jQuery – I have been spending a lot of time learning how to fully exploit jQuery to create some really slick stuff I can use in my projects. As far as I am concerned, jQuery IS Javascript. It makes it so easy to do some real complicated stuff that would take a year and a day to do in vanilla Javascript.

C# – I have been diving into a bunch of my Wrox books that have both Visual Basic and C# code as I learned all the Visual Basic at first. C# is a surprisingly useful language and is not much more complicated than Visual Basic. More power, only a bit more complex.

I have also been looking into joining up with a team to work on an existing open source project. I really want to start pushing my knowledge and I tend to “woodshed” on my own things. Anyone have any good suggestions?

You have the power.

What an awesome story: A man just paid $17,500 for a rare Nintendo cartridge. I have to disagree with the author calling the gentleman “clinically insane”. And yes, it is time to start getting upset about all of the comic books, baseball cards, etc. that I let my folks trash over the years. Let’s think about it a second:

OK, so I am a bit jealous he can spend the money to buy a decent compact car on a video game with the playing time of a few minutes, but that is beside the point. I am positive he will be able to sell this thing for a profit down the road. This is considered one of the holy grails of video game collecting.

Any reputable company does not engage in the practice in the first place. An honest blogger won’t engage in the practice. As long as it is disclosed, who cares? The FTC has more important things to worry about.

Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/21/AR2009062101107.html

The only way you would be able to even hope this would work is that if every major news content outlet started to charge as well. Obviously, the chances of that happening are, well, nothing. I don’t have a problem paying for premium content, but nobody will ever pay for what someone else gives away for free.

Murdoch: Web sites to charge for content – CNN.com.

I decided to give it a spin, and was I surprised. It’s fast as hell, the code completion and parameter hinting is really quick and light, it hasn’t crashed on me once, and all the other good features you would expect. I really urge you to check it out if you do any amount of PHP development.

And yes, it seems the weirder the name, the cooler the software. Netbeans? I won’t ask.

So what is holding me back? I really want to start my own freelance web design company. Why should I sit back while I see people slapping together crap and make money off of it? But I still can’t seem to get everything started. I know that I can be much better than a lot of people out there, so why don’t I?

I have not decided if I will restore all of my backed up posts, sometimes it is just good to do a fresh install, sort of like Microsoft Windows. I’m just not one of those people that has to have all of my blog posts over the years up on my blog.