David’s Blog

As many of you don’t know, I’ve been planning since before Christmas for the PHPThrownDown 24 hour programming contest. Knowing the chances were slim, I still strove to gather programmers for a team. Originally consisting of four programmers, Ole, Kieran, Aaron, and myself, found ourself, all week, planning for Saturday’s activity. The debreffing/venting from the contest can be found on The PHPDN Forums. Using my idea that we should develop a flashcard website, a topic of which I have much experience in, we all agreed, over Kieran’s Incest.us, an idea to mix a dating site with a genealogy site - to which I added “Fun for the whole family!”, would be the best thing to program for the competition. I won’t go over too many details, the debreffing will cover me on that. Now about this whole, “You haven’t updated in over a month” bit, yeah no kidding, for the first two weeks of the month my hosting companies DNS was screwed up, last week I was busy with my $30/hour freelance job, and this week I spent to planning for the contest. Oh and if your wondering, I programmed for 20 hours straight, 7am-4am, and got 2 hours of sleep, 4am-5:45am, I wasn’t able to hold a conversation with my girlfriend come Sunday. I ended up passing out on her lap; she felt great after that.

I really only made this post to conglomerate Joel Spolsky’s blog post “Where do These People Get Their (Unoriginal) Ideas?”. I really have to agree here with Joel, being a programmer I can understand exactly what “THE ZONE” is and how different it is for us to just “get in it”. The zone is great, the zone is fast pace. People ask me how I can spend hours in front of the computer in one sitting. (literally; sitting) They all think I’m gaming because how else can I spend the time? Well truth is I hardly play games, It’s mostly programming and once I’m in “The Zone” just as Joel states I think the five hours I just spent programming was really only 30min. Once “The Zone” is broken you have to remember what you were doing and regain your train of thought; “The Zone” is not programming the code but BEING the code. Once your in “The Zone” you don’t think about anything else, it’s 100% code and project goals.

- Time is money; Don’t waste money, don’t mess up anyones’ “Zone”.

Sound going loud, then soft, then back to loud, then back to soft. (Repeat) Ether my sound card or headphones are messing with me or I’m messed up tonight. Ugh, My head hurts too not a migraine like normal but a sharp pain behind my right eye. I swear I’m not drunk; I don’t drink remember? Anyway check this link out, I doubt I’ll be getting much money but they get a lot of traffic; traffic that MIGHT get me a nice job. DevNetwork Job Posting Anyways, Carrie’s was great; yesterday we ended up going to Tony’s church for their New Years party. Ended up messing the New Years countdown; however, it was still 12:00am so I went in for the New Year’s kiss like every other couple today. As planned went to her house at 10am and had a nice little New Years Lunch and had a little fun.