Friday, October 22, 2004

Man I love this stuff



I love creating things that are useful. That's why I like designing web pages and stuff. But what I love more deep down is designing stuff that involves code. I love the whole process of coming up with an idea, designing it, writing it, and seeing it work. And when it works well, I can't be any prouder. I can honestly say I've always had a passion for this stuff. Somehow when I got to UCSD, I had forgotten what it felt like to design and create. All they assigned us were dumb and pointless data processing chores. What they should have done was tell us, write any program that demonstrates your ability to incorporate this new learned concept. And I would have had a ball showing off my creative side. So I was delighted when I took the CogSci courses that let me design web pages. Which is part of the reason I steered away from CompSci to CogSci. That and the impossible hurdle that was also known as physics at UCSD, it was clear to me at the time that it was the fastest way to graduate with a BS, and quite possibly the only way.



So I don't regret my decision, but I think doing a job that demands this type of work from me is my calling, and something I have a passion for.



So I've been working pretty much non stop on my photo gallery that I revived since my hard drive crash 1.5 years ago. Since my work these days includes a lot of ADSI scripting for Windows 2000 databases, I've picked up a lot of core concepts and methods in visual basic. So this made writing and editing ASP a lot easier. javascript seems to be a mix of C and vb, which makes it easy for me. Working with the photo gallery, I've learned countless things and got to experience a lot of things for the first time. Like using cookies to store information, making queries to the sql/mdb database, transfering variables to another page (4 different methods), working with database tools, and a bunch of more stuff I can't remember. i also created today an asp page that will look inside a directory for images, and randomly output that image on demand. what's cool is that it looks in the same folder where i store the 320 x 200 images for the photo gallery so i only need to update one folder. you can just specify this url in a img src tag, and have the page choose a random image every time you load, which is what i've set up my blog today for the rando images. its much better than what I had about 1.5 years ago before the crash since that involved a server side program that just copied a random image into a jpg file with a specific name. it was a lot more load intensive, and it was always writing to my harddrive which i hated. now that i'm pretty much done with creating the gallery, i need to take some nice pics that will let both gallery grow. and since i'm pretty much done writing all the ASP I need, I need to have another idea of creating something. what to do next... maybe i'll write all the code for my blog from scratch and host it on my server. hmm...seems too easy of a task, even though it would be nice to not rely on blogger and Haloscan...

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