The server crashing every day has become a daily occurence. It's frustrating to you, I know. I'm sorry. It's more frustrating for me. (But as a side note, I'm incredibly amazed at how well one 1.3Ghz Celeron with 512 mb of ram is handling all this traffic!)

It's been one of those weeks, when things have been piling on and on ... I feel like I'm bottling up too much anger ... sometimes I just get this urge to go out and get completely plastered at some bar. It's a tough feeling.

I've been struggling with a lot of issues regarding my own life; in terms of the direction I want to take my life and what I want to be doing a year from now. I've also generally been disillusioned with this whole teaching experience (I'll write more about this once I get back, as it's really not appropriate to write when I'm hot-headed about the issue) ...

People have always told me I'm hard working, but I've never really felt that way about myself. I've always had these expectations of myself to be able to do everything my mind expects of me. But in those moments when I need to be working, I'll get lazy and do something inane. For example, thi whole Tabulas thing. Had I pushed for the control panel to be finished ... a lot of these server issues would be irrelevant.

I haven't accomplished much, if at all, of anything important on my "to-do" list. The problem is that I find myself (once again) spread far too thin. This job takes up 13+ hours every day (I leave at 8am and get back around 930pm) ... for which I only get paid 6 real hours. This has left me very little time to go out, meet friends and relatives, and to work on my own stuff.

Soon I go back and have a whole another life to deal with.

And I'm at such an important crossroads in my life. Once I get back, I have to decide whether to commit my money all the way to Tabulas; I will be investing upwards of $500/month (realize I don't have a job once I get back) to servers on Tabulas.

It's such a huge mental burden and it's honestly been stressing me out ... not letting me sleep at night too much.

Of course, it's totally not encouraging to read the responses I get from various people (the rational part of me tells me to ignore these people) who whine about server outages and features being stripped away.

I sometimes wonder if they can stick their heads out of their own asses and look at the reverse side of the equation and see me. The struggling kid, just trying to do what he loves, but finding it's not financially viable yet.

So he busts his ass building a completely new system, only to find it's way over his head ... so he's constantly discouraged and finds progress way too slow. (I think as a loner, it's important that I be able to see goals being reached to encourage myself, but too often I don't see it happening)

And this time, it's all a learning experience. This boy took no formal CS training, so he has no idea what he's doing half the time; the CP has been rewritten almost 3 times since I first started working on 2.0 as I find out various optimization tricks and mess around with the site architecture. I continue to do a lot of reading on optimziations, and just find myself totally overwhelemed with all the necessary components in making an awesome website that's well optimized (I've been reading on basic optimization of hardware, hard drives, OS, Apache, PHP, and mySQL; learning how to do advanced optimization in each is a friggin' task in itself).

The more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. Even about the things I know best ... I barely know enough to get back. I'm afraid I have no skills. And it's so depressing because there's so much to know in order to be the best. Sometimes it's just so much you want to quit ...

The pressures have been enough sometimes where I just seriously just sit on my bed and contemplate just pulling the plug on the whole thing.

For those of you who know me personally, I think you realize how much a crucial part of my life these projects have played; they've given me great joy and sorrow, while helping me define who I am ... and they continue to my hope for the future. It's the fact that I've been contemplating just giving up the whole thing worries me. If I'm going to commit, it has to be 100% on my end. I cannot have any doubts in what I am doing.

I see my friends coming back to college to get more schooling, and I wonder if I should just say "fuck it" and put my efforts into studying MCATs so I can apply to med school. But my grades are shit. What can I do?

On girls: I'll get serious for a second. I know I don't have time for a girlfriend, but it would be so nice just to have someone to talk to ... to confide in these feelings. These feelings I've pent up for weeks now; I'm not entirely sure why I'm writing this entry about it now .. this was supposed to be a post just about the downtime. Maybe it's that damn Elliot Smith pushing me to vent these feelings.

But yeah, I really enjoyed the company of Judy while I dated her. It was the perfect relationship for me at the perfect time; I grew up so much in that relationship and learned so much about people ... not really sure if I ever thanked her for it. The split was quite amicable ... and we still catch up occasionally (although we rarely do since I'm horrible at keeping up with people).

Is there a girl out there? Some girl for me?

To touch her. To hold her. To talk to her. Making those small little jokes that make the small moments so special. Where is the girl? Something to break the fucking monotony of getting up at 9am, teaching until 9pm, coming to the PC bang and working on websites until I fuckin' fall asleep ... then starting that all over again. You know, to talk to someone about something deep or personal ... damn I miss it a lot.

It's killer here. This trip was an experiment to see how well I could survive on my own and push myself to reach new limits on a personal level ... but it's just been a summer of selling my soul to the hakwon while being dissappointed in myself.

It's so fucking hard. So fucking hard. But I have to push on.

Elliot Smith - Miss Misery

i'll fake it through the day
with some help from johnny walker red
send the poison rain down the drain
to put bad thoughts in my head
two tickets torn in half
and a lot of nothing to do
do you miss me, miss misery
like you say you do?

a man in the park
read the lines in my hand
told me i'm strong
hardly ever wrong i said man you mean

you had plans for both of us
that involved a trip out of town
to a place i've seen in a magazine
that you left lying around
i don't have you with me but
i keep a good attitude
do you miss me, miss misery
like you say you do?

i know you'd rather see me gone
than to see me the way that i am
but i am in the life anyway

next door the tv's flashing
blue frames on the wall
it's a comedy of errors, you see
it's about taking a fall
to vanish into oblivion
is easy to do
and i try to be but you know me 
i come back when you want me to
do you miss me miss misery
like you say you do?