David B. Calhoun’s Blog

You know what, despite my friends mocking me, I’m doing quite well. I am more profilic than I ever have been. I’ve been successfully updating three blogs and I’m learning a lot of things on my own for once.

I was going to complain about being mocked, but you know what, screw them.

While once describing my frustration over a girl, I was told I really deserve better anyway. You know what, that’s true. I do deserve better. Maybe I even deserve better friends.

I have always done my best work by myself, isolated and alone. That’s where my most meaningful contributions are made. They’re not made at endless drunken parties or being a non-contributor to society while playing endless video games. Or spending endless amounts of cash on new gadgets. #*% that. I realized early on, while that stuff is fun and neat and all, it entirely misses the meaning of life. People complain about not knowing the meaning of life, meanwhile they don’t even get off the couch or stop partying to think about it for themselves.

In short, damn you all for being so blind and for calling ME blind. And for implying that I’m somehow crazy or need professional help because I don’t enjoy the bullshit and crap that you guys enjoy.

I want to kick myself for not being confident in myself with saying this earlier, but I’m quite confident I’m not off the mark with this post.

I’m doing well. Quite well, thanks.

How is it that a lame man does not annoy us while a lame mind does? Because a lame man recognizes that we are walking straight, while a lame man says that it is we who are limping. But for that we should feel sorry rather than angry.

Pascal, Pensees (#98)

Trying to get back into the hang of school. Looks like I’ll be concentrating on that for the next couple years, as I should be I suppose. Might’ve taken me ten years to finish while working full time…

Well, it’s another Friday night, and I just got paid. Sitting here at home again trying to be productive…

It feels like I’ve lost a job. I guess it’s easy to feel that way after you get a phone call telling you how much the job is offering you, and that you’ll be sent the offer letter the next day. Then to be called the next day by your manager and told that basically there was a mix-up and I’m not eligible for the position. And never to hear from HR again…

Yeah, so that was this week.

Oh well, my resolve is strengthened and I continue to carry on with my personal projects. My WWI flight sim site is still coming along very well. I continue to have a blast updating it and watching all my visitors come by. I now have the game developers themselves coming to me and corresponding with me! Or something similar, where I’m actually mistaken for the game developer and as a result, and I’m contacted by a distributor who’s anxious to hear of the release date.

I just launched the Forum over there, which isn’t wildly popular, but does have some people signed up and posting already, which is a good sign.

Also, if you couldn’t tell by now, sometimes I’m pretty open and honest on my personal blog here. But I’ve had a desire recently to keep up a professional web development blog, which I launched this summer. I’m starting to hit a stride with it finally. As a study more and more, and as I just maintain my website, I’ll update it with any stuff I learned. It’s sure to be useful to someone, somewhere…

Most people know Beethoven’s Fifth symphony for its famous opening four notes - “Dat Dat Dat Daah”. But recently I’ve come to appreciate it for it other movements. Up until recently I’ve enjoyed the beauty of the second movement. But one of the most amazing parts of the entire symphony is the fourth movement, which starts with a great crescendo that’s almost startling after the long calm of the third movement.

This is my life - for the longest time, a leaf floating on the calm waves, letting the waves take me wherever it leads. And then - BANG! The fourth movement, and I am now the wave that crashes onto the rocks by the shore. Timpani drums sound and the great waves roar and let themselves be heard. This is my life now - the crescendo at the start of the fourth movement:

Dreamhost and my website and having issues co-existing. Up until recently, I hadn’t cracked down on some hotlinking of my images, and they were being requested like crazy. So my solution was to finally do what I should’ve done long ago: disable hotlinking of images.

My webserver is run by Dreamhost, which honestly has been a great web provider and really hasn’t given me issues until now. However, since I’m on shared hosting, they have to load balance their servers with special script killers. For instance, if my site begins hogging up too much resources via PHP pages, the script killer will kill off the process, resulting in a 500 Internal Server Error.

The thing is, the script killer seemed to not only kill the process but kill the original PHP script as well. This resulted in this blog as well as my new one-entry developer blog being completely broken. It also killed off some other PHP scripts on my site, including the home page, which is dead simple, but uses some PHP includes. As a result, most of my website remained inaccessible for probably way too long. I have been busy lately with school and work, but I was really neglecting this site!

Anyhow, things seem to be under control now, but I’m still trying to get stuff up and running.

In the meantime, my WWI Air Combat site seems largely unaffected, which is strange, since it runs on the same server and uses custom PHP scripts that I built to run it.