Rolling Title.

Picking up speed here. I've been negligent in my Java learning because I have to do it when I'm home, and let's face it, after 12 hours on the road I want to get home, play with my kid, and pass out.

Ah, but this is where the Android phone is a handy tool. I can code any time, anywhere. Using the web browser and TxtPad Lite I'm good to go. I write and review code on TxtPad, and upload it via my web host's control panel.

There is a down-side though. Yesterday I was at Seven-11 buying milk at 10pm (necessary to get my daughter to go to bed), and figured out why some php I was working on wasn't playing nice with MySql as I was standing there with the freezer door open. So instead of checking the expiration date, jogging to the counter to pay and rushing home to get my daughter her bottle of milk(she drinks enough man, trust me, the kid isn't starving. This is more a matter of Mom being tired and wanting to put her to sleep), I grab the gallon of milk with my right hand and the Android from my pocket with my left. Pull up the local file of the code, drop the milk onto a box of Slim Jims, and start coding away.

After ten minutes and feeling some odd looks (and swapping the now warm milk jug for a cold one), I jumped in my car and by the time I got home it'd taken as much time as if I'd jogged there and back.

"Did you stop for a drink?"

"No."

"What took you so long then?"

"I figured out some bad code and had to correct it."

"In 7-Eleven?"

"Yes."

"Are you $%#*ing serious?"

You .:. Step Forward

BlueJ . . . I'm still messing around with . . .

But the point here is to do 5 programs before starting on Knuth's _big_ book. Well, I figured if I'm going to put the time into making some programs at least one of them should do something that will make my life better(isn't that the point?).

So, I've gotten myself all riled up on the idea of building a parts inventory database for my service company(dental equipment service, by the way, if you're curious).

And so, a new obsession was born("The word geek is a slang term, noting individuals as "One who is perceived to be overly obsessed with one or more things including those of intellectuality, electronics, etc."): and, having a new obsession - this time not about researching the whole history of Mastodon without buying a single album of theirs because I liked a track of theirs on the Brutal Legend soundtrack - that can actually make me more productive in the real world, I've pretty much dived in head first.

Now, knowing that I had this grand idea to create a fully editable and always available parts inventory, and being as excited about this new project as anyone with a geek-disposition would be, I pursued this project by researching every available programming language out there. Now, I was most impressed with the potential of Python and Perl, but I had to be realistic - after a lot of searching it's pretty obvious that php was made for web development, and it easily works with mySql. If you're just starting out like me, go with what will be easiest to learn. Then, when you know what it is to be a coder, you can really evaluate Python and Perl in real terms.

So, I've been playing around with SQL the last week. Cool stuff.