Brooke and I are deep in the PHP trenches these days, parsing our way through the ifs, elses and thens of C-based protocol. Being relative newbies to this particular domain, we’re learning that programming can be an unforgiving beast, and you confuse its symbology at your own peril. Here’s a guide to some of the biggest repeat offenders:

The Semicolon - Previously known as the prefix of impish “winky” emoticons and grammatical structures whose rules exist only on the quantum level, this tough customer will make or break you. It will, in fact, probably do both of things, multiple times, within a single function. Don’t leave home without it.

Brackets - Infuriating little things which create tesseracts of nested logic that eventually become impenetrable to mere human analysis. Did you open one of these? Well, it better have a corresponding close-out waiting, else the complex architecture you’ve been slowly piecing together will come crashing down while you scream fruitlessly at the uncaring sky.

Double Quotes - Due to PHP’s overlap with HTML, quotes become a sticky situation. Sometimes, you have to “escape” them, because you want quotes to happen within quotes, which is an intention that a computer cannot parse, because computers are just so mean, dangit. Don’t even ask about putting quotes within quotes within quotes. Just don’t.

Okay, so, I kid. Sort of. Like any other skill which involves the encoded creation of a thing - a thing that works, in a way recognizable to other humans! - from nothing, it’s joyful when you get something right, and to have that moment of pride turn into a platform for even more advanced creations. At the same time, that process of getting it right? Mount a pillow to your desk, else you’ll wear a permanent indentation there from where forehead met wood at alarmingly high speed.

Song for the Day: Boards of Canada - Mansel

So, while I wasn’t looking, my first anniversary of being a Louisvillian (a term rife with possibility) came, then went, which was surprisingly anti-climactic. Despite the predictions of certain miscreants, I have not, as of yet, plumbed those depths of musical possibility offered by the Hooting Jug, nor have I evolved a mandibular appendage that suspiciously resembles a corncob pipe. I do like Gumbo now, though, so that’s probably something.

Regional shifts aside, however, a year in Louisville also means that I’ve also have hit a full year of employment at CurrentMarketing, which really is something. A ride, really, and one whose wholly positive effects it seems only proper to chronicle in this here space.

Coming into CurrentMarketing, I was a mix of overconfident bravado and terrifying insecurity. Sure, I knew my stuff when it came to front-end HTML/CSS work, but it was knowledge cobbled together off of the electronic equivalent of old milk cartons and coffee-stained magazine inserts. I’d handled the web presence of whole medical colleges before, but that was a case of replacing trundling brachiosaurs with experimental mammalians - the improvements were clearly there, but long-term sustainability was far from a foregone conclusion. Were these here skills up to commercial snuff?

Well, kinda. Which is to say that my abilities were far from flawless, but my higher-ups on the CM ladder were happy to toss me into the deep end and shout advice on how to swim. A mix of healthy Googling and a somewhat psychotic set of standards (“no, link, you cannot just be an ‘a’ tag around an image - that’s what losers do”) allowed me to navigate my way to a shallowing in which I’m at least slightly more comfortable, despite being lost within an impenetrable metaphor.

Really, there are a million things I appreciate about working at CurrentMarketing, but one that’s always stood out is the amount of trust placed in my abilities - and my ability to improve those abilities - without a lot of hand-holding. I always like to say that, as a company, we punch above our weight, and the ability to hand something off to another Lightbulb, then move on to the next project without worry of how it’ll be handled is probably part of that. Thanks for a great first year, everybody. Hope to have many more.

Song for the Day:

Minus the Bear - Houston, We Have Uh-Oh

I’ve not written about it here before, but I’m, at most, two shades from being a full-blown WordPress evangelist. Have you heard the good news? WordPress is awesome! It’s clean, it’s lean, it’s mean and it gets done what needs doin’.

...and now it won’t support Internet Explorer 6.

I should be giddy, right? IE6 is, after all, awful. It’s a required showing in lists of the top ten worst software products of all time, and provided training wheels for all the spyware, malware and other computer problems that now plague us. If Skynet were built today, you can forget about John Connor - Terminators would be sent back to the late 90’s, programmed to clean house in Redmond. Yes, post-apocalyptic wars are important and all, but this is about dignity, people.

At the same time, though, CurrentMarketing can’t simply be concerned with tech improvements. We have clients, and those clients have customers, and despite a shocking amount of recent progress in eliminating IE6 from the marketplace, it’s still a prominent portal for browsing the web. It’s great when tech companies like Google un-hitch their wagon from Microsoft’s biggest blunder, but we can’t do that. So, much as I’d love to celebrate my favorite little piece of web software doing good in the world, we’re now going to have to evaluate every site we make with WordPress and make sure that it won’t be completely undone by this change. Moves like this are good in the long-term, but sometimes, you end up wishing you just could re-invent the internet.

Song for the Day :

Explosions in the Sky - Last Known Surroundings

Okay, so, time to admit it...I kinda like Facebook!

Yes, okay, so does everyone, to a point. However, ubiquity is its own enemy, and the long-awaited Facebook Backlash has been in full effect for a while now. First came the privacy outcry. Then The Social Network. Now that the inevitable articles (warning - naughty language ahead) about the various evils of Facebook, and social media as a whole, are starting to surface in multiple publications, with overblown phrases like “Digital Feudalism” and comparisons to the truly awful 90’s era AOL, I think we’ve gotten to the silly stage that these sorts of social trends inevitably end up in.

I’m especially puzzled by the implication that social media sites have ensnared their audiences in some sort of pyramid scheme of free content production. They provide a space for users to connect and interact, completely free of charge, and serve up advertising in order to monetize the effort. In other words, they’re using the same business model Google’s been getting by on for close to a decade now, which has worked out pretty well for users, Google and society at large.

You can view Facebook as profiting off the work of its users if you really want to, but at the end of the day, they’re not charging a fee to frolic through their garden whose only definition is its walls. They provide a platform, constantly work to expand and improve it, and host what is almost certainly the largest site in the history of the internet on server farms whose operating costs almost certainly outstrip the GDP of whole countries - all for absolutely no cost to the user. I fail to see the scam.

Is Facebook all good? Heck no! There are days here in the Geek Suite where we want nothing more than to catapult several thousand megatons of high-grade explosives through the stratosphere with an end destination of Palo Alto - ℅ Mr. Mark Zuckerberg - and never look back. Behind the scenes, Facebook is a seething mess of inconsistent policies and back-end design that seems to change requirements like Lady Gaga goes through costumes, complete with the odor of rancid beef. In this regard, Facebook can be more villainous than valiant.

At the same time, it’s still the number one online destination for a reason. It lets me play Scrabble with friends on different continents, or keep touch with locals for whatever gaming shenanigans I might be getting up to. It keeps me connected with the  sort of wonderful miscreants I enjoy the company of, all for nothing more than the price of a few irritating Farmville invites. Thankfully, there’s a button that solves that sort of problem.

Besides, Facebook’s rise killed MySpace. For that alone, we ought to cut them some slack.

Song for the Day:
Superchunk - Digging For Something

So, my mom called me up a few days ago to tell me that she was going to try and get a grant to make a smart phone app. This all but caused me whiplash while I nervously scanned the landscape for legions of rampaging, weaponized Tyrannosaurs or other signs of mass, global higgledy-piggledy. It was a little jarring.

See, my mom’s never been the most technologically-oriented person. She’s no Luddite - thirty-odd years of work in nursing doesn’t allow for such frivolities - but the world of computers has simply never been her thing. There’s a number of funny family stories relating to this (I’ll never forget the morning I was walking out the door to go to school, only to hear her scream “Brian! The White House is a porn site!” Oh, the 90’s. You happened), and my general assumption upon giving her my old G1 was that she would use it as a phone, and all the extra options would be pleasantly but firmly ignored.

Then she started texting. That’s normal enough. It’s just short-length communication; e-post-its, if you will. The use of net lingo was a bit perplexing, since even I won’t use it (I’ve got an English Degree to maintain, damnit), but it’s just a time-saver. Apps, though? Nothing of the sort. Impossible. She couldn’t even know the word...

Wrong I was, as it turns out. Not only did she grasp the concept, but she began to apply it cleverly to the medical field. It’s a reminder that successful technological advances are user-friendly. So, while CurrentMarketing is always paying attention to new trends, we also have to pay attention to the way in which we apply them if we want our clients (and their customers) to harness them properly.

Since the blog’s recent upgrade, we’ve had some fairly interesting chatter come down the pipes. Angela’s recent piece on Lemonade: Detroit was picked up on by the film’s producer/director, Erik Proulx, who left a happy, hopeful note, thanking Angela for her support. More recently,  Earndit co-founder Andres Moran commented on Dennis’ blog entry about the company, offering both gratitude and a clarification. Upon hearing about this attention, both Dennis and Angela lit up like Christmas trees. Angela made a ‘squee’ noise. All was good with the world.

I’ve run numerous websites and webcomics in my day, and once had a year-long stint doing a daily comic strip for Michigan State’s student newspaper; the sinking feeling that one’s work simply languishes, unheralded and unremarked upon by the public at large, is one I know all too well. Regardless of the time one puts into it, anything sent out to the electronic public at large is an expenditure of effort, created in the hope that it reaches the eyes and ears of viewers who take interest in the topic at hand. Without feedback, the process becomes a glum exercise in shovelling one’s energy into the void, always becoming more and more difficult to sustain in the face of towering silence.

Just one positive comment, though, can make the whole thing worthwhile. Even better if that reaction engages with the material in some way, becoming a conversation rather than a ping sent to one’s own synaptic server space. We end up having a lot of blog entries turned in late here (like, er, this one - sorry Katy!), and I . This post is just a reminder that, yes, people are watching, reading and interacting all the time. Join in!

It’s strange to keep remembering that, even while our daily lives remain fairly recognizable, the future keeps happening.

Quantum teleportation? Done, to a range of ten miles, just this May. Remember how everyone pretended to be afraid that the Large Hadron Collider was going to destroy the world in its singularity-inducing quest to find the Higgs bosun particle? We’ve been teasing the boundaries of causality for almost a decade now. The whole thing seems downright quaint anymore.

Musical instruments operated solely by your mind? Apples in Stereo frontman Robert Schneider has that covered. Heck, you’ve been able to buy simple, EEG-controlled games for a few years now. They sit on the toy store shelf, happily co-existing next to the umpteenth version of Star Wars Monopoly.

Oh, and the first successfully self-replicating synthetic life form no longer dwells in the realms of science fiction.

Just your daily reminder that, yes, the world is very strange. Try to enjoy it!

Song of the Day:
Dance Floor by The Apples in Stereo