December 3, 2008 — Comments Closed
…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!
November 2, 2008 — Comments Closed
I bought a white EEE PC 1000HA.
There was a great sale on NCIX as well as free express shipping on Wednesday. All together, it totaled $490 including taxes.
- Screw you Andrew: it wasn’t $600
- Calc fail as Qifan pointed out.
- Screw you Andrew: keyboard is 92% of full notebook.
- Screw you Andrew: You’ll be jealous when you see it.
Yes – a lot of Song hate. :P :heart:
It got here on Friday and I picked it up on Saturday at the sketchy store where Purolator deliveries get dropped off for my area. Within 30 mins of having unpacked it, I had the ’special’ ubuntu-eee on it. It looks nice, but I’m not really a fan of the the ‘home screen’ thing. I managed to get rid of it for about 10 minutes once, but now I can’t anymore.
Windows XP is also on it (dual booting) and it’s noticeably faster than my desktop machine… That’s a bit sad. My desktop, “Alfredo”, is pretty old though.
Will post pics of cute little lappie later.
Sidenote: Typing this from work. It’s Sunday. I’m at work.
October 26, 2008 — Comments Closed
So I thought I should blog again, after reading others’ blogs and feeling bad about it. I’m a horrible blogger and generally a bad person-to-regularly-update-things. I would say a lot of things have been going on and I’ve been really busy, but that’s pretty much a lie. There were some random adventures (last night for example), but nothing too note-worthy.
Work is going pretty well, minus the stress of noobs (for lack of a safer word) who don’t know what they want or what they’re talking about. As a software developer, it’s generally hard to take direction from… not much. It’s similar to: I want an apple pie. But then I want to have cherries instead of apples in this pie, and I want the crust to do flips in the oven. That’s probably a really vague and horrible example. :\ Other than that, work is better than it was last term imo. Testing Blackberries was interesting, but a tad mundane and repetitive at times. Doing what I do at home (sometimes) at work is pretty sweet.
Last night, probably the most interesting thing recently, I went to the casino in Hull and didn’t spend any money. This was the first time I had been in a casino. I must say that the entrance was much more impressive with its fountains and pretty lights than the actual casino with rows of blinking lights and whirly sounds. The restaurants and assets on the floor (tables, roulettes) were fancy though. The two people I were with toyed with the idea of putting shampoo in the fountain as we were leaving to leave a huge sudsy mess. :D
Sticky&Sweet
Not-so-recently: Madonna. I went to Boston to see Madonna’s Sticky&Sweet tour. It was awesome! We planned somewhat last-minute, so we had $350 tickets. Well worth it though – we were damn close. Traveling by Greyhound for 10hrs overnight was not awesome, however. Miles and I spent less time in Boston than on the bus. I found it was okay until 3-4am rolled around. Those hours are the ones where I start needing sleep desperately.
We checked into a hostel at 6:30am, then got coffees and shopped until noon. The hostel happened to be pretty full, so our beds weren’t ready until then. Miles was dying and I was somehow hyped up enough to want to go shopping. Strange…
It was also the first time I stayed in a hostel, so that was pretty neat. I didn’t imagine Boston when I was thinking of the first time I’d be staying in one – I always imagined somewhere in Europe. We’re somewhat planning our next trip down to New York to see Equus avec Daniel Radcliffe sometime in November. :D Another overnight Greyhound, hostel and cheap food. We planned the Madonna trip last minute, so hopefully we can plan a bit more this time.
Now what?
I r co0l and usingz linux now. Well, debian. It’s really nice. I’m also thinking about getting an EEE PC (1000 series.) Either the HA or the SSD one. I think I want an SSD, but I know a HDD won’t be that sensitive to minor shocks. I had a nice email chat with Rachael and she really convinced me (as if I needed much more for a cute little lappie) to get one. She just got one herself.
My task list grows yet, and I rarely check anything off. Sometimes I cheat and make a task that I know I will complete within 10 minutes just to make myself feel good when I check it off. :)
I have been prescribed glasses. Really minor myopia – but enough for a prescription. University blackboards and textbooks are evil. My eyes were perfect before all that :(
And I think that’s it for now…
