Epic Banality

For the past few years, the bread and butter of my web development career—presuming that you could call it a career anyway—has been PHP coding. I know a lot of so-called “real programmers” will boo and hiss and whatever, but it’s served me well enough. When I made my initial exodus from ASP in 2000, PHP was a breath of fresh air. I preferred the syntax to that of ASP (and I was one of those “mavericks” coding it in JScript and not VBScript because I hace class) plus it was free and ran on my home grown Linux server. Those were good days.

In the past eight years, I’ve done more programming and gotten better at it. Some of my projects have been larger in scale and PHP becomes much less fun to work with. I’ve been working with Python in my free time and really like the Django. In fact, if any of you out there are fledgling programmers and are looking for a place to start, I can’t help but recommend Learning Python by Mark Lutz. Python has a lot of good free tools, runs on many platforms and this book is very, very good in my opinion—not just as a primer on Python itself, but on beginning programming in general. I even picked up a few things from it. (And, if you’re a Monty Python buff, you get a bunch of extra bonuses.) I much preferred to Programming Ruby by Dave Thomas.

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I suffer from some strange compulsions. There are the simple ones, like the fact that all the cash in my wallet must be sorted by denomination and series date and if I see some change sitting on a table or a counter I feel the need to arrange it in an orderly fashion. When I eat at In’n Out Burger I have two hamburgers—no cheese—and some fries and consume them thusly: burger, fries, burger. It must be this way. I generally like symmetry and order and my family has categorized me as “anal” since middle school. There are also the more annoying ones, like the resulting problem with the table IDs in Wordpress and the mess and hell that is the newest version (2.6).

Wordpress 2.6 introduced something that, at first, seemed like a damn cool feature: it keeps track of revisions. Every time I change a post it keeps a history of the changes. Cool, very cool. That is, until you combine it with their auto save feature and the fact that it’s just not a very well thought out system. It could be—and I hope they do something about it—but for now it grates on my compulsion for tidiness in data.

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All of the above are synonymous with “banal.” For those of you unfamiliar with the term, let me give a bit from my dictionary: “so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.” Considering the state of blogs since their inception, I figure that’s a pretty fine title for any blog really!

Given what I think of most blogs, someone might ask the snide question, “Well, if they’re so boring, why are you writing one?” Rather than answer this directly, let me digress a bit and discuss another subject I comment on regularly: penis trucks. You’ve all seen them I’m sure; souped-up, diaper buffed, over-powered gas guzzlers that don’t appear to have been driven off-road and have never hauled a boat or carried a bed full of anything in their entire existence. They’re almost universally operated by some rich prick trying to capture his completely depleted masculinity, or worse, some obnoxious woman toting a bumper sticker that reads, “Silly boys, trucks are for girls.” I don’t think I need to state that I hate these things, but I’ll do it anyway. I hate these things.

A few months ago I was driving around town in my relatively modest truck—a truck so modest in fact, only a midget could hope to use it to compensate for his own undersized equipment—and saw one of these monstrosities. Typically, I’d make some sort of comment to myself like, “homo” or “pansy ass” or merely snicker, but before I could do so in my own pavlovian manner, I saw a bumper sticker on his bumper that made me giggle a little. It read: “Does this truck make my penis look bigger?” Bonus points for being ironic. It was like this VW bug I saw puttering around a few weeks ago with a tiny pair of those fake testicles hanging from the back.

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