Simplify the Web Small and Simple things

Today I had a very enriching discussion with a good friend of mine, Penny Leach. We talked about culture, social molds, addiction and happiness. The central theme behind my comments was the conundrum of pleasure-seeking vs happiness-seeking.

I am convinced that everyone seeks to be happy, but we all have trouble discerning between pleasure and happiness.

It is a common misconception amongst the members of my religion to think that anything unexplainable and bizarre that happens outside of the realms of our own Church is necessarily evil and satanic; people who heal others but don't have the priesthood or people who make objects move at a distance (telekinesis), for example. I used to think that way, but I'm pretty convinced now that the reality is more subtle. I believe that the human body and mind, taken as a whole, is an incredible organism capable of truly awesome accomplishments.

An experience I had recently will illustrate that point.

Those who know me well know that I have very high standards as to what I watch on television or which music I listen to. Some even feel offended when I refuse to watch something they enjoyed because its content does not conform with these standards. They feel I’m being self-righteous, preachy or snobbish. Thankfully, others take a second look at their own standards and actually respect my choice. A few even raise their standards, and good on them for doing so.

A while ago I wrote about having entered the entire Standard Works of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints into a mysql Database. I haven’t done much else in this area since then, and I haven’t really looked into Ruby much either, being very busy in France with several international clients.

Recently I rekindled my interest for Ruby by joining a free course running on Moodle run by Satish Talim.

I've recently experimented with Flot for creating nice-looking graphs. Good-looking graphs can be a selling point for your Web Development work, because it is something most people can see and understand. If it looks tacky, it won't matter if your work is masterful and clever, or even if it is free of bugs: the client sees the graph; the graph looks horrid; conclusion: you're no good, let's look elsewhere.

Vous pouvez lire mon CV (mis à jour régulièrement) sur http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dhs4mnxj_8g7bcxwhj

The problem

Last week I started to formulate an idea for better Graphical User Interfaces in software. I posted my first draft on moodle.org. I would like to explain this a bit better here.

Life can get tedious. We can get so caught up in the daily, weekly and monthly routines that we can forget why we even do them. Without something new and exciting coming to our attention on a daily basis, we lose focus and interest, and we tend to become dissatisfied with ourselves or with our life.

Born in 1978 in France, I have 4 brothers and 1 sister. At age 19, I spent 2 years on a mission in England for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. There I learned much about human nature and saw much misery and suffering, mostly caused by dysfunctional relationships between people, especially in families. I decided I would study psychology and become a family counselor, to help alleviate the hurt I saw all around me.

People often ask me how I met Anne-Marie, my wife since September 2000. They are curious because I am French and she is Australian. They would like to know who was visiting which country when we met. In this rather lengthy blog entry, I hope to elucidate these questions and entertain, surprise and move you. Our story is unique, as all true love stories are.

Background information