I’ve been sat here for the last five minutes thinking that I should really write a “proper” entry for my blog (after putting up the admittedly funny picture of Steve Ballmer this morning). I now have 10 minutes of my lunch break left, so I suppose I should just vent into the keyboard, and see what comes out (that sounds disgusting, doesn’t it).
I got home last night with the intention of putting some work in the CMS script I’ve been picking at in my free time. CMS stands for “Content Mangement System”, much to the derision of the people I work with - they all think I should give the script a decent name. I suggested some names to convince them that naming scripts with some arbitrary monicker is a bad idea. Personally, I see no problem with calling a script “George”, “Nancy”, or “Horace”.
Anyway - CMS. I have this script that lets you bung content into a database, and it organises that content onto pages. What it doesn’t have is any security to specify who can add or change content, so I was thinking up a logical way of doing that…. well; I had the intention of doing that when I sat down.
What I actually ended up doing was fiddling with the template of this Blog script for most of the evening. Over the course of a couple of hours I managed to re-write the template to put everything in shaded boxes, and then decided I hated it and put everything back again. Two hours wasted just like that. Think of all the crap I could have been doing in those two hours. You could make a seminal breakthrough in theoretical physics, or solve the unified field theory, or something like that… probably. I once knew somebody who remembered getting high on weed one summer evening, and told the story of having this moment of clarity when everything to do with the way the world works made sense - he suddenly understood gravity, light, the whole physics bit - except of course he then flaked out and couldn’t remember any of those insights when he came round… and druggies wonder why nobody trusts them, listens to them, or believes them…
Something I have discovered is that silly pictures on your blog are the route to hits, and if you get enough hits you can have a Google ad-sense banner It won’t make me rich, but it will make about 50% of the hosting fee a year, which is probably a good thing. Of course it means I have to keep entering my thoughts every day into this thing for the enjoyment of the slightly odd people that are interested in what I have to say.
Hmmm… four minutes left. I guess I could go make myself and my colleagues a cup of tea or something, couldn’t I. Making tea is another fine diversion from work if you’re doing something boring