I awoke yesterday morning with a sensation that the top of my esophagus had been permanently closed down due to a blockage of chilli’s intermingled with gravel.  As pleasant as this was to wake up to I decided that going to work wasn’t in my (or (s)hell’s) best interest.  Once I calmed my throat down enough by drinking copious amounts of tea I started watching Grey’s Anatomy (seriously?) and doing some photoshop tutorials.  The day disappeared quite quickly.  My throat got steadily better.

I have enjoyed learning applications through books, so the photoshop tutorials are starting get a little tedious.  I much prefer learning through the practical application of the tools that I am working with but the only way to pick up some of the basics (and even some of the fun shortcuts) is through studying the books.  The Adobe classroom in a book series is excellent, and they are designed so that you can do one lesson at a time from anywhere in the book.  I have a Illustrator one waiting for me when I finish the photoshop book, although I am more likely to just ‘dip into’ that for lessons that take my interest. 

I was on a SQL: Oracle course November last year and unfortunately have had no practical application of the subject I was taught since then.  I was surprised when someone asked me today if I could use my SQL skills to change this that and the other in a database we are currently working with.  Two things went through my mind:

1. No, are you crazy that would take a long time and I have better things to be getting on with (like my blog).
2. Erm, why not use this other method and do it in five minutes?

I am not sure what made me laugh more, the fact that I would have to go and get into SQL books again to change the database or how quickly it could be changed using a different method in a different application. 

I feel like we are drowning in a sea of applications.

It also reminded me of trying to install Apache and php on my desktop at home so that I could start playing about with php pages.  I basically spent an entire weekend trying to get php installed correctly so that Apache would recognise it.  Even though there were many internet pages that explained what lines of code you needed to change and the book I was reading from was explicit in what was required I just could not get it to install.  I was very deflated by the end of the weekend, knowing that it was just something small and stupid that stopped me from getting this installed.  Of course, I ended up un-installing everything after finding an application that packaged everything together, including MySQL.  Quite annoying, but it works and does what I need.

I also, as you may have noticed, started using Clicky as my counter for web hits etc.  I am interested to see who is reading (if anybody) and where they come from.  As you can imagine there were about three billion different types of counter to choose from and I guess clicky won, for me, due to the cool little feature they have with Google maps.  I am sure there are at least a dozen more counters that have the same feature but alas clicky was the one I choose before I gave up the will to live.