I haven't written any Glowing Face Articles for quite awhile. According to my "calendar of accomplishments", the last article was written on the 9th. That would be my newest article, entitled "Privileged Information." I wrote that on my girlfriend's laptop, and the reason was that my own computer had its backlamp burn out. Thatmeans that the screen is black... or at leat, nearly black. As a matter of fact, you can barely make things out through the murky darkness. If you shine a flashlight at the screen, ...
(Interruption as GlowingFaceGirl enters the room and breaks into laughter) yes, as I was saying, you can barely make out the faint details of the screen, and can even painstakingly read words if they're black-text-on-white-background. The reason my girlfriend just got so surprised was she walked into the room and saw me sitting here typing at a seemingly black monitor. Personally I think it's cool, it makes me seem elite and hackerish, like I'm broadcasting the blog straight out of a B-rate 80s techno-scifi flick.
But that's not the main reason why the website has been quiet lately. There are a couple reasons. First of all, I've decided to spend a lot of time reading, so I can provide better value here. I've been reading through a lot of self-development books, so that I can write with more authority on that topic. So far I've finished the giant tome which is Tony Robbins' "Awaken the Giant Within" and I'm just about finished with the much-smaller and less intimidating genre-starting classic, "Think and Grow Rich", by Napoleon Hill. Next on the list: "A Course in Miracles" and "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People".
So it's a kind of cocooning process. I feel like I am gaining priceless resources which will help me become a better writer here. At the same time, I'm rather startled just how much of the stuff I'm finding in the old classics, is stuff I've independently come up with on my own. It lends evidence toward the simple truth behind it all.
Besides this literary "cocoon", I've also been preoccupied with teaching myself more about webhosting. In the past two weeks, I've taught myself PHP, MySQL, UTF-8, Apache, and some of what's involved in being hosted on a real host. The testing grounds for all this is a certain dictionary website I launched, which is now under construction. Presently it has the ability to search for Japanese words in Romaji (Romanized Japanese) and output the English translations. I thought this would be a two- or three-day project, and it would've been, if I hadn't run into some unexpected limits. The free-webhosting site I'm using for self-teaching only allows 6,000 files. That presents a problem for a dictionary with ~200,000 pages. I managed, at great effort, to crunch the whole dictionary into just N files (where N can be set to whatever I want), using nothing but PHP. Then I realized how massochistic that was, when my reality expanded enough to make me aware of MySQL, a solution which is basically tailor-made precisely for the dictionary problem. So now I'm facing the prospect of redoing the dictionary from square 1... but with the much more ambitious vision of something like Wikipedia, with the ability for users to freely edit entries in real time.
While my webmastering interests are expanding outward, my interests for this blog-- my vision for the Glowing Future-- are tending away from language and spaced repetition, and I'd like to focus more on self-development topics here.
Summer is coming, and my girlfriend and I will be hitting Las Vegas once we're free from the Ohio State University. She recently gave me a really cool Japanese summer outfit, called a "jinbei" (that link leads to the appropriate entry in my sparkly, fancy new dictionary). It's sort of like a kimono/yukata, but more awesome.
I'm going to go sleep now. I justfinished a 2 AM jog, which was quite exhilerating. Look forward to some very high quality articles coming out of GlowingFaceMan!
(Interruption as GlowingFaceGirl enters the room and breaks into laughter) yes, as I was saying, you can barely make out the faint details of the screen, and can even painstakingly read words if they're black-text-on-white-background. The reason my girlfriend just got so surprised was she walked into the room and saw me sitting here typing at a seemingly black monitor. Personally I think it's cool, it makes me seem elite and hackerish, like I'm broadcasting the blog straight out of a B-rate 80s techno-scifi flick.
But that's not the main reason why the website has been quiet lately. There are a couple reasons. First of all, I've decided to spend a lot of time reading, so I can provide better value here. I've been reading through a lot of self-development books, so that I can write with more authority on that topic. So far I've finished the giant tome which is Tony Robbins' "Awaken the Giant Within" and I'm just about finished with the much-smaller and less intimidating genre-starting classic, "Think and Grow Rich", by Napoleon Hill. Next on the list: "A Course in Miracles" and "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People".
So it's a kind of cocooning process. I feel like I am gaining priceless resources which will help me become a better writer here. At the same time, I'm rather startled just how much of the stuff I'm finding in the old classics, is stuff I've independently come up with on my own. It lends evidence toward the simple truth behind it all.
Besides this literary "cocoon", I've also been preoccupied with teaching myself more about webhosting. In the past two weeks, I've taught myself PHP, MySQL, UTF-8, Apache, and some of what's involved in being hosted on a real host. The testing grounds for all this is a certain dictionary website I launched, which is now under construction. Presently it has the ability to search for Japanese words in Romaji (Romanized Japanese) and output the English translations. I thought this would be a two- or three-day project, and it would've been, if I hadn't run into some unexpected limits. The free-webhosting site I'm using for self-teaching only allows 6,000 files. That presents a problem for a dictionary with ~200,000 pages. I managed, at great effort, to crunch the whole dictionary into just N files (where N can be set to whatever I want), using nothing but PHP. Then I realized how massochistic that was, when my reality expanded enough to make me aware of MySQL, a solution which is basically tailor-made precisely for the dictionary problem. So now I'm facing the prospect of redoing the dictionary from square 1... but with the much more ambitious vision of something like Wikipedia, with the ability for users to freely edit entries in real time.
While my webmastering interests are expanding outward, my interests for this blog-- my vision for the Glowing Future-- are tending away from language and spaced repetition, and I'd like to focus more on self-development topics here.
Summer is coming, and my girlfriend and I will be hitting Las Vegas once we're free from the Ohio State University. She recently gave me a really cool Japanese summer outfit, called a "jinbei" (that link leads to the appropriate entry in my sparkly, fancy new dictionary). It's sort of like a kimono/yukata, but more awesome.
I'm going to go sleep now. I justfinished a 2 AM jog, which was quite exhilerating. Look forward to some very high quality articles coming out of GlowingFaceMan!
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2 comments:
You know what we should do? We should get together and make up a "reading list" for our readers.
I read Think and Grow Rich also. I agree with the message. Let me know what you think
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