I walked into the center at 8:32, and fortunately the guy who I was supposed to see wasn't there yet. I signed the intake sheet and took a seat in the lobby. I looked around, remarking how it was the same as when I was there before, almost down to the brochures sitting on the table. It was eerie.

After a few minutes of being roundly ignored, finally the guy I was waiting on, "Mr. Byrd." I freaked that when I had been there before, he seemed so tall. When I got up, I realized I was a good six inches taller than this guy. Very strange, the tricks our minds plays on us.

I was in a general state of mental shock. When he started giving me the standard battery of questions, some I couldn't concentrate on properly. Like, oh, "spell 'WORLD' backwards." "Uhhh... D... L... R-O-W... um..." What sort of question is this?

After about an hour of playing stupid-question/stupid-answer with Mr. Byrd he announced that he diagnosed me with persistent major depressive disorder of moderate-to-severe degree. He said he couldn't really be terribly sure about bipolar disorder, but when they put me on medication, if it pushes me over the edge then they can adjust it accordingly.

Before I knew it he was on the phone calling to make me an appointment with a psychiatrist for December 21 to push pills down my throat and send me home to forget about me and sending me out into the lobby so that they could log me into the computer and finish filling out all my paperwork with somebody else.

Spiffy.

I didn't think too much of this as I drove home. They don't do therapy there, but gave me a suggestion of who to call to check on getting therapy. The second woman I saw (the one who wasn't particularly nice on the phone before) suggested I go back to school (what is it with people and me going back to school?). I felt like I was being swept under the carpet. Maybe I am.

I think it just took a while to sink in. If I want to feel better, I need to do something. My previous experience with therapy didn't go quite as expected, because while I felt better while I was in therapy, everything unraveled after a while. I have tried suppression, ignoring the problem, beating it by keeping busy, turning myself off while I'm experiencing symptoms (sometimes for weeks at a time)... none of them work. Thus, I guess medication will fit the bill as something, and a something I haven't tried before, to boot.

Also, Mr. Byrd suggested that if there is anything that I can think of to help myself, anything I can do to not be so depressed, then I should pursue it. He said maybe try to get back into something I used to do that I had lost interest in because of the depression.

Thus, that explains me sitting around all day trying to concentrate enough to learn some SQL. I'll build a dynamic website if it kills me.

Fast forward to December first...

Speaking of, I had been reading SQL for Dummies lately to learn some SQL. That is, except for every third page when I fell asleep. Slow-going is an understatement.

Well, I found this tutorial online that is far, far more interesting. This is the sort of thing I used to like to read for information, that goes through examples and from the examples you pull out enough to know how to code. Only then do you make your way to the reference to pick up details and nuances.

Back in '92-'93 I was talking to somebody about a potential project, that I used to call "The Poor Hacker's Guide to Everything". Basically, it'd be a compendium of documentation and information on all things that could be gleaned and collected on technology-related topics.

Of course, this is just a short hop, skip and jump from the tutorial texts and "g-files" you'd find on most BBSes back in the depths of the early-to-mid '80s, that go into specifics where you pick up on how to use something quickly, and the in-depth stuff is left to your explorations in the manual. Or maybe computer magazine articles going back even further. Or how you learn from somebody else. It's how I learned, anyway. For better or worse, it's still how I learn, which makes me an academic frustration, especially to formalists like mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists. I'd never make it in a rigorous engineering environment.

Anyway, at the time, we were thinking if we followed through with this project, it'd have to be distributed on CD-ROM. Of course, this was when the web was starting to "happen." Unfortunately(?), the guy I was planning this undertaking with had a falling out with me, so we split and the idea simmered (although I have to admit, I think about it from time to time).

I was thinking that this would be an interesting website to do, finding resources like this online and organizing and linking to them. I guess, in a way, it'd be like some of those books like Learn Brain Surgery in 24 Hours, but truly, sometimes that's all you really need to know, and I know that I don't like to clutter my mind up with stuff I won't really use most of the time.

File under something to think about in the future and probably never pursue.

Ohmigawd. If you're trying to do some web development on your computer do not install Microsoft Personal Web Server 4.0 to serve up the pages.

• It takes about three and a half hours to download at 28.8k.

• It wants to run with every bootup. You can't convince it not to without hacking you registry.

• It consumes a lot of memory. Like, on my machine it consumed 16 megs. Although I have 256 megs of physical memory, that's still ridiculous (just because I have a lot doesn't mean you can come along and use it all). (Also, what is it with software that takes so much memory? The first (non-mainframe) computer I ever used had 4K of RAM, and that is a lot compared to what a lot of people first used. The first IBM PC I ever used had 16K of RAM (although we were awed when it was upgraded to 64K). Now you're going to tell me that to run a simple, free application from Microsoft has an idle footprint that requires approximately 1024 times that much memory? What's wrong with this picture?)

• It uses up CPU time, too. Even when you aren't using it. Again, I have a fast machine, but I prefer to use my spare cycles testing for Mersenne primes.

• It won't run on any port besides 80. (I bet it will, but I couldn't find a way to change it in the documentation, and I didn't feel like digging around in my registry seeing if I could change the port to 8000 or 8080 or something.)

• Oddly enough, everything it wants to connect to is a Microsoft product. There is precious little documentation on connecting to anything else, even if it supports standards like ODBC.

• Don't even think about running their documentation in Netscape. It will work, but take forever to load and crash an unmerciful number of times. Give me a break, they're doing this shit on purpose.

• When you uninstall it, it won't put PWS 1.x back so you can use FrontPage from time to time for brain dead things. You have to go and reinstall PWS from the original media. Ugh.

I really suggest if you want a good web server for Win32 for development, you go with Xitami. It really hasn't let me down yet, you can add external services to it easily (it takes one line in a config file to run php from Xitami) and the upside is that they have it for a lot of platforms, so if you really like it, you can run it on a lot of machines. I still grouse some because it continues to use a little CPU time, but the memory footprint doesn't seem to be too bad (four megs, according to System Monitor).

Then again, maybe Apache is a better choice, since that's what the lion's share of web servers are running over their preferred flavor of *nix, but I couldn't make it run worth a damn on this machine under Windoze 98. (Basically, Xitami runs well, came right out of installation running well, and I didn't feel like messing with Apache. I'm lazy sometimes, okay?)

Of course, YMMV. If you go installing stuff, you best be able to set it up and maintain it and don't tell me, "but you said..."

restlessmind