Geek stuff

Since rain has descended on the Boston area, I've been unable to make progress on the back of the house, which is currently stuck in the sanding phase of paint-prep. I've instead started focusing on other activities.

First, on the technology front: I've decided to learn PHP. For the non-geeks reading this, it's a language for writing and managing dynamic web pages. There exist a number of blogging software packages that use it, and I'm imagining that this site will eventually be migrated to one of those.

In addition to learning PHP, I also want to familiarize myself with Eclipse, which is an IDE for doing lots of different development tasks.

To these ends, I've been reintroducing myself to the Apache Web Server, and will also be getting to know the MySQL database system.

Soon I may be a dangerous web site backend maintainer, since I will be armed with a small amount of knowledge about these tools and technologies.

Second, I've started investigating volunteer opportunities in the Boston area. My current focus is on ESL tutoring possibilities, since I'm considering getting an ESL teaching certificate at some point in the near future.