What am I doing?

I feel beat up.

I've been spending a lot of time doing stuff that sometimes comes with web work but I'm not as familiar with it, nor does a part of me really want to. But it's there.

Yesterday for instance I spent about 10 hours straight messing around with database and programming work for a project that involves some open-source work with things like Mambo, Forums, and Galleries.

If you're unfamiliar with Open-source work, the basic concept is that there are programs online that are collectively developed online by the internet community as a whole and freely distributed to anyone who wants to use them.

So a lot of forums & galleries you see out there are built using this open source material and modified to suit the users purposes or tastes.

The problem comes when you want to be "fancy pants" and try to merge all these separate open source stuff together so it's a seamless website that delivers all these things in one. It's a pain in the neck.

Like if you had 5 groups of people and you send each group to develop a part of an airplane, the best they can do without seeing any plans or seeing what the other groups are doing. Later when you have the 5 parts it's up to you to try to put the thing together and make it fly.

So anyway, long story short (I think it's already longer then even I can stand), I spend countless hours putting together this damn plane that can barely roll off the tarmac right now. And all I got was a case of carpal tunnel.

Meanwhile I'm trying to develop my own site. ALSO using open source stuff, in this case using Wordpress. Very fun and interesting program in fact...more full featured & flexible then Blogger albeit a little longer to set up. I'm excited about it, but it's also a case of a lot of trial-and-error to customize that the way I want it.

By now I'm practically eating, drinking and shitting PHP, MySQL and CSS work. I wish I wasn't.