Reading, Writing, and Ramblings

1) You're late to your internship in the morning because it's imperative that your significant other understand that multi-value columns are much worse than a couple of JOIN statements.

2) You hear "Stereo Hearts" by Gym Class Heroes on the radio many times, and it isn't until the twentieth or so that you realize they're not singing:

My heart's a stereo
It beats for you, so listen close
Hear my thoughts in every node.

3) You can't wait to get home from your boring job coding websites so you can code websites.

4) In a dire budget crunch, you'd rather give up food and entertainment than your virtual private server.

5) Despite the existence of perfectly acceptable Blogger, WordPress, and other free publishing software, you would rather build your own CMS from scratch for your newest blog just so you can have total control.

Last week, I decided that I wanted to make a new blog, in addition to the personal and internship-related ones I had on Blogger. I wanted to host this one myself, because I don't like other people having control over my things and forcing me to use their cumbersome interfaces. So standard software like WordPress was out, and for the past week or so, Sweetie and I have been meticulously constructing this site. Set up domains and subdomains. Design. Redesign. Structure databases. Argue about the structure of the databases (see #1 above). Add layers of security. Write queries. Add more layers of security. Rewrite queries. Generate RSS feed. Test. Add archive sorting functions; test again. Add search. Add accessibility features. Add CAPTCHA to stymie the spammers. Finally delete everything so all the users see is a very pretty hand-constructed banner and a big, impressive white space.

I did have some concerns about hosting this blog myself, and associating it with my name. There are a lot of cruel people in this world. However, if one of them really wanted to find me, they could have with relative ease. All kinds of aggregators have already stolen my birthday, home county, and the names of my relatives from social networking sites alone. If you Google my name, the first five pages consist solely of my blog posts, comments on others' blog posts, old news articles from my high school days, and reviews of various products from Target that were commandeered by other aggregate sites. All the tools necessary to attempt to destroy me are right there at any stranger's fingertips. So why not go the full mile, eh?

Contrary to the tech-focused splashy intro, the purpose of this blog is not to talk about programming (although bits may sneak in here and there). The purpose of this blog is to hold all of the opinions that should not be cluttering up my other happy-go-lucky cooking blog. Ostensibly, it will be about writing, an activity I pursue regularly but secretly in the darkness of my $480/month apartment. It was $440/month when we moved in four years ago, but now I have to fight to keep it down to $480 by playing the starving grad student card. Water and electricity are shooting through the roof and Internet just jumped from $40 to $55 a month, and I had to beat Comcast representatives with a verbal stick to lower it from $60...but I digress.

A disclaimer, for those aspiring novelists or seasoned wordsmiths who wandered here because of the cute feather pen next to the URL: I am not a published author. The odds that I will ever become a published author are depressingly slim. Why? First of all, I only write passingly well. I majored in biology and wield semicolons like duct tape. Secondly, what I do write would never be popular. I break all the rules. I'm not idealistic enough for paperback, nor cynical enough for hardcover.

And finally, I'll probably never get the damn thing done. Classes, internships, part-time jobs...by the time I'm done with all of it at the end of the day, I only have enough energy to crawl a couple of miles on the treadmill and watch fluffy, action-packed Korean shows. Another of my incentives for creating this blog was to at least get me thinking about writing, so I'm more likely to do it.

So here it is: Reading, 'Riting, and Ramblings (with an Oxford comma). The pop-infused house for my sardonic wit and nominal sentences. If you fancy reading the random theses of a still-maturing, ofttimes melodramatic graduate student, this is the place to be. You can subscribe to my posts by adding the link on the right side bar to your personal choice of reader. There won't be anything there yet, of course, but I'm working on it. More pages will be added later, when I actually have material to populate them.