Growing up, I've been hit a few times with hayfever and other similar allergies. As I've grown older though, they've pretty well settled down. That is, until this year.

Sometime after Thanksgiving, the facilities crew at the office began decorating for Christmas. They set out several potted Poinsettias at various locations in the building, none of which were near my desk. When I noticed this, I said to my cube-mate Josh, "I'll be sick in a couple of weeks from these."

That couple of weeks have now elapsed, and I feel miserable. Just being in the same building as the horrid things, I started showing hayfever-like symptoms, starting with dry, red eyes. Now, my sinuses are in disarray, and I have had a <sarcasm>wonderful past couple of days</sarcasm> as a result.

Friday I went to work feeling okay, but a couple of hours into the morning and the sinus pressure started. After I went home that evening, I started feeling a little better. The next morning when I went in, I was feeling decent, but still had the sinus pressure. At the end of my 8 hour shift, I was ready to die from the discomfort. I ended up having to go back in for a couple of hours due to a technical emergency that only I could fix, and that ended up ruining me entirely.

I didn't get much sleep last night because of it: The sinus drainage into my throat has caused irritation therein, an it seems to have collected somewhere between my throat and my stomach, leaving what feels like an orange stuck in my esophagus. I woke up sometime around 8am this morning from a very light sleep, and my stomach started howling as if I were hungry. I knew I wasn't hungry, and that this churning was caused by the drainage.

I ended up going to the convenience store to get some soda and antihistamines. The latter seemed to have helped more than anything else, but I assumed the fizziness of the soda would help to break up the phlegm in my throat. I was wrong about the soda, so now I only have a bit of a caffeine high from it.

I have to go back to work tomorrow, then Tuesday I'll be flying back home for Christmas. I'm totally not looking forward to being cramped up in a pressurized aluminum capsule for 3 hours with this sinus crap.

It's been a while since I've talked about technical stuff and I need to rant, so here goes:

I got started in web development sometime around the middle of 2001... I think... Anyhow, it was a pretty garbled mess for me, as I picked up a couple of existing products and tried to make modifications to them to suit my needs. Frustrated, I ended up starting my own projects, and I have learned a lot even though not a single one is fully complete.

Along the way, I've played with all different technologies. I've used template engines, I've used frameworks, and I've even gotten my feet wet with some Ajax (without bleach :P). I've learned a lot from these, but there's one thing that holds true in all cases: Keep it simple, stupid.

Let's start from the top with template engines. It's kind of a good idea at first, because you may have your project broken out into groups of designers, developers, and managers. The designers may not know much about the core of your application -- the PHP that does all the heavy lifting -- but they may be quite skilled with XHTML and know how to do the needful. The problem with most template engines, though, is they introduce either a new markup language specific to the template system, or they use rather awkward methods using some sort of implementation of PHP.

For a long while I was a fan of Smarty. In fact, several of my sites still use Smarty. I thought it was a good idea because it helped me keep my presentation layer separate from my processing layer, and it allowed for me to make different themes for my sites. The downfall though was that I had to learn a new language that didn't really afford me the flexibility I needed, manipulating the data to suit the needs of the layout. Other developers pushed that I needed to not use a template engine and use straight PHP to build my layout. I didn't believe them, and when I first tried it after using Smarty, it was painful. But now that I've been working without any template engine for over a year, I can honestly say that PHP is beneficial from not only that standpoint, but also from a resource usage standpoint. No longer am I passing around arrays and classes up to 1MB in size. No, I'm now passing just the data I need, and using includes to load the different sections of my layout while maintaining my presentation layer separation.

The next problem is down to frameworks. Who in their right mind would consider building a simple list management system from a framework like symfony or Code Igniter? These frameworks are big, bulky, and are much too restrictive (unless you're new to the concept of project development entirely). It's possible to build a project from a very simplistic framework (which I'll be sharing my version of sometime in the next few months), and if you're diligent enough you can maintain a clean and organized project without sacrificing your power and ability as a developer. In short, frameworks like those mentioned are a horrible idea.

Ajax. Not the stuff I (don't) clean my kitchen sink with. No, the implementation of asynchronous JavaScript and XML. What's the problem with it? It's generally overdone (see Dojo Toolkit Demo: Contributor Listing), and pointless. Probably the only reasonable implementations I've seen so far are applications like Meebo and GMail. Generally speaking though, there's no point in using Ajax. It just over-complicates things and leaves you curled up in the corner of your office, sucking your thumb, and chanting obscenities against the technology of Ajax.

I guess in summary, I just want to say that I'm old-fashioned and I despise anyone who tries to get all fancy-schmancy with their code. You have a links database; you don't need a full MVC framework with an Ajax fisheye-flipper!