1. Update - May 2010

    I’ve been pretty much knee deep in work lately. School is about to wrap up, which is nice. But it seems like nobody is giving me a free ride to the end of the year, I have one or more “end-of-the-year project”s for just about every class, which will undoubtedly delay the progress of my personal projects and my freelance site/web-dev blog which is now like…4 months in construction. I would really love to wrap it up and make it live.

    I am wrapping up my sophomore year of high school right now, and will be going in to my junior year. This is pretty exciting, I’m a bit nervous about my academics. I honestly struggled a lot this year with my grades. Some things will get better, like not having to take a foreign language anymore (which has consistently been my worst subject) but things may also get worse, my schedule for next year isn’t exactly looking forgiving either. I am also told by my parents that I need to get a job next year…yay, less time for me to pursue what I love. My only thoughts about that is that it either needs to be computer related, or really easy. I don’t care about money, I’ve survived with my allowance for this long so I would be fine continuing the way I am. They just want me to get the experience of a working environment, I can see their point but if things end up the way I have been working my whole life to achieve then I won’t need this experience, I’ll never have any use for it.

    I just finished teaching myself jQuery. Its actually really simple, after I memorize the functions I will be able to write it more fluently but for now I still have to look things up in the jQuery API listings. Its what I did with CSS and now I know all the properties without thinking. It will come soon enough. This summer, I intend to learn Perl. This is going to be a bit different than what I have previously learned, the style of programming is different in a lot of ways. I have selected Perl for several reasons.

    • It can be applied to Web development in many ways
    • It uses the little bit that I know about dynamic scripting languages in it’s syntax
    • It is a great entry level language into future languages such as Python or Ruby

    Depending on how difficult Perl is for me, I may or may not attempt to learn another language before I go back to school. If I do, I am leaning towards Python right now. Python is widely used and is known for “remarkable power with very clear syntax”. A clear syntax is something that is very important to me. I can’t get motivated to learn and code if it looks like I’m learning gibberish.

    I have started, what is now like my 3rd attempt, reviving Quesomanrulz Tutorials on YouTube. I think I can give it a good run this time because summer is starting up and I’ve begun to create a decent balance between bettering myself as a programmer and helping my fellow computer (one who does the action of computing, not the device). I have decided, however, to let quesomanrulz.com die. The domain expired tomorrow actually (from the day this was posted) and I have made the decision based on several points.

    • I never update it
    • I don’t want to update it
    • When I did update it, it only consisted of the embedded video and extended description. Just go to YouTube…
    • The design was horrendous and I have no interest in putting in the effort to design a new one
    • It’s a waste of my time and money

    Hopefully it doesn’t get cybersquatted, but if it does its not a big deal to me. What matters to me is creating videos that other people enjoy and can benefit off of. YouTube partnership is not nearly as important to me as it once was, mostly due to YouTube deciding that they only want to sponsor videos that are proven successful, after all of its release views are gone, which is completely idiotic, so real YouTube partnership hardly exists for anyone who was not already a partner before this change. But, this may be for the best, less of my focus is now on making money and more of it is on creating quality videos that are helpful and loved by my subscribers. That is what is really important.

    That’s about all that is going on right now. I’m just gunning for the end of school and hoping to have a great summer.

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