“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”
— Stuart Smalley

Back when I first moved into an apartment on my own, around 21 years old, I didn’t have an answering machine. This was around 1988-89, and answering machines were not ubiquitous like they are now. Many homes/families had one, but they were still relatively new. The very first message I ever left on an answering machine, when I called my best friend, whose family had just gotten one, was of our toilet flushing. Yes, it was as funny as I thought it would be.

The first few months in my own apartment, I kept thinking about all the calls I was missing without an answering machine. So I saved up some cash to buy one. I was very excited when I hooked it up and left my outgoing message — I expected to never miss a message ever again.

No one ever left a message. Either no one was calling while I was out, or no one cared to say anything when I personally didn’t answer their call. I couldn’t believe no one was calling me. Come on! Why was no one calling me? I got calls while I was at home. Eventually I came to accept that the answering machine was a waste of money — I wasn’t missing any calls while I was out. I just wasn’t as popular as I had deluded myself to believe.

With my old blog set up, I knew people wanted to comment on my posts, but with my simple HTML page arrangement, they couldn’t. So I finally got around to setting up some real blogging software, with lots of functionality (like comments), because I wanted to read all the comments I knew people wanted to make on my posts.

Just like with my first answering machine, I’m discovering that no one really is wanting to talk to me. Although, unlike with the early answering machine, I can actually tell that people do come here and read the blog. So I can keep deluding myself that this blog is a popular read.

[Actually, I don’t mind. I’m not writing all this stuff and junk to get comments. It’s just that the comparison to my old answering machine situation was funny.]

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I saw this statement on an Internet message board:

I normally don’t read blogs. I am not interested in what a person thinks of toast.

I don’t normally read blogs, either. It’s not that I’m not interested in what other people have to say on random subjects, it’s more that I just don’t have time. I barely have time to write my own daily blog. But I’ve looked around at some blogs.

Most blogs I’ve found that seem like they might be interesting enough to check more than once, are updated only rarely, if at all. I’ve found lots of blogs that have less than 20 entries. I’ve found blogs that have over 100 entries, but then never got updated after two, three, six years ago.

I’ve posted to this blog every day for almost a year now. I’ve only missed maybe 10 days — due to technical restrictions, not because I didn’t want to post or didn’t feel like posting or didn’t have anything interesting to write. And there have been several days that I’ve posted more than entry. As of today, I’ve made right around 400 posts to this site in 10 months.

Granted, most of the posts are either on mundane and lame topics, or are on topics many people aren’t interested in. I don’t post on politics — which I know is pretty much the whole purpose of blogs today — and I’m not especially trying to entertain anyone (other than me). This is mostly just an regular exercise for me to keep my writing brain cells in toned shape.

As for toast: I don’t have toast very often. When I do have toast, I like butter and strawberry jelly/jam on it. There’s one toast treat that I haven’t had in many years, something my step-dad taught me: toast with cheese and mayonnaise. You put a slice of bread on the cooking sheet, lay a slice of cheese (cheddar or American) on it, and heat it. Pull it out of the oven, slap on some mayonnaise, and eat it. Mmm. I need to do this again sometime soon.

Pathetic joke for the topic:
Q: What’s bread?
A: Raw toast.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I’ve set up the database and installed proper blogging software to use the database. I fiddled around with the code in the software to get the layout I wanted (almost), the basic features I wanted, and the space for expansion I wanted. I’m good to go, now.

Now as I write posts, the software does all the management functions — I can just concentrate on writing. And now this site is becoming easier to navigate for visitors. To the left, you see the Archives section and the Categories section. The months before April are still in the old basic Web page format, but I’ll be working to add all the posts to the database in the coming weeks, as I can. The “specialty” posts (on Games and Movies) are also still in the basic Web page format, but I’ll be moving them into the database, also.

To do all this changing over, I had to learn some PHP coding. I studied computer programming in high school (Basic) and early college (Fortran, COBOL, C, C++, Assembly), around 20 years ago. I’ve dabbled a little bit in HTML, but I always used a WYSIWYG editor to create my Web sites. So I have a base of understanding to build on for learning PHP. But I haven’t done any actual programming since school — my career went in a wholly different direction. I learned what I needed to know for this project as I played with the software.

I downloaded a basic theme for the Web site that I thought I could hack into what I wanted, and set about studying the code. I learned something that I had pretty much forgotten in the 2 decades since I last programed a computer: I like programming. It’s fun to get down into the lines and strings and characters of computer code. I used to enjoy translating machine language — that series of 1s and 0s, and occasional hexidecimal letters.

This week I looked at the code and starting finding the patterns and logic. I’ve never seen PHP before this, but all programming languages have patterns and logic. There are absolute right ways of doing things in programming languages.

This is a drastic difference from working with words. As a writer and editor of a human language, making a sentence, paragraph, and document “work” perfectly is sometimes an exercise in frustration. Human language is so subjective that no two writers or editors will always agree on how to convey a piece of information in text. I would imagine trying to learn a human language by reading a newspaper would drive a reader mad.

But learning PHP by reading .php files? That can be done, apparently. I’d read through the code, form an idea of how a particular part worked, make a change to the part, reload the Web page and check the results. The first few times I did this, I didn’t know what to expect from the results, but after a short while, I could predict the outcomes. And that’s when playing with the code and the Web pages were fun.

I had to do a hatchet job to the base theme to the point where the original layout is pretty much unrecognizable compared to my page layout. I see some errors here and there in my site, and I’ll be fixing them soon. But the basic look and functionality is here. I want to get this new page to look more like the old page in basic layout, but I’m not satisfied with the bland look. I’m going to play around with the colors and maybe some graphics as time goes on.

But for the time being, the base functionality and automation I need is here.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I’ve got to make a test of a new set up for this Web site, and tech support tells me the first part of this will take 24 to 48 hours to resolve. During this time, I won’t be able to update or add or remove any files from the host server. Then, after the first part, there may be another day or two that I need to test some things before continuing. So Total Bullgrit will be static for a little while — let’s plan on it being 5 days.

When I next update, I hope this site will be all new and improved. If the test fails to do what I want it to do, we’ll just be right back to like it is now. <crosses fingers>

See ya in a few days.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com