03
Two weeks left!
…until work term is over, I go to Rome and then go to school after that. No “Christmas” at home this year. What a shame. (sarcasm!) I don’t really enjoy the holiday season except for making/giving gifts to others. I really enjoy that whole giving spirit. I don’t like receiving things as much, though.
Second Work term at RIM
If I were to graph the productiveness of my work term and the hecticness, it would look like the Ballmer Peak with x-axis being relative time in the term and y-axis being hectic-factor. My second four-month term at RIM started quite slow as I gathered my requirements for my major project and slowly implemented. Work there is so cushy and no one was rushing me, so naturally I wrote things slowly. However, in the last week or so, I was at work late finishing things and rewriting a beast of a project. This thing was the ugliest code ever. It also had numerous security flaws - not that it mattered much since it was on the company’s intranet site. I spent a solid week just going through a few lines at a time and scoffing loudly at it. It was horrible! The guy who originally wrote it clearly had no idea what it was doing, or was copypasta-happy with PHP tutorials.
On the plus side: I learned a lot more about PHP/M*SQL and web apps in general. It was also good experience with the whole… software development process. The past couple days I learned some Perl things and PHP’s shell_exec command. One of the things I learned is that it sucks for returning anything if it failed… Instead I wrote my own function opening a process with r/w pipes watching for output. Also interesting.
In conclusion, I pwnt my work term evaluation with my manager (highest possible yippee) and enjoyed my term. I’m still working on things at the office, but my boss just left for a month so I’m at the low point of the peak. 
Rome, Italy
Unless I talk to you frequently through MSN or perhaps #uweng, you don’t know I’m going to Rome (and other surrounding cities) for the holidays. I leave one day before my official unemployment date (oops) and come back a day before classes (… >_<). According to my local newspaper, Venice is being flooded at the moment. I think we were planning on going there, so it may be a good idea to rent a boat eh? The trip should be good, if my family can avoid arguing profusely for more than 10 minutes.
Fail blog!
I have come to realize (before this post of course) that I suck at blogging. There are a few reasons I can see for myself as to why. The major one being that I think of my entries in my head while idling doing something else, thus purging them from my ‘queue’ of things to write. I later forget what awesome things I was going to write about, so I’m stuck with nothing for weeks. Nothing really happens that’s overly exciting is my second reason. I notice that on other blogs, the authors sometimes write about fairly routine aspects of their lives, or what they did on the weekend. Perhaps I should start writing really mundane daily things? Halp!
