de Paul Warren

Posts Tagged ‘frustration’

My father has always been annoyed when I used the word “can’t,” or rather, the contraction. I guess he saw that as a sign I was giving up. I don’t quite remember as at that moment, I would usually tune out and roll my eyes. I was very negative then.

Much has changed since those times and I have picked up a much more positive attitude. It’s been so long that I’ve been like this now that only during times of true, painful stress will my negative side come out. But I’ve begun to notice that the phrase “I can’t” is once again entering my vocabulary. It seems in a different way this time.

As a Christian, I notice my failings a lot and it’s always when I try and truck it alone. But it’s not always my personal walk that I notice this. Since January of 2007, I have worked on a game called iKonquest. It’s gone through many stages but it has not caught on to the public. Reason being was for, in my view, my greatest failing. I don’t sell. I can’t sell. I won’t sell. This also includes marketing.

As the project itself has begun to grow, my eyes were opened to see that I could no longer do this as a one man show. Even if I were to finish the code. Nobody would play it, primarily because they won’t know it exists. Now that I have a few volunteers on board, things will get exciting. This will definitely be a great learning experience. One that I’m now ready to take on.

While “I can’t do this” is somewhat accurate, a more appropriate phrase would be: “I can’t do this alone.”

A fisherman, eh? I’m eating your friends. Lots of them. I pretty much need to in order to swallow. I woke up a few days ago with the start of a soar throat and only by eating the friends of fisherman would relieve me of my irritation. While it doesn’t hurt to talk, I sound like I’m on my last few days before I go for a tracheotomy.

I’m not thinking at a 100% either as I’ve been downing NeoCitran and Halls Centers as much as possible. It appears that while I may be very resistant to everything else: the flu, fevers, etc; My Achilles’ heel is soar throats and colds. If you’re within 100 km of me with a cold, guaranteed, I’ll catch it if I haven’t had it already.

As for the title of this post, that’s what I sound like half the time.

It’s hard to stay calm as time goes by. Seeing random shootings with no intent other than to hurt others. Violent pranks such as drive-by paintballing. Super companies raising prices just because they can. Vandalism for the sake of boredom. Criminals suing their victims and winning… This world sucks and it’s not going to get better. The only thing that has changed over the past thousands of years is that we have become much more “civilized” in how we act uncivilized.

In an age where having super powers or just being a regular vigilante is popular, I must remain at peace. It’s one of the hardest things to do: to be a victim of injustice and turn the cheek. It’s a simple lesson but one that can’t be ignored. Once I start daydreaming about being a superhero of any kind, even for just the “I’d be cool if I could…” kind, hatred will now have an opening to get in. Who thinks of super powers like: spontaneous kitten / puppy creation, shooting laughing gas out of your eyes, or any of the carebear’s powers? It’s all super strength, super speed, and sharks with lasers on top. And when was the last time you ever daydreamed about dealing justice but you nicely captured the bad guys without hurting a single one?

And without going to the weird super powers, I could simply just be that little bit stronger than the perpetrator. Deal him my own brand of four fingered justice. Being that extra bit faster when they show a weapon. Or possibly the nonviolent method of spinning your own scheme to get them caught in their own plans. Foiling a plot… but really.

It’s not that you can’t do the above and you should just sit and take it. I’ll be one to admit that in tough situations, I’d probably freeze up. But that’s not the point. You see…

It all comes back to Hatred.

And the more you focus on it, the more you become like it.

What is with the changing of the keys? I understand that there are different layout standards in other countries, but I’m sure the 2×3 Insert -> Page Down group has been like that for a while now. The only time it has changed was for laptops. As one who uses all 6 of those keys, I really don’t like when they start moving them around.

I’ve had frustrations with the backslash being beside the backspace, a small backslash with the backspace taking up the remainder of the gap, Enter being L shaped, and a few other minor layout changes. Thank goodness, that I haven’t experienced the backslash being to the right of the Right Shift key!

But those were all 1-2 key repositioning. I use all 6 of the “Home/End” block. So far I’ve pressed Home when I wanted Insert, End for Home, Pageup or Pagedown for End, End for Pageup… although I’ve never accidentally hit Insert as It’s not even in the same area anymore.

All in all, I like being able to type without having to look at the keyboard, but when they keep changing the layout of some of the keys, I have to constantly look after I notice the key I intended to hit produced a different result… because it was no longer the same key. If they keep changing the keys around, I’ll have to get myself a DX1 Input System – Fully customizable keyboard and layout the keys as how they should be.

My eye is beginning to twitch faster now. I’ve suffered about a year’s worth of inadequate web hosting service. The server is up, the server is down. MySQL won’t work or is broken. Tech Support is responsive 50% of the time. As of this article, the email server is not responding. I was about to make another Support Ticket but guess what… the ticket database was down!! Jeez!

It hasn’t always been like this. I’ve used their service for about 5 years or more. When I first signed up it was great. For several years everything was fine. Then I noticed that things started to crap out. So being a loyal customer, I simply just switched servers and everything was fine again. But I’ve been neededing to do that (jumping servers) almost twice a year lately to keep ahead of the servers going to hell.

Why not move? Well I’m poor. I can’t afford large service charges and the other reasonable ones don’t offer the needed services this one does. It DID work at some point. So it’s not like I had troubles from the start and should have known to switch early on. And when the problems started, I was thinking of just waiting out the problem and it will pass. But in order to move servers to a different provider, I need to be certain of a few things. #1. They must support the version of PHP I want. Too low and I’m not using them. I can’t downgrade all my code to suit them… even with the risk that they won’t be good either. MySQL needs to be high enough too. They can’t be anal about their transfer limits or speeds. I won’t sign up with someone who’s just going to charge me a huge number or cancel my services or automatically upgrade me in the case of one of my sites having a spike of popularity. I’d rather be warned first so I can prepare to respond. I need appropriate access to the files. None of this CPanel crap.

So the only solution I can think of currently is either finding someone who can fit my requirements, or possibly strike a deal with dedicated hosting if I provide the actual server. I’m willing to buy a server if it means my monthly cost is low.

This is really beginning to peeve me though. I’m struggling to develop a few applications, yet I find myself fighting with the stability of the servers more than my own code.