Even though I’ve been playing Mario Kart Wii for several weeks now, my friends and I will always have a special place in our heart for Mario Kart Double Dash. I know, I know, this game was a major departure from the franchise, but we still love the multi-player battle mode. So much, in fact, that in February I built a stats-keeping mini-app for us.

The premise was simple: We loved battling, and did it almost weekly, but were always disappointed that there was no way outside of a lame spreadsheet for us to keep track of our stats. At the same time, I was just starting to learn Ruby on Rails, and I needed a real project to help me learn. I finished up a beta of the project, which was just good enough for our personal use.

Basically, while battling it out Mario-Kart-style, we would fill out a form after each match, with the winner and stage, as well as how many balloons the winner had left. From this, the stats engine I built would calculate a series of statistics that we came up with. Of our stats, my personal favorite is “Balloon Error Ratio,” because it is a statistic that reflects not only wins, but also the amount of balloons you lose in battles. As you can see from the screenshot, I hold my own against my friends. Of course, the same wouldn’t necessarily be true against the video game overlords out there.

This app is based on Rails 1.2.6, and still has some bugs. If you’re interested in the source, hit me up in the comments.

However, I have never taken a programming class. All the XHTML, CSS, and PHP I know has been self-taught and has generally been a gradual learning process, looking up stuff when I need an answer or run into a problem. For better or worse, my web design method has usually been front-end-centric, ignoring or taking for granted what happens in the background. I have been become relatively well-versed in theming Wordpress and Textpattern, but have never really understood just how these applications connect, talk to, and edit database entries.

But after viewing the RoR “Creating a weblog in 15 minutes” screencast, I gave into my temptations and decided that it was high time I dive head-first into the foreign world of web development. I went ought and bought the highly-recommended Agile Web Development with Rails, and have been struggling through it for about a week.

My learning curve has been admittedly steep, as I am not only learning Rails, but also Ruby, and programming in general. I’ve found myself having to google lots of terms I probably should already know, such as “method” and “class”, two programming concepts that I’ve had a particularly hard time shoving into my skull.

That said, I have also been rather impressed with the authors of the book, because it seems well-aimed for both newbies and experienced professionals used to other programming languages. I’ve gone through the example project in the book, and I think I’m ready to start my first Rails project from scratch. The CMS modules based on RoR that I’ve seen in the wild–Radiant and Typo–have been very indicative of what Rails is capable of with a minimal amount of coding, not to mention the very-cool RoR apps from 37signals.

Where to go from here? Who knows? I guess the proverbial sky is the limit. All I know is that I’m excited about finally understanding some of what goes into a web application, and even more excited that custom web applications can be possible to build from the ground up, even by a wee designer like me!

1. The name has changed. Formerly JayDee Design, this company shall henceforth be known as Joshua Davey Design. I confess the change was mostly for vain reasons: I like my name.
2. The blog has changed from “Soapbox” to “Words”. This is primarily because I want my design work to more closely related to and associated with my musings. The addresses have therefore changed as well, from /soapbox/ to /words/.
3. I have added a portfolio.

These small changes aside, the design itself is what I spent the most time on, and I must say that I’m rather proud of it. Not that its aesthetically anything to write home about, but because this site is the first time that I built a Wordpress theme from scratch. It was certainly a learning experience. Inductive learning always proves fruitful!

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism’s face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
“I will be true to the wife,
I’ll concentrate more on my work,”
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Imagine one point. Now a small ring forms around that point. In the next moment, the circle has a new ring around it. Time in this way is much more like a process, like growth. It makes a lot of sense for our lives. We are not just a point on a line. We are the sum of everything that has ever happened to us, everything that we’ve experience. It’s all within the circle.

So now I have Firefox on my USB drive so that labs that are still living in the Microsoft-monopoly Age can be useful. I’ve got a bunch of other programs and a launcher on there too.

I’m a nerd.

Anyway, we had a lot of fun together, as we always do on those all-day dates. We went to a dog show, an art museum, and the Jazz Kitchen. Saweet!

This post isn’t about the date, though. It’s about how I screwed up this Valentine’s Day. Bethany is a “gifts girl,” meaning that she loves little things. Any little thing. A voicemail, a note, a flower; anything small and tangible to say I love you. I messed it up because I minimized her desire need for these small things by asking if we had to do anything on V-day, since we were already having our big date on that day. It’s not that she was expecting much, just something small. But I, knowing that, was thinking of myself, and how going out to get flowers would be inconvenient or something. It’s hard to think about someone else’s needs before your own.

Well, I did end up getting her a flower last night. Sometimes it’s the small things.