I find one of the hardest parts about learning something is getting past what you think you already know about what you’re trying to learn. For example, I’ve been haphazardly programming computers for about 20 years (longer if you count Logo on an Atari 400). It started in junior college with an introductory course in Pascal and then I moved into C programming. Since I couldn’t write a functional line in either one of those with a gun to my head you can tell how well it went. Years later I picked up Java in the web’s early days. I hated that too and was forced through it again once I went back to school years later with the intention of becoming some kind of internet superhero. Now I focus my coding efforts mostly on Javascript, Python and PHP. Programming has become easier to learn and implement since my early days in C programming, and that’s also made it more fun.

This example has spread across many different facets of my life and I’m only recently noticing it. In becoming a parent, I’ve had to deconstruct the simplest of ideas in order for someone without any life experience to easily understand them. Explaining a concept like time to a three-year-old makes you force a look at your own understanding of it and how it relates to your day or why it’s important and in giving relevant examples to someone that doesn’t share your priorities can make you realize how well you do actually understand, well, pretty much anything.

I’m lucky that I do have a need to learn as I’m pretty sure that relaxing on what I’ve learned to this point might get me through the next few years but it wouldn’t make me grow and professionally I’m not being challenged in any way. It’s sad at times but this is where it’s up to me to put on my big boy pants and continue the growth. And yes, just right before this I wrote some Javascript that makes things blink, so there.

I’ve got a bit going on right now. Just moved all of my sites (and set up some new ones) to a new server that I configured from the ground up. I’m pretty satisfied with the system, although I’m running a little lean on RAM. Will probably need a bigger slice in the near future, especially once I get back in to Rails development. We’ll see how much it makes sense after some things are built and I do some optimization tricks.

Keeping myself busy around the house lately too. Finally put up the top-of-stairs gate so the baby gorilla doesn’t suddenly go barreling down them and flatten himself. Have other projects to get to but that’s just simply part of owning a house I suppose.

No new music has passed by me in awhile, could use some new discoveries. Last.fm has helped, iTunes genius mixes have reminded me how much I need to organize (and throw away) some of the crap in my library, and the giant pile in the closet has led me to rediscovery but nothing new. Movies haven’t been too mind-blowing lately either, extremely disappointed in Zombieland. Not funny and it should have been. Did discover Ink on Netflix though, highly recommended. Tracked down the rest of the director’s films but haven’t watched them yet, curious to see how they hold up.

Back to work, giving someone a needed facelift.

There were a few posts that got lost in my (relatively) pain-free server move. Just a bunch of stuff about me not knowing what I’m doing with Ruby on Rails even though I took a course on it in grad school. I suppose that I’ll be writing about it later since I’ve got a few projects lined up for myself that use Rails but for now, three missing posts. I think that there was something in there about Charlie and Christmas presents too, but who the hell’s even reading this crap anyway?