Are You Making Any Sense?

"Rewind what you just said there, and look at it through the eyes of a non-geek."

My friend said this to me in jest when I got way too excited about the wine project over on OkayDave.com, but it got me thinking: does anybody know what the hell I'm talking about when I get going on a topic?

My main interest is my clients, and making sure that they understand what I'm talking about; it doesn't do much good for anyone if I'm just babbling in Geekanese and the client is nodding with a blank stare.

Additionally, and far worse, is the disconnect between developers and end-users (see?! JARGON!) when turning over the reins of an application. What seems natural to a power-geek may feel awkward and foreign to... read more

Reading RSS with PHP

The Problem
The Internet seems to be getting easier everyday. With sites like Myspace, Flickr, YouTube, and Twitter, you can essentially create a full-on interactive web experience for free and with no knowledge of web design. This is great, but it limits your creativity, and it also requires your readers to remember multiple separate URLs.

On the flipside, you could reverse engineer all of these tools and create your own versions of them for use on your personal website, creating the same immersive user experience you get from using social tools, but that's a good deal of time and effort. The learning experience of building such tools is great, but we don't always have hundreds of hours to dedicate to rebuilding Flickr's robust photo management. Besides, doesn't it seem a little silly to reinvent the... read more

Sleep Better at Night

I am a light sleeper. I wake up to the sound of my cell phone vibrating, to the sound of a car door closing, to the sound of my downstairs neighbor smoking a cigarette and talking on his cell phone beneath my window. While this is annoying, especially because I live in an old building with paper-thin walls, it's never really been a problem for me because I can generally fall asleep quickly.

Lately, however, I've been having a really hard time falling asleep, and I wasn't sure why until last night, when I was staring at my ceiling, listening to the wind blowing my bedroom door against the door frame softly, I realized something: I cannot sleep when I'm stressed.

Now, let's all take a moment to appreciate the Duh! factor of that statement. You done? Okay... read more

You Should Sweat the Small Stuff

I work two jobs: I work as a freelance web designer and software programmer in the evenings and on weekends, and to make sure I'm making ends meet, I keep a second full-time job, which I don't hate, but I don't particularly enjoy, either.

As you can imagine, the hours have a tendency to run long, and I find weeks slipping away without so much as a single memory outside of work, the gym, and my apartment. And when I had a live-in girlfriend, my time was even more thinly spread, which left me going to sleep every night an hour or two later than I'd wanted to and waking up feeling like I'd spent my whole REM cycle in a dead sprint.

Something had to change, but I didn't really know how to fix it. I... read more