Live and Learn

Three short days ago I attended the funeral for my oldest cousin. I can’t go into specifics, but he was still a young man, one whom I respected and admired greatly. I will definitely miss him. There were several points during that ordeal where I really just almost lost it completely. Death is never something I’ll be able to cope with easily.

During the trip I was able to read more of Learning PHP 5 by David Sklar and I got several more ideas for the direction of Dyjour, the webhost which will be using Veda. Essentially I’m going to be employing sessions for added security and will be using functions to make the code cleaner. I’ve already drafted up some rudimentary prices for some features, but the actual service will be free with no ads, popups, or linkbacks. Just yesterday I decided to make it not only accept OpenID, but also become a provider of it as well. Dyjour will become the summation of everything I have found useful for making a webpage on the Internet thus far. It’s also going to be fugging hard to pull off too. Moreover, I’m making it more for this blog and other PBA sites than for the actual money. If Dyjour doesn’t make a dime back I still would be exceptionally pleased.

I’ve taken a shot at The GIMP, a free alternative to Photoshop, and hope to master it to a level of other doujin drawers, specifically for the Gforum Epic. It doesn’t matter to me that I’ve been banned from the G4 forums after two years of awesome fun, I promised myself a long time ago I was going to see this project through to the end (and what an end it will be!) Also, because of the GIMP, I’ve become reinterested in low-poly 3D game development, specifically Polar Nights. One huge thing blocking me was textures. While I’m a decent code monkey and creative when I want to be, applying that creativity to drawings and other abstract things is really something I couldn’t do. Hopefully I’ll do well in this and will be able to master the other impediment, 3D modeling.

For a while now I’ve been wanting to learn an instrument, specifically the piano. This is probably a combination of learning about “Renaissance men” (men who try to excel in all areas of life: art, music, invention, sciences, etc.), and of Ouran, throughout which the beauty of the piano is frequently displayed. I’ll be looking into several options, but eventually I want to be able to do something like this:

School is going well, and like I mentioned in the previous post, really fast. I only have two real weeks left to spend with my favorite seniors before they go off to college-land, but this time I’m at least prepared. I also just got my SAT scores back today, 660 Critical Reading, 530 Math, 590 Writing, which is good. Unluckily for me, the math test employed much Algebra 2, which I’m taking next year. I really wish the AP tests didn’t come in July so that I could compare my computer science score with my math one, just to see if there really is some kind of correlation. Still, 3/4 is almost done, and this blog has been through it all and then some.

I guess right now I’m living and I’m learning, and I can’t ask for anything more.
-Andrew