erniepark is a tumblelog.

priorities and values

i have not posted in a very long time…

anyways, something that has really been on my mind and heart this summer is the relationships i have with my friends and how important that is. dave matthews said it… “turns out not where but who you’re with that really matters”. it’s a really obvious statement in some senses, but really hits home in different situations. 

i love being out in california for the summer. it’s nice weather, work is great, and the environment is fantastic for someone like me looking to start a start-up. but to be honest, i’m so ready to go back to school. as miserable as it is, i love being around my friends all the time. where else can you be surrounded by all the people you love and want to hang out with than school? 

as much as jobs and opportunities will be out in california for me being a cs major, i wonder how i’ll feel after i graduate, whether i’ll want to leave the friendly confines of MIT and go to somewhere new. of course, things are different after you graduate and that bubble of community bursts a bit, but it’s still been something i’ve been pondering.

the owner of the house i’m renting is the head of a tech startup/incubator/vc firm. ive chatted with him a bunch of times and he said to me, if i want to do a startup, to drop out of school. he kept encouraging me to do it. honestly, its a load of BS. it goes down to values. all he’s thinking about is the money and career success i may be looking after. but it’s totally overlooking so many other things. for one, it’s never a BAD idea to graduate with a bachelors from MIT or any other school for that matter. second, it’s not as if i’m turning down a billion dollar offer, i’ll have opportunities now, and later down the line. third, he’s neglecting most of all that school is so much more than education to me. i value being with my friends, growing with them, playing hockey, singing, and everything else that comes with being at school. i find this myopic sort of view to be very offputting and have the sense that many others in this silicon valley startup bubble might share that.

in the end, as great as making money, working, having a business might be, its the people i care about that make me happy. real satisfaction and comfort in life comes from love, with your family, friends, and most of all - God. all of this might seem obvious, and i’ve “understood” this for a long time, but i feel that every summer i get it even more. in my senior year at school, i really hope to strengthen the relationships i have with my friends. i want to leave school with friendships that will continue regardless of where i end up. this is something i failed to do in high school and i dont want to make the same mistake twice. 

family guy vs simpsons

family guy so blatantly rips off the simpsons sometimes that i wonder if they’re actually just paying tribute and making references to it. in one episode i just watched peter and brian go to the movies and theres one of those preview questions where the answer is T_M HA_NKS and theres a simpsons episode where at the movies theres a word scramble with tom hanks also… hmm…

business.

no, not business, like making money. but rather busy-ness. i write about it a lot because it’s so engrained in me as an MIT/college student. busy-ness really just gets in the way of my relationship with God. being busy in itself is fine i suppose, it’s good for me to stay occupied, keep my mind working, body active. i want to do well in school, take classes, sing, play hockey, etc. but the real issue with being busy is that it steals chunks of my brains attention. when i get too busy, theres less space for God, and our relationship suffers as a result. i just have too many processes running at once, (wheres my next meeting, what pset is due tomorrow, what reading should i do to get ahead, etc etc) that theres not enough space in my head for what/who should i be praying for, have i taken some time for reflection/worship/devo today…. 

theres almost an obsession with busy-ness. and at least at MIT from what i’ve seen, people measure their self-worth and affirm themselves as students by how busy they can get… even though it can make them miserable. its time to get less busy, relax, and spend more time with God…

i use … too much…

Sidetracked.

I got a new idea for a website recently. It’s nothing revolutionary. Just something fun I want to build as a side-project. Mostly, I’ve been really wanting to learn Ruby on Rails and see what the hype is about so I want to use this project as a means to learn. I’m motivated tonight, so it might be a long night… I’ve realized these moments of inspiration tend to come and go, so I need to take advantage of it before it fizzles away.

Buttons

…are a pain in the butt. But I figured out what I wanted. I tried using a sliding door with images and sprites, and it worked, but it was just too much overhead for me. Going back to photoshop to tweak is super annoying. Also, although an extreme edge case, zooming up and down breaks the button since the images are pixel perfectly matched. 

Instead I chose to just use CSS with a CSS gradient and it ended up looking just as good and with no images, and it scales. Of course, IE won’t support the gradient (I don’t even want to bother putting the IE hack in there), but I don’t think it matters since IE probably won’t support half the other features we have anyways. For the competition at least, our focus is just on Chrome since we only need to support one browser. I may regret this later, but cross-browser support will be for later if the site takes off.

6.470 Web Programming Competition

This IAP I’ve decided to take 6.470 which is the Web Programming Competition. My friend Ryan and I are trying to win and get the cash prize to hopefully pump back into future websites and startup ideas we might have. 

I’ve been spending the past few days starting to code up the site. Unfortunately, neither of us are really front-end/design gurus (Trevor, our other friend we used to work with graduated, but he taught me a lot to work off of) so I’ve been doing my best to build the site from the ground up and gain a lot of experience. I hope to blog here about different techniques/things I’ve learned along the way as a reference for myself when I build sites in the future, and for other developers to comment on. Sorry if all of this is super boring and irrelevant to you.

Let’s jump in… I’ve been looking at tons of “web 2.0” and “Apple-inspired” sites for some inspiration. It was logical then to pick the 960 grid system for CSS. I’ve used it before and really liked how it made layouts easy, but found it to be really annoying to work around certain things in the past, namely, full width backgrounds, and footers that stick to the bottom of the page (but this is not just for 960). 

For full width backgrounds, I was able to get around it by using multiple .container classes and wrapping them in a full width div. I then had to allow overflow for the parent wrappers so it would expand with content. Full width, check.

For sticky footers, I just went with www.cssstickyfooter.com ‘s approach. I didn’t like the extra markup required… I needed another wrapper around my content, and an extra div before the footer, but it works and I’ll take it for now.

My next goal is to work on form and button stylings. I want to integrate the sliding doors technique and CSS sprites. I’m going to have to brush up on my Photoshop…