Woke late after a night of strange dreams. The most notable one featured a stocky, murderous child (dressed in something like lederhosen) who killed another child. I had to guard him, awaiting the police. I went to a kitchen to get some food and opened a tin of tuna for myself, although the fish inside was more like white fish. Also in the tin was a whole grey fish, about 40cm long and with dark, slimy skin. The skin was loose revealing horrid insides when peeled away. I shouted to my unseen mum if she knew the correct bits to eat; she didn't, so I told the boy that he could help himself to this fish, and left him to it. After a short while he said he'd finished it all, which surprised me, and I grew suspicious. I went into the kitchen. The plate was empty and I discovered that he had hidden the stinking fish inside my nice wool coat. I was furious and intent on exacting violent revenge. I then awoke.
A frustrating day. I started by staining a frame, the large ragged wooden frame for "So, How Have You Been?" that I've been making this week. Choices came down to brown or black, and I went with black after a quick Photoshop mockup. This was stained and varnished.
Then I investigated the shopping cart on my website, which it seems doesn't work. It seems that the PayPal integration is out of date (but it should theoretically still work fine). This is the curse of all programming. In a year two, everything goes out of date and you need to learn something new. Programming is all about learning new things just to stand still. Things break constantly for no reason, and we must battle just to try to get back to how things were, in a pure world where everything was quick, efficient and simple.
So I've spent all day researching the PayPal API, Curl, php, json scripting and other complexities, an arduous trawl. I try to approach technology like a child, wondrous, unafraid and by repeating 'I can to it, I CAN do it!' even if completely mystified. I believe that I'm capable of learning how things are done; we all can, eventually, but this isn't easy, and sometimes seems to be a near-impossible struggle. After six hours I've achieved nothing but headaches and failures, and still don't know what I'm doing wrong. In four years of my current system I've only sold one thing online so is it even worth it?
So a long day ends with no achievements except a stained frame. Problems and puzzles bother me enough that I'll probably keep trying and thinking about this, but it feels like a waste of skills, a gamble whether anything will come of it. This is typical of programming and why I've grown to hate it; it's one of the most Sisyphean of jobs. Art is easy; what we do is, at least, visible. A lot of programming is really hard work and hidden, or actually achieves nothing, and then goes out of date and becomes useless to everyone.
It amazes me how many years I've been working on my games, like Flatspace II and Future Snooker, as written even on this blog. This year I found myself still updating those old games, just to ensure that they worked on new computers as they did when they were made. Perhaps everything needs updating, even art. The more we create, the more we must caretake.
