This blog will chronicle my attempts to improve my life.

Goals

3 Months:
- Meditate 2 times per day for 20 minutes
- Learn HTML & CSS
- Stop being a slob
- Fix car and sell it
- Un**** my finances

1 Year:

- Quit job
- Be proficient at coding
- Learn Spanish
- Achieve life balance on my terms

Long Term:
- Be able to take a vacation whenever I want


I'm a very lazy, naive, self delusional, and emotional person. I will probably not do any of this ****. I have done so much dumb **** to my life by simple inaction and sitting in front of my PC playing video games. I would have been better off doing a bunch of drugs as at least that has a social aspect to that. I will chronicle a lot of that and my attempts to fix the damage I have done.

I'm hoping this blog will help me crystallize my thoughts and help me follow through on my dreams.

Quit Job

So this is the primary reason for getting off my ass and changing my life. I had like 6 huge paragraphs typed out dealing with how much I hate my job and how I got here but I felt it was really boring so I deleted it all.

Basically, my job was cool but now it sucks. I get a pretty good salary but that doesn't mean too much to me. I have learned one thing about myself and its that I value life experiences most. I don't want to do this anymore.

My ideal work situation would be to work my ass off for a few months then take a couple months off. I see coding as a possible means to that end. I'm not sure where exactly I want to go with it but freelancing is attractive or hopefully I can get really good at it and leverage that into a job with a lot of flexibility.

I will probably not achieve what I am going for but it's something I have to try. If I fail I will learn a lot about myself and life and if I succeed more the better. I have pretty much no idea what I am doing. I barely know how the internet works. I have not taken a math class in 10 years. On one hand I feel that if I work hard I can definitely achieve the life I want. I have a good track record when I work hard but I do it very infrequently. Unfortunately, I am very lazy and easily distracted.

The past few days I have been learning HTML & CSS(mostly just HTML) from a book called Head First HTML & CSS. I think it's a really good book for beginners as it has a conversational style and doesn't just explain the different tags but gives you actual projects to work on. HTML is pretty easy and I'm probably wasting my time with it but I feel like starting from the ground floor.

Today I jumped ahead and decided to learn some actual coding from a book called Learning PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, CSS & HTML5. This seems like a really good intro to coding and web development.

One of the first steps in the book is to download a WAMP. I spent about 4 hours trying to get the WAMP working properly on my PC. It was an extremely frustrating experience. It still doesn't really work right but at least I can make a simple "hello world" in my browser. I downloaded an IDE and a program editor but I have no idea how they work. Is it worthwhile to spend money on these things? Right now I'm working with Komodo(trial) and Editra(free).

Also,

I have a short term goal to not drink any booze until my vacation to SF in two weeks. I had been sober for apx 45 days and feeling great till I slipped up this last weekend. Time to get back on the horse but no way I'm going sober in SF.

Hello Huskalator,

I wish you well in your quest.

I am a programmer. I've been doing it forever. I don't know the answers to everything but I will gladly be of help when I can. I'm not an HTML or CSS expert by any means.

For an IDE, get Eclipse. It is the industry standard, extremely robust, and it is free.

Thanks! I futzed around with Eclipse today and actually got a simple PHP file working which was cool. It took a while to understand how to get it to find the file. It's pretty obvious there is a lot going on here that is completely foreign to me but hopefully I will learn.

Keep going for your long therm goal.. every on should be able to achive this.

Huskalator,

In addition to your current resources, you should check out codecademy.com. They have modules for HTML&CSS, Javascript, and PHP. It's a pretty useful, interactive site. Great for pairing with additional resources like books and videos.