Finding Momentum

Spent much of yes­ter­day at work doing some somewhat-dry labor, build­ing some pro­file info fields and writ­ing a Rails DB migra­tion script. I gotta say, echo­ing Hsi­u­fan’s obser­va­tion, that Rails does take a lot of the situps out of the equa­tion. Rails really does amaze me some­time, the MVC pat­tern is such a log­i­cal way of design­ing things and so many things are done for you. Unfor­tu­nately, that’s the draw­back; that so many things are abstracted away and hid­den from sight that you can’t fig­ure out how to design them to your own lik­ing. And Ruby, phew, it’s just really cool. “I feel so much cooler using blocks!” says Hsi­u­fan, and it’s true. Who says that learn­ing a func­tional pro­gram­ming lan­guage (i.e. SCHEME) was for naught! Hooray, high level pro­gram­ming languages.

Work­ing for a web startup also comes with its own ups and downs. The ups are that it’s just plain cool, get­ting press and buzz and know­ing you’re mak­ing the ‘net a cooler place but the down­side is that.. it’s kind of stress­ful know­ing that there are a cou­ple thou­sand folks who you need to keep happy with your updates. And that one night I dreamt I killed the server.

On the more per­sonal side,

These days have been hot and muggy lately. I went out run­ning at 9PM last night and the air was smooth and warm. That’s def­i­nitely a good feel­ing. (I got my foot checked out the other week, and the doc­tor said it was just heal­ing really slowly. So I can exer­cise now, but need to be pretty care­ful about doing so.)

And there are def­i­nitely a thou­sand side projects beck­on­ing me to take on. Like fix­ing up the blog at www.g9labs.com and learn­ing some extra blues licks on the gui­tar and fin­ish­ing East of Eden and refor­mat­ting my desk­top and whatever.

What’s been tough is com­ing back home and relaps­ing into the per­son I was in high school, be it in relat­ing to my friends or falling into old habits or in my atti­tude towards my par­ents. It’s hard, to be honest.

But I want to make this sum­mer count, you know? Spend some qual­ity time with folks. Stop being the with­drawn he’s-too-busy kind of friend. Live a life that over­flows with love, live a life vul­ner­a­bly exposed to my com­mu­nity. Grow in some spir­i­tual dis­ci­plines of prayer and Word (learn­ing to savor it because it is good). Stop liv­ing a life for myself (it’s easy to do that in the sum­mer). I’ll let you know how it goes.

Photo of the Day

I like this one. Sara, Ryan, Dave, look­ing good in shades.

Cur­rently Read­ing East of Eden : (Cen­ten­nial Edi­tion) By John Stein­beck see related