Warren Shea - World of Warren

Archive for January, 2012

â™ª â™« What can you do when your good isn’t good enough â™¬ â™ª

Tuesday, January 17th, 2012 at 12:28 pm

I’ve been listening to this song lately…it’s a…sad song I guess. When I rewatched Glee, listening to this song was really emotional.

“What can you do when your good isn’t good enough? When all that you touch tumbles down?”

These lyrics starting to pop into my head whenever I see someone failing at something.

I’m looking at my peers.

One of them put 100% into a relationship and it still failed.
One of them tries to work really hard but still struggles at their job.
One of them tries to work really hard but doesn’t get recognized for their work.

I’m just listening to this song as those lyrics (the entire song almost) apply themselves everywhere.

When I listen to this song, I think: desperation

Trying impossibly to do, to get or fix something. But maybe you can’t. Not this time.

I’ve dealt with my own share of personal desperate failures in the last few years. Times where I feel desperation…because what I’m doing just isn’t good enough to get what I want or fix situations.

It’s a horrible feeling to have…this desperation. And when I look around me at those who have had or have this feeling, I wonder:
How could they not see it coming?
How could they not prepare for it?

But…I’m guilty of the exact same thing. Sometimes…these situations just happen.

I’ve been thinking hard about myself and that I always need to be prepared.
Prepared to lose things. My girlfriend. My job. My possessions. My family.

Ugh. Even writing that is almost like…admitting that I can lose something. I mean, on one hand I want to be prepared for failure. But on another hand, I should strive for success and failure should never even be an option. I shouldn’t even consider preparing because I *know* I’m not going to fail. But that’s not it…it’s that as much as I try not to fail, sometimes it just happens. That’s the point I guess.

(Knowing you’ll never fail is a confidence and arrogance in yourself that defies logic. A younger me was very guilty of that. Even now, I’m somewhat guilty of it…but I’m more vulnerable now than when I was younger. I have much more to lose.)

So I need to always be on my toes. And make sure I never fall into a situation where this desperation applies to me.
If I lose my job: what do I do? I need to constantly keep my skills up so that I can get another job ASAP. I can’t ever fall behind so much that I don’t have the skill to do something.
If I lose my possessions: what do I do? I need to remember that money and material things aren’t what make my life. And that my family is there to support me.
If I lose my girlfriend: what do I do? I die a horrible death alone. I think this is the one I’m probably least prepared for…

Anyways, this song and the lyrics have been floating around my head lately…seemingly popping up everywhere and applying to everything. I just wanted to…remind everyone that sometimes you fail, despite your best efforts. And that everyone needs to not only be prepared for it, but to accept this reality and be prepared to move past it. To accept that sometimes you fail. To accept that you have to try again.

Posted in All Posts, Friends, Insightful Reads, Insightful Reads, Introspection, Life, Miscellaneous, Music, My Life, Past, Work | 1 Comment »

Accomplishments – January.5 2012 Edition

Sunday, January 15th, 2012 at 11:59 pm

Shows / Movies
Glee S1-S3E9 [S1-S2 Rewatched] – Complete
Up in the Air – Complete
The Godfather Part III – Complete
The Glee Project S1E1 – S1E10 – In Progress
Currently watching: Glee, Young Justice, Big Bang Theory, The Office, Misfits, How I Met Your Mother, House, Thundercats – In Progress

Books & Manga
Steve Jobs – 20/600 – 3.33% – In Progress

worldofwarren.com / warrenshea.com / secretproject [to be renamed]
Portfolio structure complete, working on filling in content

Gaming
Zelda: Skyward Sword [Wii] – In Progress – Currently at Fire Sanctuary Dungeon

Web Development and Design

Other

Notes
I’ve been working on warrenshea.com, Zelda: Skyward Sword, Glee, researching DSLR cameras, researching new cars, and getting back into a good working habit for work.
So I’ve been busy….not blogging, but busy. I really really just wanna finish Zelda and warrenshea.com and move on. Zelda’s definitely taking a lot of my time…but it’s fun. The dungeons are so long! Thankfully there are plenty of save points in each one :)

Posted in Accomplishments (monthly), All Posts | No Comments »

Zelda + warrenshea.com + randomness

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012 at 12:13 am

These are the two things I want to finish ASAP. I finally got a good jQuery plugin for my portfolio section. It’s called Isotope and it’s much better than Quicksand

Unfortunately, I wanted to finish warrenshea.com by Jan 12 or 14 or something like that. I realized today that I would need to finish it by the 11th…which is simply too soon. Also, I fell asleep at 7pm…randomly, on the couch. Woke up at 9pm. I’m not gonna make it. I decided to finish it, but not to rush. Stupid me, I sat on it for months and when I needed it, can’t finish it in time. Procrastination is a bad bad thing!

While I’m still playing Zelda, warrenshea.com took over as a priority…like I said, I’m a developer first, gamer second…but only if there’s motivation :)

I’m going to spend the rest of the night on warrenshea.com…but because I’m trying to sleep early, that’s not going to be much work. Anyways, I guess I’ll get started ;)

Also, I want to start doing tutorials on my site. There are 2 I have queued right now. It’s just a matter of getting around to them. Too lazy tonight…

Also also, I watched the first episode of The New Prince of Tennis. I don’t like some of the new voices for some of the characters >:( And also, where and when can I watch Gundam Seed HD Remastered? I haven’t watched that in a long long time but I’d definitely like to watch an HD, remastered version of it :)

Oh, finally: I got all the achievements for Plants VS Zombies on my iPhone. Score!

Oh one more thing: I decided not to get a fancy Point-and-Shoot camera because even a good one won’t be able to do the shots I want. I’m starting to think: DSLR. Going to start doing research.

Oh yeah and Z and I decided to buy a new car. We promised to each do 1.5 hours of research by Saturday…high level research on what we can afford/like/bring to the table as options. We’ll probably just got with a Honda Civic or something ;)

Oh and I removed the Blogger theme option from my site. It doesn’t really belong. Now that I have other decent readable themes, that one is kind of useless…and dated.

Okay, off to do work now…

Posted in All Posts, Daily Randomness, My Life, warrenshea.com | No Comments »

…in two years…

Saturday, January 7th, 2012 at 7:15 pm

To recap…today is a special day for me. It’s the 2 year anniversary since I quit World of Warcraft. I know, it seems stupid in retrospect or hindsight that I would celebrate something like this. But World of Warcraft was an addiction of mine…and life’s been great since kicking the habit. I wrote another post last year on this day about the one year after I quit WoW. This is a followup post to that….tradition, if you will.

What did I ask myself at the end of …one year ago…

How much will change by Jan 7, 2012?
What will I accomplish?
How will my life have changed?
What will I have figured out?

What I’ve done in the last year

worldofwarren.com (previously warrenshea.com)

New Google+ Theme on worldofwarren.com
Got worldofwarren.com domain and moved content from warrenshea.com to worldofwarren.com
Heavily cleaned up code on worldofwarren.com
Fixed old themes on worldofwarren.com

I was able to separate my site into 2, a personal and professional site. Just what I wanted to do this year :) Not that it was hard…and this…

warrenshea.com

Almost done

….yeah, this is almost done. :D

Blogging
187 posts between Jan 7, 2010 and Jan 7, 2011. On average, roughly 15.58 posts/month. The number actually falls almost too perfectly inline with my hope of 150-200 posts this year (that I wrote I wanted in my …in one year… post). FYI – Last year’s stats were: 300 posts since my first one, on Jan 26, 2010. On average, roughly 25.25 posts/month.

Twitter
2831 tweets since Jan 18, 2010. 1345 since Jan 7, 2010. Just shy of what I did last year (1486). As expected.

Improved development skills
I definitely did NOT improve my ASP.NET C# skills and only improved my PHP by a little bit.
I had a good amount of improvement on HTML5, CSS3, and jQuery while building warrenshea.com
I’ve also learned quite a bit about Web Accessibility knowledge due to a large project at work.

Reading

Dragon Ball Z Vol 1 – 26 [Manga]
Bakuman Vol 1 – 2 [Manga]
Hikaru no Go – The Neverending Road – Chapter 1-79 [Fanfiction]
Azumanga Daioh [Manga]
Street Fighter: The Ultimate Edition Book 2 [Comic]
Street Fighter: The Ultimate Edition Book 1 [Comic]
Get Backers [Manga]
L, Change the World [Short Novel]

This is obviously not a complete list of all the things I’ve read as I’ve got so many comics and random mangas in the list too. This is just from my accomplishments post.

I haven’t read that much this year…and that’s okay. Steve Jobs book this year…and we’ll see what else.

Gaming

Super Mario Kart 7 [3DS]
Kirby: Return to Dreamland [Wii]
Kirby Mass Attack [DS]
New Super Mario Bros [DS]
Super Mario 3D Land [3DS]
Star Fox 64 [3DS]
Catherine [PS3]
Zelda: Ocarina of Time [3DS]
Zelda: Ocarina of Time [N64]
Super Mario Bros. [Wii]
Hard Corps: Uprising [PS3]

Last year was pretty quiet but this year was…not. More on that here

Art
Is it still okay to say this is a hobby of mine? I don’t think I did a single art piece this year.

What I hope to accomplish this year

worldofwarren.com
I’m going to get rid of the Blogger theme I have. I guess that one’s never really been mine anyways….not that the GMAIL or Google+ themes are really mine either though >_< I want to make a professional theme still...I guess that would be next on my design plate. warrenshea.com
I’m going to finish this..and soon!

[sideproject].com
I still plan on making this. It’s not my epic project. It’s a blog that won’t be updated too often. It’s based on a product line of toys I really like. Anyways, I’ll get this made this year, for sure! Right after warrenshea.com! I’m kinda waiting on my new camera for this because I want to take photos of my toys FOR this site.

Blogging
I’m getting a bit tired of blogging to be honest. I think blogging once every 4 or 5 days is a good amount…maybe a bit too little though? That would only be like, 7 posts a month! I really like having 10-15 posts a month…anyways, we’ll see.

Reading, Gaming, Art
I don’t care so much about reading or art. As for gaming, I would still like to continue gaming…but maybe game less than this last year.

Improving development skills
I’m not going to set any really high ambitions for this this year. I learn best and most when I have a practical project to work on….so I guess I’ll really try to focus learning through working on my current site and projects, worldofwarren.com, warrenshea.com, [sideproject].com, and [epicsite?].com.

I guess what I learn will all depend on the projects I do. I’m try to focus less on learning, and more on working on practical work…and let the learning come naturally and automatically.

How I’ve changed professionally this last year

To be honest: At this point, I think I’m at my lowest point of motivation ever. Part of it happens to be my work friends. It seems like the new friends I’ve made at work really affect my productivity. Not surprising. All I want to do nowadays is chat. It’s been really bad (professionally). Personally it’s been really fun and great lol.

Part of it is being on these super really long projects. They’ve been delayed and delayed. I’m afraid to take on new projects that will end up going and then falling at the same time as these big projects, and physically and mentally stressing me like they did earlier this year. I hated it. All work, no play. And then I got sick. I don’t wanna go through that again. To be honest, I’ve been avoiding projects for what seems like a long time. I guess it’s only been since Sept/Oct though.

How I hope to change professionally this year

I need to get out of my rut. Should I volunteer for more work projects? Maybe new job might help. But I dunno. I guess I’ve been in this job/role for about 4 years. Maybe it’s time for a change? I just need some motivation…

…in two years…

I’ve done a lot since I quit WoW, two years ago today. I like where this is all going. I like the websites I’ve done. I like the friends I’ve gotten in touch with again and the new friends I’ve made this year. I like that I’ve watched a lot of new shows, listened to different music, played lots of games. Basically, I’m really happy with all the things I’ve done since I quit WoW. I can’t imagine doing 1/2 of these things had I still been playing.

Let’s see what this next year brings :)
BRING. IT.

Posted in All Posts, Blogging, Daily Randomness, Games, Introspection, My Life, Past, warrenshea.com, Web Developer, Work, World of Warcraft, worldofwarren.com, Writing | No Comments »

Gamer VS Developer

Friday, January 6th, 2012 at 1:05 am

As my “two years” since the day I quit WoW (World of Warcraft) comes up, I’m reminded of what I wanted to do this last year. And I honestly fall pretty short of what I wanted to do (more on that in Sat’s post).

I wanted to focus this year on development. But I didn’t. I didn’t learn most of the stuff I wanted to learn. And I think that I learned that I’m fundamentally more of a gamer than a developer. But maybe that’s only true when I’m not motivated to develop :P

In recent years, I played a lot of WoW. Then, I took a break from games and did worldofwarren.com (previously known as warrenshea.com). And then I went back to games this year.

Look at the 2 lists below, they speak for themselves (thank you bi-weekly Accomplishments posts for making this so easy to compile).

In this last year, these are the games I’ve played and beat completely (in order of most recently beat to least recently beat)

Super Mario Kart 7 [3DS]
Kirby: Return to Dreamland [Wii]
Kirby Mass Attack [DS]
New Super Mario Bros [DS]
Super Mario 3D Land [3DS]
Star Fox 64 [3DS]
Catherine [PS3]
Zelda: Ocarina of Time [3DS]
Zelda: Ocarina of Time [N64]
Super Mario Bros. [Wii]
Hard Corps: Uprising [PS3]

This doesn’t include the games I played but didn’t beat (cuz there’s no ending) – Marvel VS Capcom 3, Initial D: Extreme Stage, Gran Turismo 5, League of Legends (LoL), DOTA, DC Universe Online, Counter Strike: Source, Plants VS Zombies, and even occasional (but non-addicting) WoW….plus all the iPhone games: Cut the Rope, Cut the Rope: Experiments, Drop 7.

In this last year, this is what I’ve done development wise (from a personal perspective….I still did/learned a lot from work)

New Google+ Theme on worldofwarren.com
Got worldofwarren.com and moved content from warrenshea.com to worldofwarren.com
warrenshea.com (but not complete…80% done)
Heavily cleaned up code on worldofwarren.com
Fixed old themes on worldofwarren.com
Read CSS Mastery book

Honestly, while I did a lot of dev, I think I spent most of my time playing games (well, actually most of my time would go to watching and re-watching shows, sitcoms, anime but I do other stuff when I watch stuff…like eat/dev). I think the year after WoW was working hard on development to balance/catch-up the time I’d lost gaming due to WoW. And then this year was to catch up in the years I’ve missed in gaming :P I didn’t mean for this to happen…it just…did.

I don’t know what next year will be like: Dev or Games? I think professionally, it’d be better to focus on dev….but I can only do that if I’m motivated. Lately…I just haven’t been (this looks so bad to any potential employers coming to my site looking for a self-motivated individual). It’s hard because I’m not one to finish projects….starting warrenshea.com, finishing most but not completely finishing it. And then I don’t want to start a new project because I should really finish warrenshea.com. And then I don’t wanna finish warrenshea.com cuz it’s the boring stuff, clean up…nothing challenging. So then what do I do? Game. I guess it’s all about procrastinating….and gaming is my most fun, efficient use of time-wasting. I imagine I’ve spent a little more time gaming than blogging…but maybe not, it’s hard to say….I blog a lot but I don’t game a lot…just in concentrated spurts.

I guess my next most efficient time wasters would be reading: comics, manga, fanfiction, a novel here or there…followed by art/design.

Still, Web Development is not a time waster. It’s my professional field…and while many people don’t do professional stuff outside of work, I try to be an exception. Because I certainly do love development, and I think keeping a current skill is incredibly important for future opportunities. My skill with a blade must be sharp, like the blade itself. It can’t be dull, or it’ll take more hits to take out a Stalfos. OMG too much Zelda. But seriously…out of the other 14 developers in my department, only 2 develop frequently. And they’re both senior and incredibly skilled. Less than 5 do occasional development and the rest don’t do any outside of work. And that’s okay if they’re okay with that.

But I’m the least skilled of the 3 most skilled in our department….and the least hard-working of them. And yes, while I’m in the top 4/5 in terms of skill…I’m the bottom of the top. I don’t like that at all. I’m not saying I want to be the best if it sacrifices my life…but both of the people above me seem to have a pretty normal social life. More normal than me…

Anyways….I’ve really been reflecting on my “two years” post and this is something related, on my mind, but not what I want to focus on….which is why it’s a separate post.

Good night for now, talk to you soon :D

Posted in All Posts, Games, Introspection, My Life, Past, Web Developer, Work | No Comments »