also while walking back I began to feel guilty that I had never followed through with my project to learn php last year and was reflecting on how these things come about. it's not that I've lost interest; oh no I still want to know it, but what happens is I get in to a certain level and then I get distracted with something else and by the time I have time to get back to it I've forgotten the basic concepts that I had gotten through before so I have to review and that takes a certain amount of time and in the end I have to go over everything two or three times because I never am able to spend an extended amount of time actually getting something down except my general academic project which I am thinking about every minute of every day.
but then it occurred to me that what I most need to know for the near future is how to operate a server under Mac OS X so I guess it's back to learning how to run, install and configure software from the command line.
too much to learn and not enough lifetimes in which to learn it.