Kids say the darndest things. I’m talking about 25-year old guys who end up in my PHP class. One student—I’ll call him Werner—was having a hard time understanding the concept of True and False.

“So, tell me what programming languages you know,” I said.

“None,” he said. “But it’s not a problem. I can learn anything.”

“How’s that?” I asked.

“I have a special knack for learning. I can just absorb knowledge. I can walk into a room where people are speaking a foreign language and an hour later I can carry on a fluent conversation.”

“That’s a gift,” I said. “What languages have you learned?”

“Farsi, Greek, Mandarin, German, and Italian, all in one summer when I was traveling through Europe.”

“Say something in Mandarin,” I said. I happen to know a little Mandarin.

“Oh, that’s not necessary,” Werner said. “It’s something I can do in the moment, when I’m in the flow of the conversation. But I’m having trouble with this PHP. It’s not coming to me yet and it’s bothering me. Really, I should be on top of it. I have so many great ideas for making money, if this PHP would cooperate. Maybe it’s something you’re not doing.”

“I don’t get it.”

“I learn by osmosis, like I said. If I’m in the room with you, I’ll absorb everything in your head. My roommate works at Yahoo and he’s always hacking on PHP at home. That’s how I learned PHP, by being there when he’s hacking. I think you must be blocking the osmosis.”

“Got it,” I said.

He dropped the course after a month of waiting for the osmosis to kick in. I saw him a couple of years later. He was taking an intro Java course.

“I figured out that it wasn’t you. Osmosis doesn’t work for programming languages,” he said. “So I’m doing it the easy way, just taking courses. Anyone could do it.”

New Product Box Sort Order – Zen Cart Support.

I’m working with Zen Cart today for a client. When you find yourself drifting aimlessly through the incomprehensible documentation, with it’s multitude of dead ends, you eventually end up at the Gates of Hell, otherwise known as the Zen Cart Forum. You know that you’re working with a frightening piece of software when you see that several of the guru developers, custodians of the Zen Cart forums, have posted more than over 120,000 responses to the questions and lamentations of the dismayed, confused, and desperate denizens who made the fatal decision of choosing Zen Cart and now stand pleading outside the gates.

They are a selfless group, the Zen Cart support team. Indeed, they must be. After all, they have dedicated many thousands of hours of their mortal lives to explaining an inexplicable pile tortuous spaghettii code. One of these guides has 20,000+ posts, another has 47,000+ posts, and the master of this dreary and dank sulfurous region of the Netherworld has posted more than 57,000 responses.

Typical question: “How can I sort the products by date added?”

Typical answer: “Go to line 434 of /include/modules/pages/advanced_search_results/header_php.php and change $order_str.”

“Change it to what?”

“Oh try ' order by prod.date_added desc '.”

“Thank you. I will try that. Thank you. You are truly an angel of mercy.”

“Oh, think nothing of it. If I am an angel at all, I am one of Hell’s Angels.”