving in SF is almost breathtaking. The layout of the city is much different from Los Angeles. There is definitely more to see than could be absorbed at first sight. We arrived at our hotel, hotel Nikko, at around 7:30 or 8:00pm.

We headed towards the San Francisco’s Cigar Bar & Grill soon after our arrival. The Cigar Bar is a great place to hang out in SF. Two of the bar’s owners, Neil Rideout and Matt Kahn, joined our table. After a few hours of great music and great food, we headed back to our hotel room.

The next morning, we ate breakfast and walked around Union Square for bit. I appreciate the needlessness for a car within the city. Everything is walking distance creating a more social atmosphere. After resting back at the hotel for about an hour, I left the group and met up with my good friend Tim Masterson.

Turns out, an event was taking place this same weekend known as LovEvolution (formerly known as LoveFest). I met up with Tim and his friends at the event’s parade. The crowd attending the event was massive. People were dressed in outrageous costumes. Each float in the parade was actually a stage where DJ’s blasted intense dance music. Each float was packed with people dancing. The majority of the crowd was within my age demographic: college students. However, the overall age range spanned from about ‘8 to 80 years old.’ After spending sometime inside the rave with Tim and his friends, I decided to take some time exploring on my own. I mostly walked around attempting to absorb the free-thinking attitudes of this vast crowd. A few hours passed and I headed back to the hotel room.

I spent the rest of the night watching the USC v. Cal game which my uncle and his friends were actually attending. USC eliminated Cal. After meeting back up with Tim to grab some food, I called it a night.

We headed back home at about 12:00pm. The ride home took a bit longer than the ride up but the scenery was still worth the drive. Overall, the trip was very satisfying. I learned a great deal about traveling, San Francisco, and people in general. I hope to explore more cities throughout my life, but I definitely hope to head back to SF soon. Thanks to everyone that I interacted with and everyone that made the trip possible.

Software development is an abstract process. Envisioning the exact functionality of an entire application proves to be quite difficult before the development process begins. While the client may have a general idea of what types of tasks their application should perform, he/she never fully imagines the requirements necessary to perform each function.

Before development, an experienced programmer would carefully consult their client, breaking down each requested function, until all possible details are uncovered. During the development process, a series of milestones would be scheduled where input may be received from the client. Typically, at these points, the client will have a clearer grasp of how they would like their application to be structured. After gathering the client’s input, the developer will make the necessary adjustments. Correct scheduling allows the developer to make time to perform these adjustments.

Because of software’s abstract nature, a definitive completion point becomes difficult to pin down. The client may realize an infinite amount of functionality which they would like to include however, it is unfeasible for the developer to make an infinite amount of adjustments to the clien’t software. As a result, the need to nail down the major requirements of the requested software, before development begins, must be emphasized. This way, the completion of the application may be considered as the completion of each major requirement.

Content management systems and automated web page builders provide simple interfaces which allow everyday individuals to develop full scale websites. These applications seemingly eliminate the need to hire a web developer to create a professional online presence.

These applications usually do a decent job formatting the overall look and feel of each web page, however, they do typically produce very poorly structured code. The overall HTML, Javascript, and CSS produced by these programs does not come close to following W3C standards (W3C is the organization which develops and specifies web standards and guidelines – http://www.w3.org/). This fault is easily overlooked since the audience which utilizes these applications is not exposed to the web page coding and would never be able to make any sense of the script.

A website with poorly produced script cannot develop into a successful online identity. While most web surfers are concerned only with the appearance and content of web pages, search engines are concerned only with the code and content relevance. Search engines are tripped up by ill-written code and are likely to ignore the web page or website as a whole.

I am currently working on a 4 page website previously developed by a Yahoo content management system. The client is interested in Search Engine Optimizing their webpages. As a result, I will begin by cleaning up the code. Each page seems to require several hours simply to disect its original diluted script. A great deal of time and money could have been saved if an experienced web developer was consulted before website construction began.

Content Management Systems do allow everyday individuals to produce presentable websites, however they greatly reduce the websites visibility to the online community.

My current (short-term) goals are as follows:

1. Get a job.
2. Become a Wordpress expert.
3. Write a simple, useful application.
4. Become a social networking expert.
5. Finish the book ‘A Place to Stand’.
6. Finish the website for Bali Construction.
7. Complete an iHOG e-book.
8. Become an email marketing expert.
9. Catch up on web trends.
10. Finish out Summer quarter at school.

These are my short-term goals in no particular order.

This Wordpress blog is my very first, very own blog. I hope to post useful information involving my journey through web development. I also hope to document my personal growth and development of life understanding.

This blog is part of my effort towards A) completing those things which I always push aside and B) taking the next step in expanding my personal education: utilizing my knowledge.

My future is not so far out of sight; I only need to continue reaching a little further.