The Fence is Complete!
Yes, you read that correctly! The chain link fence project is complete! My hands feel like 2 leather gloves, and my body feels stiff as a board, but the fence is complete and the dogs love it! They can go out whenever they want. The neighbors won’t get harassed as much, and my wife and I can easily let the pups out to do their business while taking care of baby number 2!
Looking back on the project I learned many things. You don’t have to put the corner and gate posts in concrete blocks below the frostline. This is a chain link fence, not the Great Wall of China. I’m not expecting this thing to outlast me, but it should be around for 10 - 20 years, give or take…
I also learned that chain link fabric is super heavy when it’s rolled up. No-one on earth knows what a fence post driver is unless they have already installed a chain link fence. Staff at Princess Auto don’t want to help you find this obscure weighted metal tube, but they do have the nicest public washrooms I have seen in a long time.
PRO TIP: Do your public 1’s and 2’s at Princess Auto when you can!
On a different topic… Today I came up with a super 90’s website design that I might try and incorporate into this website. I was doing some colouring with my son and after we had finished I went to put our work up on the fridge, but realised we are running out of space and fridge magnets. I would like to keep all of the nice things he has made so we can look back on them as he grows up. That’s when the idea struck me! ⚡💡 Why not make a one page website where the whole website is an infinite scrolling fridge door, and all the artwork can be scanned into the computer and put on the fridge?! Dates/age can be added from time to time so we can keep track of what was done and when. It would also mean that all the physical artwork is digitally backed up on a PC and a website in case anything happens to the originals. We will see where this idea goes I think! Could be a long night of scanning in my near future. Watch this space!
On to topic the third. I have been helping people on the Neocities subreddit with code snippets. It feels great to be on the other side of the hill from where I started just over 4 years ago. When I began learning to program I would see all these posts on Stack Overflow, and similar sites where people posted such complex looking answers to peoples questions. Then I slowly began to understand what was a good answer, and what was a not so good answer.
SIDE NOTE: Fuck Stack Overflow. I find the culture on there is pretty toxic and shits on new people that are just trying to learn. There are also built in checks and requirements for how you ask a question and how you can edit/update your questions. These are not that great for people just starting out, and people starting out are probably the intended audience for Stack Overflow. Just my 2 cents. I have never posted a question on there, and I have found helpful answers on there, but the general vibe is meh and the answers I get are 50/50 on whether they actually help solve the issue. Rant over…
Anyways… After starting this site I thought I would lurk in the Neocities subreddit and maybe learn some more about the indieweb community. I saw a few programming posts on there and they weren’t getting many responses so I took a run up at the issue and gave them a code snippet to use. They aren’t the most difficult of issues, but it has been nice to stretch my HTML, CSS and JavaScript legs a bit. I don’t use those languages very much any more.
The people I have sent snippets to have been very grateful for the help, and the code has actually worked for them. 4 years ago I would have said that this was an impossible stage for me to reach. Now I am here and I feel great that I am able to help others and I understand so much more about how all this stuff works.
I played Guitar and did Music related things for pretty much my entire life. From age 10 until around age 25 I was playing music regularly, teaching guitar, gigging, recording, reading about guitar/guitarists/music production/music history, learning about guitar/guitarists/music production/music history, I went to University to study Music performance and production, I worked in a recording studio for years, etc… I was working in music professionally for years throughout School, College, University, and beyond. I lived and breathed music all the time. I never thought it would be possible for me to reach the same level of proficiency in another subject, but I feel like I may be able to reach a similar point with programming someday. I live and breathe that now instead of music as much. I love doing it, reading about it, seeing things work, figuring out problems, learning so many new things, discovering new things, working through bugs, learning about programming standards and limitations of certain languages and hardware. It feels amazing to be able to write code and communicate with other professionals about code and programming. I went from watching Web Dev Simplified on YouTube and not understanding what a “div” tag was all about, to building this website using HTML, CSS, Jekyll and Vim. I remember struggling to write a dice rolling program in Python, and only 2 years later I wrote a port of Wordle in Progress ABL to show my boss and his boss that I should be moved into the open programmer position (worked like a charm!).
There are still days where it takes me a couple of hours to figure out that I am using a string in place of an integer and that’s why the program won’t run… Or I might be reading documentation and cannot figure out what the hell it is trying to say… BUT this is par for the course. These days exist for everyone in every field, it is natural. What I am trying to say is: “You got this!” If your learning something new and it just isn’t working, or your finding it hard to keep up your enthusiasm, that is OK! Just walk away and come back the next day. You can do it! You might be learning to make scrambled eggs today and can’t see how anyone can cook like Gordon Ramsay, but in 3 or 4 years you might be writing your own food blog and cooking things that you could only dream of right now. Not only is there ALWAYS time to learn a new skill or hobby, there is also time to learn it deeply, and a little obsessively! This is great news for me because that is apparently just how I like it! 😁
Alright. I have waffled on for enough for today. Speak to you later! 👋
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