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Sunday, Cliff and I went to Ernie’s for brunch. We were having our typical pseudo-philosophical conversation, which is why I love Cliff.

As we were checking out, Cliff was talking about how he believed most people were inherently too weak-minded to control themselves (and thus people want control subconsciously). I asked him if he’d read Leviathan since it’s pretty much written from the same point of view. I paid the tab and Cliff got ready to pay the tip…which I had just thrown onto my tab.

At this point, the girl behind the register chimed in and said I’d already left a handsome tip. She further qualified this by saying it was a handsome tip from a handsome man. We laughed and left.

But hey, I’ve still got the magic

We’ve been playing Silent Hill: Origins. We didn’t have much hope for this game since it was a port from the PSP, but it’s actually great. I was really apprehensive about it from the beginning when I realized the development team was ‘merican instead of the Japanese team that usually makes Silent Hill games. You know, it seems like usually ‘merican games just get dumbed down a lot and usually go for more shooting and bigger guns instead of story or atmosphere. Some of this is sort of true - a lot of our fights have boiled down to us hitting monsters with toolboxes, TV’s, and meat hooks. But there have been several seriously frightening/creepy moments, which is refreshing after playing the other games in the series.

Just to test the waters, I checked around online to see who would give me a fixed-rate mortgage for a house and how much it would cost. I’m of the mindset that if I’m going to buy a house, I might as well get something nice. Not because I have fancy tastes, but because it’s an investment for the future. Surprisingly, I found that I could potentially be paying less on a house payment monthly than I’m paying in rent, and I also found that I have sufficient credit (and I get VA loans) to get a zero-down-payment loan. This has got me thinking wistfully because the first step is to choose where I want to live and, well, all my friends are in Columbia and I’m not.

I bet having said “mortgage” here invites a horde of spambots to come try to sell me stuff.

Work is good, but busy. I have been there a month and have only written like maybe 5 lines of PHP and absolutely no SQL at all. This is sad since I’m a PHP guy and that’s definitely my strong suit. I’ve been just doing all javascript and CSS.

Every time I write anything in javascript, I get worried. It looks cool and you can do fancy things with it. But sometimes people that don’t know any better will want to go crazy with it. The next thing you know, your website is like a really bad powerpoint presentation. I’m fighting the good fight though and I’m trying to keep usability at a maximum.

Currently, a large part of my job involves deciphering code written by a team that appears to have had some competition amongst themselves to see who could do things in the most backwards manner possible. There is some evidence of forethought in there, but not much. We have hundreds of pages and no database whatsoever, which to me is simply amazing (especially considering we include databases as a standard with all hosting packages). There are at least 70 cryptic text files scattered around in different directories. Last week I found a script whose only job seemed to be printing “Hello” when it gets a specific parameter passed to it. Why? I don’t know.

But, nevertheless, I get a vague feeling like someone had a REALLY good time hacking it all together. I mean a good time in that mad-scientist-IT-LIVES-kind-of-way. Sometimes it feels like a rogue intelligence is behind all of it and enjoys laughing at me as I try and understand why there is a chain of includes spanning across 20 scripts for no particular reason.

I loaded up on CD’s this weekend. I bought all the Explosions in the Sky, Red Sparowes, Dirty Three, and Pelican CD’s they had in stock. As I was checking out, the guy behind the counter said “Wow, you must really hate lyrics!”. Yes, yes I do.

I guess the only other thing worth mentioning is that I’m going to become a Zend Certified Engineer at some point when I get the motivation to take the test. I downloaded the study guide and realized that if the test is anything like the guide, it’s really just a test of general PHP knowledge. Right now my motivation is pretty low since it really doesn’t get me anything special, but perhaps that will change in the near future.