I received a surprise call from my ISP today, and they informed me of why I was having problems. I had emailed them a couple times, and was surprised when I only received a small email back saying "we are investigating the issue." Usually, when you hear your ISP say something like that, you think to yourself "they aren't doing jack-shit." But they did. And in the end it turns out that I had my proxies turned on, and they had screwed up their proxies servers, so that's why I was having problems. So now, things are back to normal.
As for me, I've been really thinking lately. Not about life, not about money, but about my web design skills and such. Since I became interested in the whole field of Web Development, I really don't feel I've gotten much better. I may have made better designs, but lately I feel I'm stuck. I'm stuck at the same level of understanding I've always been. I want to know more about CSS, Web Standards and PHP/MySQL. Those are my main goals, and I feel that if I can learn those, my level of HTML understand will also go up, as I will have to advance that as well. I want to be able to code a site without having to refer to old code to 'know' what to do.
So I've picked out a few books that I feel will help me learn what I need to know. CSS, is something I think I can figure out with books I have, and along with just hard coding. Designing With Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman has been mentioned to me a few times, and with Ian highly recommending it on his site, that finalized the decision. I'm going to buy that book. Along with that book, I'd like to pick up Dreamweaver MX Web Development, as I don't have any idea how to use Dreamweaver to it's full capability. I just sorta use the layout preview and the upload feature. And finally, I'd like to pick up The elements of typographic style, which I think I would find to be a very exciting and rewarding book. I have this summer to learn, and I'm going to do it.
I know I can't do it during school, I'll be damn busy.