Forward or Backwards… You Decide.

Life has a habbit of falling into loops. Like learning to program, you have a field day with loops - I remember when I played with BASIC for the first time, learning colors, then finding loops, I flooded the screen with random colored letters, phrases, etc. and then had it scroll the entire screen - it was fun, it was all I knew, it was new and cool.

Life is a lot like that lately, seems the more I push forward, the desire to go back to what I knew, what I know, what is safer, is all behind me, that is familar - in front of me is new people, new things, new responsiblities, new possibltiies. Change is scary - anyone who says it’s not at least a little, is either a VERY strong person, or is insane the more I look at the situation that I have blogged about over the last few days with this one client, I realize more and more, they are hitting some major change - new staff, new possiblities, new layout, new code, new everything, and systems within their org. I have started pushing for change means 1 more thing to learn, more time to devote to learning. Thus why they are going backwards, falling back to what’s safe, what they know, what they can handle. And that’s fine, but in the end, that means I am not needed anymore - I can’t innovate old code without changing it.

I am not trying to toot my own horn, not by any means, but I like to think progressive in sites - I am not talking all the latest buzz words like AJAX, FLASH, RUBY, etc. etc. - I am talking about taking old ideas, and spicing them up a bit. Take CMCentral.com - one of my more long time clients, for the longest time, it ran phpBB, I brought in a new software, fought up-hill to get it, but its more secure, stable, and commercially supported - we have a problem, we ask for help, we get patches - that change took some fighting to get, same with re-writing the backend, which took about a year longer than I imagined, but I had a lot come up in my life at the same time - but in the end, the software is doing alright - but I like to push forward, that is in everything but my own life.

A few years back I said I wanted a life, I said I wanted to get in shape, I wanted to get out of my rut of work, money, gadgets, and no friends. So here I am, in the past 4 months I have done more away from a PC than I have in 5 years, gone places more than I have in 10, and made non-computer purchases (I mean lawnmower vs. gps? no contest!) - but as of late, with things getting stressful with this one client, and things falling through on the company who I hoped would take over some of the management duties of FH/TN - I am desiring to fall back into my old ways - they are familar, they are comfortable, they are fewer suprises - but as much as I’d like to go splurge and get a iMac 20inch (one thing I have been considering this evening) - or keep servers as they are, I didn’t start this journey to re-vamp the business even more for more personal life, and do things like a Gym Membership, just to let them sit by and do nothing - so I need to get my butt in gear and get to the things I had setup.

As I chatted with Jon the other night, blogging lately is sanity for me, helps me unwind, let’s me put some of the things I can’t find a way to say outloud, at least written down to where its half out of my brain, sure sure, why do it public? I dunno, maybe just so I know someone is reading it with me, and my words are heard, and that folks who 5/10 visitors are folks I know, not someone searching for “Stargate” or “E-500 vs E-300″ from Google - so again tonight I have a prayer request, keep me in your prayers that I keep pushin on, that I make the changes I need to make, maybe it is time to find a staff, get a loan and hire a crew, who knows, another thing to pray about, but last thing I wanted to do was take all the clients and put them with a company who had over 25+ server outages in a 3 week period - I know there are bad weeks, bad days, etc. but in this move, changes, etc. I want to do so with my best foot forward - so please keep me in your prayers that I find the right solution, that I make the right choices, and that I keep on keepin on! (go Joe Dirt!).

p.s. if anyone wants to pool together to get me a iMac CoreDuo, please let me know, going to be selling my iBook to my cousin for school I think (praying about that too) so kind of want a mac to fill the void, but who knows - donations welcome, iMac’s to my door even better Night folks.