Growing pains

I was reading a book review for a programming book on automation today when I realized I've been a complete moron regarding my personal development-type activities. It's mostly my website maintenance that sucks. Why on earth do I go through the same manual process of ftp-ing pictures to my server by hand when I've done it a million times and I know that ftp is scriptable? Why have I been bothered multiple times by not being able to find a picture on my website, when I have all the knowledge to auto-generate an index.html listing that lists and displays all the pictures in each directory? Gah! This is just embarrassing! I mean, I remember learning almost 3 years ago that there was an ant task for ftp, and thinking I could use that to update my site... but it took me this long to really want to do it, and to even think of the auto-generated index.htmls.

I'm also supposed to be implementing a VM that emulates one machine running on another (simulated) hardware platform. Because the whole thing is simulated on my real computer, it's really making my head hurt. I've sat down twice to start doing it and realized I had no idea what to type. Frick! The only thing that helps is being sure that heisenbug, Dan the Cat and the other software engineers I admire have all tied their brains into knots over similar things.