Ok, I’ve had a moment of clarity regarding this project I’ve been working on so long. The gist of it is, I was chasing a chicken… We have a saying around here, “HEY LOOK! A CHICKEN!” It means you’ve got some serious ADD goin on… or something…

Anyway, in other news, Rhys is feeling better and it looks like he might be able to avoid getting tubes in his ears. We will have to wait for the doc visit to know for sure, but here’s to hoping.

LOL I’m just kidding about changing the subject. I’m not that bad. Anyway, I decided to not reinvent the wheel and get back to my initial focus of developing properties, and not programming… If I have to do some programming along the way, great! But the goal is — and should remain — building properties and monetizing them.

This is going to be a bit of a tip with some Linux evangelism thrown in. So, I apologize in advance.

So, I tinker a bit with Web Development (see Quanta Plus). Far be it from me to claim to be a professional developer, because I don’t get paid for it, but I like to think I know my shit. Just humor me. Actually, the simplicity of my tip will probably work against the whole “know my shit” thing. So, wait it out and you will be rewarded with my humility.

Lately, all I’ve been doing is playing around with themes on my blog sites. One of the most frustrating things is developing on a production server. So set up a test server, you say! I did, so shut up. So, now I use my test server to test the themes before I copy them to the production sites (and no, the theme for this site isn’t done). Well, that is a huge pain in the ass too! So, laziness being the mother of good code and practice, I came up with a solution. I still develop on my test server, but I’ve created a symbolic link on my production server files. So, when I change the test server files and upload the project, it uploads to the test server. When I want to propagate it to the production server, I just load that project and hit upload. Since the theme portion is a symbolic link to the test server files, it uploads the finished product, and I save about seven clicks by not having to copy it back and forth! SEE!? Simple!

Here comes the Linux evangelism part. What is a symbolic link, you ask? Ahhh, my simple Windows user, a symbolic link is one of the most ingenious creations in computing. Am I right, brothers and sisters in *nixland? My friends on Unix, Linux, and BSD (including OSX) know the joys of the symbolic link.

It’s a very simple idea. Basically a symbolic link is a link in your file system that points somewhere else. Could be a file or a directory. You Windows users might then say, “well, that’s a shortcut, dumbass!”

Oh, simple Windows user, you don’t know the power of the symbolic link! Unlike shortcuts, symlinks are transparent to programs. So, programs read them as their linked counterpart, which is SUPER handy. Sure, you Vista users have Junction Points now, but it really pales in comparison… Come on, Microsoft! Symlinks have been around for YEARS! Get with the program, already!

So, yesterday morning I get a call at 0700 from mom… Let me preface this little anecdote by saying this is the woman who fought tooth and nail to upgrade her calculator of a computer some time ago. Because you know, it’s not important. She’s now on Vista (god help us) on a fairly new computer. Give me some time and I’ll get Linux on that machine. Anyway, this is also the woman who fought tooth and nail against a broadband connection. Because you know, it’s not important.

She calls me up this morning and her voice conveys a picture of a lady whose hair is standing on end, all her nails are bitten off, and she’s frothing at the mouth. Her first words to me are, “Please don’t be angry with me…” Unfortunately she has had the pleasure of waking me from my slumber before. On a sidenote, let me apologize to anyone who has been the victim of me waking up… My poor poor wife… She’s gotta deal with that for the rest of her life. So, the short of the story is my mom’s internet connection is down. I walk her through rebooting her cable modem, and all is well after that. She’d been up since 0300 dealing with this no doubt. And of course, she was nice and calm when she called, because you know, it’s not important. ;)