Brettia

You’ve checked Organon hourly in the past few days, but have been disappointed to see that I have not blogged. Now I have.

I still ponder the question of money, and, if I am ever endowed with any sum of it, what I will do with it. The computer has now been put on hold, mainly because the prospect of raising $2,500 on about $10/week in earnings will take about five years. So I will end up having to rely on my parents for most of the money, providing that they will even agree to financing such a large purchase in the first place.

I’ll keep my sights set on a gleaming new Alienware Area 51, but until then, I’m shooting for Adobe Photoshop CS and Macromedia Studio MX 2004. I found out I can get Photoshop for about $270 and Studio MX for about $240 (or $190, depending on if I want Flash MX Pro or not) with a student discount available from Creation Engine. Sure, $510 is a lot of money, but it’s also a lot less than $2,500. I think that if I put one of the two programs on my list of Christmas goodies then I have a good chance of getting it, too, so that will cut the cost significantly. In a perfect world I would forsake all other Christmas gifts (who wants clothes, anyway?) and ask for just the two programs and nothing else, but my parents like making me open ten million dollar-store presents, for some reason, as if that would make me happier when I see that my beloved Photoshop is missing from the pile of gifts.

Now that I’ve rambled about my sinful desire for Photoshop and Studio MX, I might as well tell you what they are, in case you aren’t as technologically savvy as I. First, Photoshop is a digital imaging program, for making web graphics, animated GIFs, touching up digital or scanned photos, and a myriad of other graphics-oriented purposes. It is the industry-standard for graphics editing, therefore that gives Adobe a right to overcharge for it (I guess), so the regular price is $650. The second chunk of bytes I want is Studio MX, which is actually a suite of programs that all have to do with web development and graphics. It comes with Flash MX (which makes all those nice movies and animations like Happy Tree Friends), Fireworks MX, for graphics and animations, Dreamweaver MX, the industry-standard for (X)HTML editing (now with PHP support, w00t!), and FreeHand MX, for laying out projects, or something like that (useless to me). Even though I’ll probably only use Fireworks and Flash, it’s actually cheaper to get all four together than it is to get the two separate. What can I say?

This all seems fine and good, but then all happiness grinds to a halt. I looked at the system requirements on the manufacturer’s websites for the products I want, and guess what? My system is no longer “good enough” to run them. This is not such a big deal, since I’ve used 30-day trial versions of all the programs I will purchase in the future and all of them ran fine, though somewhat sluggishly. (All programs are somewhat sluggish on the hunk of junk whose keys I currently warm.)

Why must I choose between great software and great hardware? Why can’t I have both? Why can’t I have them now, rather than in four or six or eight months? Why? (I must sound like that spoiled chick on “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.”)

At least if I grow up to be a paper pusher instead of a billionare software developer, I’ll know what to blame my failure on. Great. My heart swells with hope.
For those of you readers (I have about as many readers as I have megabytes of video card RAM: 4) who don’t know HTML, or even the syntax and structure behind it, you now know. The above statement, wrapped in nonexistent tags, is a perfect example. I’ve been meaning to write a HTML tutorial covering the basics and the problems I once faced, but that has been put off until February 30th. Generally, HTML is a system of directives called tags, which start and end with ‘< ' and '>‘. I won’t explain all the tags, since you can find a decent reference at W3Schools, but I will only say that it is not nearly as hard to code HTML pages as you may think. I can’t teach it to you, since I believe that learning by yourself with trial and error and experimentation will have a greater reward.

There’s a saying that goes: “You can give a man a fish and you’ve fed him for a day (for me, more like an hour), but you can teach him to fish and you’ve fed him for his life.” I see sense in that, but am sadly too lazy to teach you to fish and would rather give you a herring and send you on your way. So go to W3Schools, or perhaps get 1st Page 2000 (free), a decent but old HTML editor (supposedly the developer has returned from death and is busy coding the next version now). It’s a pretty good one to start with if you’re a noobie.

Noobie. That term used to apply to me. I am amazed when I look back and realize how much I know now compared to how much I knew back in 2001, when I first started my Internet journey. Those were dark times, when I was mired deep in the curse of dial-up and I could only manage a small webpage hosted on Tripod’s free servers. (Note how everything I use is free because I am such a poor kid. Scratch that, I am not poor, the budget is just not written by me, therefore I cannot control where money goes, therefore none goes to technology. Any IT director would be horrified.)

So it will soon be a year of PHP and two and a half years of HTML. And about six months of graphics editing and advanced CSS, plus another nine of SQL, and two of building websites for other people, and twelve more of running a forum. That’s a lot of months, though much of the time overlaps. I haven’t said much about it, but I’m skilled in Windows as well, and I’m working on Linux (though I deleted RedHat today in favor of Slackware, then deleted that to go back to RedHat. I love open source.) I can never be as good at this as some people I know, like Paul S. Owen, lead developer of phpBB, or Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel (borrowing from Unix, perhaps [<- inserted to keep SCO happy]), or, God forbid, Bill Gates, who is a great man, though everyone hates him for his severe case of richness.

Yeef. (Yawns.) I’m tired, and it’s only 7:00. I don’t sleep enough, or something, but who wants to spend any more of their life in their bed then they have to? Unless that bed also contains a scantily-clad swimsuit model, but that’s another story…

Eggplants.