Hair-brained Ideas
Sometimes I want to smack myself senseless. Obviously, this requires a little bit of setup to adequately explain where I’m coming from, so I’ll try to start far enough back that it’s enlightening without being boring or otherwise unnecessarily detailed…
Oscy and I have, for some time now, been involved with a neighbor in our apartment complex who has, to put it lightly, been going through some really serious relationship-related issues. On the side, she’s a complete technophobe who also happens to have a bizzare tendency to want to have all manner of technology in her apartment, then freaks out about it a few days later because she’s either unknowingly broken it, forgotten what it was there for, doesn’t actually know how to use it, or thinks that someone might be hacking into it (this includes being suspicious of the little circuit boards in her smoke detector, fearing that her apartment may be bugged). Stay with me here, because I’m slowly getting to the point…
One of the less intelligent things I did for this woman was give her my extremely outdated Dell laptop in an attempt to assuage her fears about her computer being hijacked and get her to a functional state of computing again, both tech-wise and peace-of-mind-wise. In the course of the month and a half or so that she had the laptop, I ended up re-installing XP three different times (once for the initial wipe before I gave her the system, and twice more after that because either she or someone in her family who promised to “fix” this perfectly operational system for her completely trashed it instead). Finally, she ended up just giving the laptop back to me a couple of weeks ago (a blessing in more than one way, as I’d been missing the nicety of having a lappy around, and it meant I would no longer be dragged over to her apartment at 11 PM to “fix” something that wasn’t broken and listen to another hour or two of sob stories). She then tried to get it back a couple of days later, only to then change her mind once more a few days after that, but that’s neither here nor there (just annoying).
Anyway, throughout this whole mess, she’s ended up becoming friends of sorts with the complex’s maintenance guy, whom she also had try to “fix” the not-broken laptop (which resulted in me having to re-align the pins for the power plug after both of them failed to realize they were forcing the jack in the wrong way… bloddy idiots). At some point she mentioned me and my incalculable technological prowess to him, and about a week ago, he came by asking if I could take a look at his computer, because he was having problems with pop-ups and couldn’t get some of his games to run. The end goal of this post is now in sight… stay on target!
I agreed to look at his computer after he promised to pay me for my time (something my neighbor has never done), and spent last Saturday evening merrily removing over 200 virus- or malware-infected files from his computer, deleting all of the crapware that came with it, and setting up a functional AV/Anti-spamware suite (in other words, Not Norton)… which was actually pre-installed, never activated, and probably damaged by a bit of malware because it wouldn’t run properly despite launching at boot-up). All told, I ended up charging him $70 for the time spent, which is still easily half of what he would have been gouged for at Geek Squad.
It then occurred to me that I lived in an apartment complex that was probably full of lamers as hopelessly lost as these two people, and that there was probably a fair amount of money to be had fixing their problems for them at half the price of what Geek Squad would charge (still a fair amount of money by any estimation) without the hassle of lugging their computer off to a retail store and dealing with Best Buy’s interminably long wait times and generally clueless staff. This led to the ad-hoc creation of the Computer Defense Force, an “on-site” computer service & repair operation for apartment tennants. Now, I’ve prided myself on not having to deal with endless system maintenance since I bought my G5 three years ago (doesn’t seem that long, but maybe thats a good thing, hehe), so Oscy was understandably baffled by this decision to start servicing computers in my “copious” spare time outside of work. There’s actually two reasons why I decided to get into this again after 3 years of just dealing with Oscy’s computer and the occasional service call from my clueless family members: 1) more money is always a good thing, and 2) it actually makes me kind of happy doing this to computers that aren’t mine. I have to be a bit more careful with other people’s systems, obviously, but I’m helping people get their computers working again, and oddly enough, it’s good stress relief watching a virus scan or disk defrag run. And did I mention I’d get paid for this?
Now we’re on the home stretch… I realized last night that my quaint little Pages document of a sales invoice was pretty cool and all, but that I’d need a real way to track expenses and payments, as well as services offered, services rendered, the costs for those services, and to whom I provided them (as well as who still owed me cash moneys). The problem is that most of the apps that handle invoicing and billing on the Mac are built for web designers and other freelance-type people who have big projects for small number of specific clients. Now, if there’s one down-side to what the Mac has done for me, it’s made me less inclined to try and shoehorn the way I want to do things into the way an application wants me to do things. My growing tendencies toward programming my way out of a hole I’ve found myself in have done absolutely nothing to help this situation. So, at a loss for an app that does exactly what I want (a surprising rarity on a platform that supposedly has far less software than Windows does), I decided on a whim to start up XCode and start dinking around in the hopes that I might be able to figure out how to build my own program. For those of you who have been waiting for this moment, this is the part where I commence smacking myself senseless.
OS X apps are written in Objective-C, which is a related language in some ways (but obviously not others) to C, C++, and any of the other not-C# variants of C floating around these days. I have nothing but bad experiences from my C++ computer programming classes, learning how to create MPG calculators that ran in the Command Prompt, which has made me extremely hesitant to try learning a C-variant language that has absolutely no practical use where I work. My forray into XCode last night wasn’t exactly nightmarish, but I was just blindly following the instructions given to me by the Hello World tutorial, so I didn’t get much of anything out of it beyond learning that XCode/Interface Builder’s way of building apps and linking them to UIs is very different from Visual Studio’s (in some ways better, in other ways a lot more tedious). I still know next to nothing about Objective-C, and I’m betting that by the time I’ve learned enough about the language to build my shiny little application with CoreData usage and iCal &Address Book integration, I could probably just make money by selling that instead of the services I’d be managing with it.
Plus I still want to make video games…
And I need to actually get Issue 12 of the Archiver done for TCT, which I was asked to help with 5 days ago…
And I’m still interested in trying my hand at C# desktop programming, just so I can have a potentially useful new skill at work if the need arises…
And I’m helping to plan Mysterium…
Which, speaking of, means I need to get the Room Share system finalized tonight and handed off to TW and Odo for assistance in developing…
See why I want to smack myself? I mean, Learning New Skills for Fun and Profit is cool and all, but I’m still working on that “and Profit” part… I have a ton of ideas for things to do, and no time to finish any of them as a result. And all the while I keep coming up with more new things to try and do. It’s somewhat maddening…
April 17th, 2008 at 11:51 am
Now you know: nothing good can come from helping people.
April 18th, 2008 at 1:45 pm
We were separated at birth.