Welcome

Introduction

Hey guys, I'm Aaron and this is my online notebook. Well, not really. But you know what I mean. It's basically a place for me to keep all my notes, my data, my work, my odds and ends. All that good stuff.

But what exactly is this? Why an online notebook? Is it like a blog? A reference site? An index? A journal? A document repository? I mean, a "notebook"...? I don't get it. Yeah, neither do I. However, I do get that I need an online resource for any number of things I frequently have to look up. I also want a place to post things I've written over the years. And I need a place to post my endless lists, tables, and whatever else I may have collected here and there. Playing "hmmm... where did I read that..." is about as much fun as searching for your keys.

Hey! Speaking of lists, lists are great. Let's make a list of what this site is for. Or in other words why I'm doing it. To start with:

Those last few look like stream-of-consciousness thoughts, but that's loosely the path I followed to get here. Using my technical skills in my personal life seemed like a good idea when I first started. Why not apply the skills I use every day at work to my personal life? I'm really organized at work... better capitalize on those professional skills. Yeah. If only. Entering a new field is always challenging, and often exciting, and occasionally infuriating. Little did I know that data management, while so technical, is also so very, very far afield from programming, networking, security, web development, server management... oh, and let's not forget about hardware. Oh yes, hardware! Because there's nothing quite like the challenge of "upgrading" your old (read "stable") system when you haven't so much as touched a motherboard in 6 years. Apparently BIOS is out and UEFI is in. Surprise! Great, maybe I can just replace... everything. Or not. When economics is factored in, you make do.

So yes, there have been surprises along the way. While this project (or collectively, these projects) have been immensely challenging, I stayed on this path only because it has been immensely rewarding, and immeasurably valuable. As with so many journeys we take in life, if I had any idea what I was getting into I could never have motivated myself to get started. All this work and all this frustration for a hobby?! That's one hell of a hobby. Maybe that's just what hobbies are.

History of this project

Social science and social work

In 2006 I was working in day treatment (a model of social services for people with mental health problems). At the time, I was reading a lot about cultural anthropology, sociology, and other fields in social science. I was thinking of ways to tie together what I saw at work with what I read at home. At some point I formed the opinion that human behavior, while astonishingly complex, adaptive, and context-sensitive, follows some essential and basic patterns. Not "instincts", like birds making nests. Not "drives" like hunger or lust. But general tendencies that, however vague, seem relatively stable across personalities, across cultures, across situations (properly defined or delineated). Easy to dream, hard to do — a familiar story in life.

I could never articulate these ideas, not to my satisfaction. Eventually I had the idea to try to analyze behavior by breaking it into "elements". This seemed like a good approach, even though I had no idea where to begin. Meanwhile, I was trying to hone my clinical skills and broaden my horizons in social services. I bought a lot of books, read articles, attended trainings (including the staples of Motivational Interviewing and DBT). But I always felt something was lacking. I eventually decided that there was no standard package of tools, ideas, approaches, theories, etc. Of course, I knew that from school, but I was surprised by how open-ended it all looked in practice. Surely there have to be some standards of the field, not trendy ideas or arbitrary practices, but methods and approaches that have been proven with practice. (And "evidence-based practices"... is a story for another day.)

Technical beginnings

By 2008 I'd made a few false starts: reading books on non-verbal behavior, social roles, norms, basically whatever I could find online or at the library. I produce anything of real value or even any leads for next steps, but I did come out of it with the understanding that I would need a database to management the project. At the time I was comfortable using Excel, but I didn't have any experience with databases.

Over the next few years, I learned about databases, data management, SQL, and related subjects. I brushed up on my Excel skills and steadily built up my technical experience. At work I transitioned from direct services to administrative work: data management. (It might seem bizarre that I went from the very definition of a hands-on, person-oriented field to a technical, computer-oriented field, but that's another story for another day.) To make a long story short, I encountered the same prob— ahem, "challenges" as I did in clinical work and it pursuing knowledge in the social sciences: there's tons of stuff available, but it ranges from low-quality to obscure to super-technical to of-dubious-authority to highly-domain-specific to just plain wrong. So if you're not familiar with all this, where do you get started? I guess you could just pursue (more) education. If you have the time and the money. But otherwise can be really hard to even get started.

Scarce resources

During this time, I also became frustrated at the lack of good books available on the social science and social services. Or more generally, the lack of good books available for students and professionals in most of the classes I'd taken in college. I'd kept most of my textbooks from college, so I gave them another look. Some of them were well-written (some of them were real gems); some of them were embarrassingly bad (Only one on the market? Professor had stock in the company?), but most of them were mediocre: over-priced, wordy, and stuffed with the text equivalent of packing peanuts. Is it really this hard to find a good book? Does anyone have a recommended reading list? To further my education? Or just fill in some gaps? It shouldn't be this hard to learn stuff. Yes, I know, Amazon has their user-submitted "listmania" lists, and Goodreads has their equivalent "listopia" lists. But you know how user content is — it takes a lot of panning to find gold. A lot. I ended up turning to Wikipedia, and it's basically a gold mine. But Wikipedia has the same problem of user-submitted content. I know some people doubt the quality and integrity of the content there; I don't. Overall it's pretty well-policed by contributers (and algorithms searching for generic vandalism). The problem is that it lacks the authority of a single voice. Not that there should be a final authority on a given topic, but the answer to "Says who?" is always going to be "Says countless, anonymous contributors". Not quite what I'm looking for. I realized I'll just have to make my own lists, and find a way to promote quality books and resources for other people who are also interested.

Writing reviews

A friend introduced me to the website Goodreads in 2008. This immediately looked like a partial solution to the problem of distributing content: a place both to make lists of books and to provide qualitative information in the form of a book review (not just a 1-5 star rating scale). I ended up writing about 100 or 200 book reviews, some better than others, but a good way to get started actually producing something valuable. From 2008 to 2010 I had filled about 20 legal pads with notes of all kinds (notes for Goodreads reviews, note for wikipedia articles to go back to, notes on magazine articles, notes or current events and my thoughts, just anything at all). This was a lot of prep work for... I don't know what. I knew it was going to be a lot of work to get it organized and eventually migrated to a digital medium, but I hadn't figured out what to do with it, how to put it together. On a side note, while this might sound like a massive waste of time, or just obsessive data hoarding, I think it was time well spent. There's a chapter in Writing Tools called "Saving Scraps"; it's basically about the value in saving (and organizing!) all these loose ends for future work which hasn't taken shape yet. I honestly felt a bit relieved when the author mentions he had numerous folders full of notes and references, and some of these folders eventually turned into major works he wrote.

Getting technical

One day I realized that all my reviews were posted online, and I have no "direct" access to them. Also, it Goodreads suddenly went offline, there go all the reviews. I needed to do something in house, but I didn't really want to create a website and painstaking post review by review, one by one. There has to be a better way. By this time I had enough technical experience that I felt confident there was a technical solution out there. Then one day I found it. It was 2013. In fact it was September 30, 2013, and I still have a note to myself from that day. Why not use a database? Yes, of course! I use databases all the time at work. Oh, and I still remember some HTML from when I was in the Computer Club in high school. Great, that way I'll have complete control over the style as well, no limitations to Microsoft Word! And I can manage all the content dynamically. Oooooh, I can use that PHP language I've been reading about. That works with databases, right? And I can write articles on general topics and publish them myself online. And resources for other social service works. And technical resources for other technical workers. And all the document templates I could ever needs, readily available. Awesome, this is just what I needed. Finally, everything is coming together!

Well, it sounded good. The excite was a bit tempered after a while. Hmmmm, I hadn't taken into consideration whether to store the reviews as text data in the database, or store them as separate files to manage with the database. Then there's the issue of user-submitted content: can people sign in and rate these? Or comment? How will I manage the threads? And what about security — how confident am I in my technical skills? strip_tags() is good enough to prevent xss attacks, right? Oh, I should use Object Oriented Programming. I've heard a lot about that and it sound really useful. And I'll have to learn commenting conventions. I'll have to learn how to use phpDocumentor. And how to install it. Oh yeah, and that O'Reilly book was talking about version control. Guess I'll have to sign up for GitHub. And learn how to use Git. Properly. Ooooh, and let's not forget about XML, because I've heard a bit about that and it sounds like something I'll need to know. And what's the JSON I keep coming across? Come to think of it, I didn't really plan the database schema out well, and this is gonna take some work to sort out.

Multiply that times about 5 for each start-from-square-one attempt, and that basically how I got here.

This time I'm going to keep it simple. I'll add stuff as it comes up, and try to make it look nice enough. Let's have some perspective, because it's not like we're building the pyramids here.

Getting started

There's a book on interviewing called Where to Start and What to Ask (I know, the cover has a horrendous font that looks like some evil Magic Eye, but info's still good). When I first started in counseling my supervisor recommended it to me while I was still getting the hang of things. As I remember, it had a "dive in" philosophy, but it also had some basic pointers for, well, getting started. I don't remember to much about the book today, but when I think of this website, that book comes to mind. I started this notebook project as way to organize the things I use, the things that I've found, the things that I've written, etc. And again, since I've already done the work, why not share it.

Disclaimer and a word from our sponsors

Actually there is no disclaimer. And there are no sponsors. This is just my personal website, so trust it at your own peril. Naturally, I hope you use a healthy dose of good judgment and make up your own opinion about anything I have to say... which I'm sure you're going to do anyway. If you like the website, great, glad to hear it. If you hate it, great, you can make a better one. If you have feedback, corrections, suggestions, please email me. And if you find something useful, then mission accomplished.

See ya.

January 2017