TwiddleGeek

I've got to give Dennou Coil credit, it succeeds in covering lot of genres at once all while staying very simple at the heart of the story.  Dennou is something of a cyberpunk hacker tale told from a very normal, day-to-day perspective.  Our concept of computers has been replaced by ordinary looking glasses that superimpose an augmented reality into the surroundings.

At the heart of the story is Yuko, her cyberpet Densuke, and their friends.  Densuke is... well, awesome.  If you can make it through the show without a soft spot for the digital pooch, you may in-fact be heartless.  He also serves as a good illustration of a large part of the show's charm - the wonderful art style.  Dennou features simple, stylized designs that really sets the show apart from the other releases as of late.  Densuke's funny, oversized head ends up being one of his most charming features, once you get used to the art style.

My favorite thing about Dennou however was the way they mixed the everyday life stories with the over-the-top augmented reality action scenes.  Giant Satchii chasing the hackers and shooting people in the face with lasers, missiles launched at one another, monsterously large fish, you name it.  I'll admit they pushed their luck trying to pull everything together in the last few episodes, but it was a great series beginning to end.

I've been wanting to write this post all weekend, but it keeps getting put off as I try to fix/add/tweak just one more thing on the new site.  I know TwiddleGeek doesn't look much different than it did before, but the switch from WordPress to a built-from-scratch system has been well worth the effort.  Nothing against WordPress mind you, I'm just really enjoying building my own thing again.

As I mentioned last week, the new site makes use of JQuery in a lot of ways.  If you're a developer and you haven't tried it yet, I've got to urge you to do so.  JQuery makes Javascript as accessable as any other scripting language, and it really brings the power of client-side scripting to the dev.  AJAX, animation, manipulation... it's all dead simple.  The use of CSS selectors and chaining functions is just brilliant.

So even though I've been laboring through the Labor Day weekend, at least this year it's been doing something for myself that I really enjoy.  This building phase, with the rapid changes and lots of challenges, tends to be my favorite part of being a web dev.  Some may be pleased to know the winamp skins are back up, avatars are currently being rebuilt, and the rest will follow soon.  If there's something you like that's still missing, hang in there.  Hope it's been a good weekend for you all.

Work on the revamped site has been going pretty smooth so far and I've really enjoyed the time spent on it.  It's amazing how quickly hours can fly by when scripting.  Concentration has a funny way of bending one's perception of time sometimes.  It's been pretty beneficial actually, solving a few problems on my own site has lead to ideas that have helped solve problems on the job.  It's also helped me get used to JQuery, which we've decided to integrate into our next site version...  but more on that in a later post.

I'll say this about being a professional web developer: It's not so much about what languages you know, but rather what problems you can solve.  Granted, being well versed in HTML, CSS, PHP, ASP, Javascript, SQL, & etc is a vital groundwork, but the majority of the work is figuring out the logic behind the code.  How the various pieces and technologies will work together to achieve the desired result, or the logic behind a 'glitch', is often a much larger task than the actual programming.

Non-technical people will often assume a computer has the ability to make logical assumptions.  A+B obviously equals C, so people assume the computer understands this connection.  People sometimes fail to realize a computer knows nothing about A, B or their relation to C unless explicitly told.  Likewise, people often fail to realize a computer doesn't record data for later analysis unless explicitly told to do so.  I suppose one could say that when we as geeks have created the illusion of computers having abilities such as these, we've done our jobs well.