Subject looks agitated, mildly disturbed.

After DAYS of putzing and fitzing and bitzenflashensparkzenflyin, I have a copy of CRE Loaded running smoothly (for now) and ready to go live tomorrow. It was one of the worst website ordeals of my life, but one of the best clients I’ve worked with. He was beyond understanding, he was helpful. It was unreal. He never got mad, he’d summarize lists of open issues and see what he could do to cover some bases while I worked out others. He never seemed to imply that the crappy software we ended up with was a shortcoming on my part. It was. Overenthusastic decision with a lack of time to wade through forum posts. Another lesson learned.

I was talking to a colleague in my office building today and was listening to myself confessing that I’d been coding since I was a little kid and my dad brought home our first PC Jr. I learned LOGO and BASIC on PCJr’s and TRASH80’s. I learned unix and grep and vi on an OSCAR and an old AT&T office box with a dumb terminal. I taught myself everything I ever learned. I did take one class in Pascal, but quickly learned that languages are just means to an end. Algorithms are what matter. Anyway, I’ve said many times in my life, and in this blog, that I’m not a programmer. I’m a designer. Sometimes I’m a hack programmer. Sometimes I’m a hack designer. Maybe I’m just a sometimes-hack programmer/designer. Maybe I’m starting a new niche, or part of a growing (or possibly dying) trend. Who knows? The thing is, people like me don’t meet a lot of other people like me when there in situations like I’m in. If you’re people like me and you’re reading this blog, email me and hey, let’s be friends.

Oh, and hey, for those of you keeping track, I got 3 more requests for the code for my contact form today. All happily fulfilled, just for the record.