Vinh Pham

1) People who have garages - A lot of great companies began in a garage. All my life, I have never had the privilege to live in a house with a garage.

2) Software crackers - Ever since high school, I have always wanted to be a cracker. Reverse engineering anything is awesome. Damn my slow brain.

3) Web Designers - I can’t design worth crap. Nothing I put together in Photoshop ever looks right. Web designing is a talent. A talent I sorely lack.

4) Flash Designers - Flash is stupid and useless, but it looks cool. How do people do that stuff? I have spend hours watching flash tutorials, but it gets me nowhere….

5) Good writers - Grammar, curse it to HELL. Me no English.

I don’t have any freelance web developer friends. Except for Trung.

It sucks because whenever I run across something challenging, I have to dig deep in google before I find an answer. If I had a network of people I can reach out to, maybe I wouldn’t waste so much time debugging stuff.

I tried looking around for good -local- groups to join, but I have not found any here in Sacramento.

I got so desperate I even hit up facebook, but surprisingly, there aren’t that many freelancing web developers on facebook either.

Maybe I am just looking in all the wrong places?

Here are ideal qualities of a good web developer group.

1) Local - it would be nice to meet up for coffee and share ideas. Or on a more professional level, have people who actually understand the market that I am in. ( Ie. Work availability, type of clients around the area, average pay rate, etc… )

2) People with above average skills - It wouldn’t be very effective to be in a group with people who are no good at what they do. At the very least, people should be open to the idea of learning news things. That is practically the creed of web development anyways…

3) Passion - Everything requires passion. Especially when you are working from home by yourself. No passionate = sleep and watch TV all day. ( Yes, I have those days… )

4) Willingness to help - If you don’t want to help, then you don’t need to be in a group. Simple as that. Besides, the whole point of having a group is so that we can feed off each others’ skill. For example, I am a noob at RoR, but I can easily answer any CSS question you throw at me.

5) Active - That’s the biggest problem with a lot of online forums, communities, etc… No one is active, so you might as well go into the woods and ask a tree for help.

Anyways, that about sums it up. I think I am going to have to make a valiant effort to network with some web developers around Sacramento. Or else I am going to sink like a rock.

Lately certain “individuals” have complained that my blog is too negative, and that is it more like a “rant”. So in an effort to be positive, I will only speak about he “positive” aspects of the Gilroy Garlic Festival.

Hrmmm… Where do I begin?….

So the shaved-ice we bought at the Garlic Festival is awesome. It was pretty simple, just ice and syrup, but dang, that is probably the best shaved-ice I had in a long time. I guess it had something to do with the weather being blisteringly hot, so the cold shaved-ice really did a good job of bringing down my core temperature.

Well… That’s it for today. See you next time…

Oh wait, one more thing… I am also happy that the line for the Garlic ice-cream was pretty short, and they served it pretty fast. That was a good thing. I wouldn’t have wanted to wait so long for the ice-cream.

This weekend, I had the opportunity to see one of California’s original landmark, Venice Beach. Not surprising to say (at least coming from me), it was a big disappointment.

I am sure that back in it’s hay day, Venice Beach was a nice place with great sun, art, and street life. But on my visit, it was dirty, stinky, crowded with ghetto kids, and cheap. My main beef with Venice Beach is that it looked like a prison yard, minus the dirty restroom facilities (meaning prison probably has better restrooms). Besides the entertaining basketball game that was going on, the rest of the boardwalk made me want me to cling tightly on to my purse (if I had one).

However, I don’t think that the unfriendly environment at Venice Beach is unique. In fact, I would say that most of the beaches and boardwalk (ie. Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk) I’ve seen in California are very undesirable places to visit. It is a sad reality that we have all these great natural wonders, yet we do not take care of them. We let graffiti get painted on the walls, garbage to collect on the streets, and shady characters loiter around the corner selling drugs and panhandling.

Perhaps if we spend more money cleaning up these natural resources, it could become a source of tourism income for the local economy.

But that’s just my opinion. Some people wouldn’t let stuff like this bother them. Me on the other hand, I won’t be coming back to Venice Beach any time soon.

I don’t know what is wrong with me, but I do not enjoy doing things people in my age group like to do.

Two examples:

1) Las Vegas - the other week I went to Las Vegas. All my friends were excited about walking around, shopping, going clubbing, etc… But me, I was disgusted at the gluttony that is Las Vegas. I do not care for the fancy building, statues ( false idols ), and scantily dressed women. I don’t understand why girls and guys come to Las Vegas and make it an excuse to drink and bare ass. I was only there because I wanted to celebrate a friend’s birthday party. It makes me sick to think of all the hunger and suffering in the world, as I walk around the Vegas strip.

2) Disneyland - I don’t want to take away from the magic of Disneyland, or say that there is anything wrong with the place. But I am troubled that, as a civilization, we have resorted to creating “fake” realities as substitutes for the real world around us. I remember in one episode of Futurama, Fry was in the future and went to a museum to see holograms of “trees”. At the time, I thought it was a great satire of the future. But little did I know, in Disneyland, that “future” is a present. They have fake mountain ranges, trees, and waterfalls. Instead of traveling to Big Sur to see the real magnificent nature of a redwood tree, you can walk through a plastic redwood tree in California Adventures. And instead of spending your weekend traveling around California to see all the wonderful natural landmarks, you can take the Condor ride and see California on a big screen TV. Ridiculous.

Let me repeat again that I am not writing this to insult anyone, or to be pretentious. I am not too smart or righteous to enjoy all those things myself when I go to those places. However, I can’t help but wonder why we have decided that it’s better to create a fake world, when we could be out living in the real world. And in the case of Vegas, I wonder why we needed to erect a city in the middle a desert just so we can go there and get “loose”.

I would like propose something different. I think that instead of focusing so hard on “working” and being “successful”. We should take more time to enjoy all the minute details of our lives. Like people say, “stop and smell the roses”. Maybe if we take the time to enjoy all the things around us, we wouldn’t need to escape to places like Vegas or Disneyland.

Ps. There are all sorts of grammatical errors in my writing. I am way too lazy to read through it and correct my grammar mistakes. I think grammar is a waste time. :).. hehe..