What am I going to do?

I am 19 years old. I will be turning 20 at the end of January. All my plans for college so far have been blown to shit by recent life happenings, but I have a nice job right now. I work with great people and I can think of only a few jobs that I would rather have than the one I have now. I live in downtown Dallas in a nice apartment, I even have a backyard. I am a trains ride away from anything I could ever want.

I have the feeling I have grown up way faster than any of my friends. I also have no idea what I am doing. I don't know how to manage my money, though I try and assume I am doing it right. I just make stuff up as I go, which works when you are 19, in college, still dependent on your parents, and have only your classes to worry about. That is something I have had to learn the hard way. I know I have probably pissed off some of my coworkers by taking the "throwing darts in the dark" approach to things, but that is always how I have handled things and it hasn't failed me that often.

At every job I have had, I have been the youngest person there. At Joe's Crab Shack, I start 2 days after I turned 17, 17 being the youngest you could start working there. After that, I moved on to Computer Care of Arlington, where it was me, a college guy named Kyle (a senior), and Chris (my boss) (eventually, Geoff came on after Kyle left, I am not sure who is older between the two of us). I left Computer Care after a year and a half to work at a place called VALID Systems. I was the youngest by 10 years-ish. I now work at a place called Institution Solutions with a bunch of great guys whom are, of course, considerably older than me (8+ years).

Sometimes I wonder if I did miss anything not working with people my age. Don't get me wrong, I don't regret any of what I did and would still do it over. In school, all I did was write programs, study computers, how they worked, why they worked, etc... instead of doing my school work, which pissed off a fair share of my fellow students (including my friends). I didn't hang out with people very much, outside of people on the intertubes.

To tell you the truth, I am not even sure if I want to be a (professional) programmer for the rest of my life. I would much rather be a musician, and if I can make that happen, which I don't see why I can't, I will gladly take the job. I enjoy programming thoroughly. My problem is I don't do well working on a single project for months at a time. I suck it up and do my best, but it certainly isn't enjoyable to me.

I guess what I am trying to say is that, even though I have taken a radically different route than my friends, I have ended up in the same boat. I don't know what I am doing or what I am going to do in the future. All I know is "let the chips fall where they may". I have friends whom are entirely too concerned about who they are now that they aren't paying attention to who they will be in ten/twenty/X years. They seem to be even more lost than I am.

So if anyone out there thinks that i had this planned all along, or that I have some kind of plan, you are completely, utterly wrong. And I wouldn't have it any other way. It is too much fun :-).

Eh, book meme :-)

Here are the rules:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

And the result:

Setting an images border property to none will remove those ugly borders.

From: "The CSS Anthology: 101 essential tips, tricks, and hacks" by Sitepoint

Pretty sexy tabs in CSS

So, I figured out how to do some pretty sexy tabs in CSS. Works inf Firefox, dunno about anything else since no extensive research has gone into it (highly doubt it will work with IE properly).

.navbar
{
width: 1000px;
height: 20px;
text-align: center;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
padding-left: 0.5px;
padding-right: 0.5px;
}

.navfill
{
width: 1000px;
border-bottom: solid 1px #000;
padding-bottom: 1px;
float: left;
position: absolute;
z-index: -1;
}

.navele
{
border-left: solid 1px #000;
border-right: solid 1px #000;
border-top: solid 1px #000;
padding-left: 10px;
padding-right: 10px;
height: 20px;
float: right;
margin-right: 5px;
vertical-align: bottom;
position: relative;
}

.navele_current
{
border-left: solid 1px #000;
border-right: solid 1px #000;
border-top: solid 1px #000;
padding-left: 10px;
padding-right: 10px;
height: 20px;
float: right;
margin-right: 5px;
vertical-align: bottom;
z-index: 1;
position: relative;
background-color: #fff;
}



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<div class="navfill" >&nbsp;</div>
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Revamping volatileminds.net

I am going to start revamping volatileminds.net, make it more dynamic (right now, it is completely static and the only way I can change something is to edit the HTML directly). I am thinking of using a fusion of Worpress and my own little hackery to do this, that way I can have the rich plugin interface Wordpress has. I will be completely redoing the stylesheet, new colors, etc... I am also moving all my projects (the ones with code anyway, which is all but the ClamAV Live CD) to an SVN repo that I installed on vm.n yesterday. I think that with my new job, new apt, new everything, I should bring everything in a full circle and redo my website as well.

I would also like to add to the web site, I have music and things I would like to put up there that I have recorded over the past few months, make it easier for me to add various (code) projects, which is why I think I will be using Wordpress stuffs.

Has anyone out there integrated some sort of CMS with their website? If so, what did you use? I am partial to Wordpress because it is PHP. We use Umbraco at work, but I am not sure how well it would work with mod_mono and I am not terribly fond of it myself anyway.

Obligatory election post

I have found within the recent months, discussing politics and such, that many (if not most) of the people that I consider intellectual (not just intelligent, or smart, as there is a difference) are voting for Obama. I also find that the ones whom have no idea what they are doing and are only influenced by what the deem as "cool" are also voting for Obama. The ones that I consider not so intellectual (though maybe intelligent), but still at least have an understanding of what is happening are probably voting for McCain. Now, this is in no way a jab at anyone and there are certainly exceptions. This is just the trend that I have found, and I wish it weren't so.

McCain himself doesn't strike me as a particularly intelligent person, just from the way he talks, reading his facial expressions during the debates, mannerisms, etc... I also lean towards believing that people whom attribute various aspects of diplomacy and politics (or anything, for that matter) to God to not be all there in the head, which given our current national situation, isn't something I would feel terribly comfortable with. Obama, while attending church and saying he is Christian, doesn't seem to do this. In my opinion, I don't even think Obama is a Christian. He is probably an Athiest (or at least Agnostic), but if this were to become known, there wouldn't be a chance in Hell that he would become President (look at what happened to Romney, and he still at least believed in God).

All this being said, I have no room to talk. I am not even registered to vote. :-)