Out on a limb...

So...I don't have a solution for the previous religion post. I just know I fail alot when it comes to matters of philosophy, and in matters of psychology - I find that I am an exception because of the skewed perspective I have of things. So, I'm just going to go about my business, with whatever direction the whims of my mind take me...and lately there has been new direction.

It's been a month into this year already, and my local friends (which were formerly my Plano Friends) and I have been going on photoshoots with some of the younger-crowd from flickr...namely Rachel and Eric to this point...and it's been fun. It's been good to get out of the house, and find something creative to do - to try and get some different perspective on the world, but not perspective that I have to adhere to.

Like I've mentioned in previous posts I've been doing a lot more coding lately - even more at work, and that too has given me a different perspective on things. It's kind of empowering really to realize that it's withing one's realm of accomplishment to think of what hasn't been done, but would serve one's purposes better - and then to go do it. I envy the ability of carpenters and electrical engineers to build things like buildings and electronic devices on a whim. But at the same time, I'm glad that I can either write or hack computer code to make it do what I want on a whim.

I started working on the FreeformFrog.com store this past weekend, and I nearly finished the modifications to the code, and the new design graphics, and most of the configuration in just one day. You'd think it would be simple since I've restarted this store at least 5 times in the last 5 years. But this time, I gave myself a fixed date for completion, and it should be live and accepting orders March 1, 2009.

I decided that since my boss won't let me design our new store in the manner that it needs to be designed and developed, then it would behoove me to create another source of income for myself, incase things do not go as well as planned.

I'm finding it more difficult than any previous website that I've designed, because I'm apprently not the one designing it - even though I have to come up with preliminary designs in order to convey the page structure and technology to a handful of people who were, apparently, born with no imagination whatsoever.

Whatever. It's just a testament to the fact that if I were allowed to handle this as the web developer, since I'm sitting in that position at the moment, I'd already have a working website up by now - we started in November.

On that note, and having said everything this far, I've made a subconscious decision to move forward in this direction...to start expanding my skills on the things that I have been putting off for years because I didn't believe I could do it. Something changed this past winter though, and all the sudden, I was able to formulate the internal workings of information systems in my head.

It's just reinforcement, I guess, that it's what I'm made to do...and it has become a cure for the bordem that was starting to set in being couped up in the apartment all weekend. So that, combined with adding a couple friends to the group on a more regular basis, has got me feeling like I'm going out on a new limb to see what's at the end of it.

Week 1 - 10 days in...

It's been around 10 days now since I moved to Plano...and I still have boxes to unpack. I'm not worried about them though - they're either decorations for the various rooms, or stuff that I don't need to hook-up/use.

But I don't really want to talk about moving. I like my apartment, and definitely like that my "work day" has been reduced by 1/3, or 4 hours, since I don't have to ride the train anymore.

Lately work is starting to stress me out. I don't get stressed easily, and generally can handle everything that's given to me in a timely manner. But lately, we've decided that we are going to recode/rewrite the entire Yahoo Store that we're using. That's great! We can finally clean up some things that needed to be cleaned up since it was first sloppily put together by the person that they paid to write the code.

The problem with that - is that I'm still expected to continue being the System Admin, and Help Desk, and Network Admin...as well as the Project Manager for this project, and two parallel ones - generating a Non-Yahoo Store, and doing research on getting a better internet connection to the building.

Normally, I wouldn't have a problem doing all these things - however, I'm dealing with a generational gap that is causing some communication issues and a lot of frustration on my end. I'm dealing with a boss who is used to doing things one way - the same way he's done them for the past 8 years, who has been involved on the day-to-day operation of the site/store, and only within the last 2 years has moved further from the day-to-day, and is more week-to-week.

That's fine. The problem I have with that, is that things aren't the same way they were in 2000. The internet changes every 6 months or less. I kinda thought that by hiring a bunch of 20-somethings, that we were going to be tapped for our expertise on the internet, how it works, what it can do, and how people use it. Apparently that was not the case. We are being tapped for all that information, but not to use it with how the internet is currently being used - no...to use it for how we've always done business.

I understand it's a tough thing to let someone else take over the production, design, and marketing of one's livelihood - one's baby that they've built from the ground up...the one thing they know inside and out. But just like Microsoft had to give up Bill Gates in order to move forward with the new way people are using computers, so should other sites that have been around as long. I guarantee that if I still had the-spot.net looking like it did during tsn I, II, or III - it'd still be dead like it was after tsnI and II. But I'm not here to talk about the health of tsn - that's a factor of the free-time I have to work on it vs responsibilities.

Basically what frustrates me, is that I would like a hands-off kind of management. I get a lot more done when I don't have a boss around that is interested in having a meeting about something, and then giving out directives to go and do something that we've already decided amongst ourselves is a bad idea. I make a list, work the list, and when I'm done, that is when there should be a meeting...not strategically positioned to interrupt a good workflow.

Trust appears to be my concern. We're not trusted to do the job we were hired to do - some of us after 1.5 years, some of us after .5 years, and some of us after 1 month. Us 20-somethings are the internet generation. We're more plugged in than the characters on The Matrix. We know what we expect the internet to do, and when it doesn't meet expectations, it gives us the impression that this site hasn't been updated in years, so we better not shop there - we might not get anything for our money.


Trust us to do what we need to do to get our job done, without defaming the company's name and reputation on the internet...then we'll have enough time to do all the other things that we've talked about doing for the company, as well as the jobs we were hired for in the first place.



This is my work rant. Too many "go ahead and add this to your list" requests, combined with too many "no, I don't like it, let's do it this way...no, I don't like that either". F@#$ dude! Figure out what you like - I'll be at my desk working on everything else that's wrong with everything else.