29th May, 2003
The project I am currently working on is finally finished and ready to be released this weekend. Because of the large size of the project and the importance, they have asked me to work extra hours this weekend. Which is standard for an engineer like me and not a problem. What got my goat this morning, is that in order to accomodate the Database Administrator on this release, she has asked me to reverse the order of the scripts. I explained to her that this meant I'd have to remove all of the code from our versioning tool (it's not very flexible) and also to make modifications in our other budgeting application (because the two applications are linked together and this project's budget is now closed).
The consensus was that I should do whatever makes the implementation easier. So, I spent four hours moving and changing and validating all sorts of code. I got everything completed, and it came out great, but I felt as though it was a very inefficient way to spend my time. It upset me to the point where I went out to my car and yelled a little bit. Better to do that in the car away from everyone, right?
Now our DBA can read her spreadsheet from top to bottom rather than in numerical order. I guess it's a good thing. But at the time I was a little upset. I mean, doing it this way will save less time than it took to set it up, and it's risky business removing versions, moving them and then redoing everything. There's a lot of inefficiencies at m job and sometimes I feel powerless to change them. Well, I'll fix them all some day.
In other news: Today I went looking for a small pane of glass which I could try etching with the Dremel I got the other day. I saw it in the manual and I'm keen on seeing how it works. I went to Home Depot to see if they could hook me up and I found out that they don't have panes of glass. I thought that was weird cause they have everything else!
I ended up going to the plant section so I could get a small pot for the ivy I have at work and I fell in love with a philodendron that I spotted. It was in rough shape. A lot of the leaves were going brown. So I bought it and now it's going to live here with me.
I looked it up on line and found that there are tons of plants in the philodendron family. I don't know what mine is called but it looks like this. I'm going to call it Philo.
I skipped jiu-jitsu tonight. Sometimes I can be a real lazy f_ck. I make up any reason to get out of something that I really don't want to do. Tonight's excuse. The New Jersey Devils are taking on Anaheim in the Stanley Cup. Devils are up 1-0 in the series. I have to say, although I'm a Leafs fan, I want the Devils to win. If only for my buddy Ross, who loves them. Plus, it's a whole east coast thing. You have to support whatever team you can relate to when you live in Hartford. I mean, the Whalers are a really long shot for the cup this year.
I just spoke to Carli and she's going to come over. The poor girl has such a crazy schedule. Either she's bored as hell at her job, or so busy that it takes all day for her to get done. Usually it is the latter. Actually, as long as I've known her she's been really busy. Except she told me that she as downtime, I haven't witnessed it yet.
Before she gets here, I'll have to post this out on Fortune City. Once again, I have to say, they make it really easy to update the site. One thing I haven't figured out yet is how to configure the page so that my page doesn't interfere with their banner. I'll have to try somethings out, you know... experiments. That'll be fun, I hope I can find some time tomorrow night.
Oh yeah, the weather looks prett decent tomorrow, so I think Greg and I are going to play a little hacky-sack. That'll be cool. Then, I have to get back to the office for 11:30pm so we can implement this project. My project manager John said I don't have to be there as long as I carry a pager. But, I worked real hard and I want to be there. It's the most complicated thing I've done yet and it's mission critical. I have a lot of pride invested in it and I want to be there when it's launched. I mean, if you built a big boat, you'd want to see it christened, right?
Yeah, engineers are funny people.
Tough day at work today. I got pretty upset this morning over something that ended up being pretty minor. I work as a programmer (obviously not a web programmer), which many people think is a pretty one-dimensional job. The thing is, there is much more to it than writing programs. In fact, the overwhelming majority of my job is figuring out how to explain business rules and then shopping them around to get a consensus. By the time we reach a consensus on the rules we have precious little time to code and test and implement. Generally, the rule changes by the time we are ready to release the program and we have to rush some changes in.
28th May, 2003
I got the blog onto fortune city. So far I have the free service. If I need it I can expand it or even register a domain. The site is really simple to use too. I'm going to put this stuff out there tonight... even though none of my links go anywhere yet... Sorry about that.
I couldn't get a poker game going for this week. Sme people thought maybe the next weekend, but hopefully I'll be in Long Island for the Field Day Fest.
Tonight, Barry is playing Splinter Cell, so no SOCOM tonight. Carli and Darryl are here. I took their pictures. I'll make a link for them. over in the pictures section.
Actually, the pictures aren't that good. They're too dark. But I put up ones that were taken on my birthday. A picture of my dad's cake, or my cake and of Carli and Myself.
I also looked at this page through Barry's laptop. The position of the secong text block is too low. I am going to try to fix it using tables.
Oh yeah, I got my Dremel today. I managed to pay for it using nothing but gift certificates and gift checks. I'm psyched to use it... I just have to find a project. The manual explains how to etch glass. Maybe I can do that?
27th May, 2003
Today I figured out that latex concrete molds for garden statures can cost up to $270 dollars. I talked to Anne and she was saying that I could do the same thing myself out of plaster. Chris thought it'd be better to try it with fiberglass, so he's going to find some info on that for me. Personally, I think this is getting way too complicated way too fast... but I'm keen to try.
So, here's what happened today:
I took the day off work. Except I didn't realize I had the day off until I had gotten to work. By that time
I had already committed to going to a meeting. Because of that and because I didn't get to sleep in, it wasn't a
real day off.
Finished my laundry and visited my brother at my parents house in Granby. I also took some time to burn some cds
of the music my brother has on his pc. Got 2 cds of some good music.
I typed up the style tags and played around with color schemes for this page... I am still not completely happy
with it because I wanted to work some orange into it somewhere and include a little more white. But, I had to have
blue because it's my favorite color.
I used this webpage as a resource and kept playing around with different colors. I'll keep working on it so check back.
I played some SOCOM online. If you don't know what that is, check this link. It's a really cool game, but unfortunately I am the worlds worst player. I rarely get a shot off before I die. It's infuriating to me sometimes... but very satisfying if I manage to get a kill. My strategy so far has been; find someone who's really good and follow them around. They will usually flush people out and then you'll have something to shoot at. Or you'll still get shot but the enemy will have to reveal their position, which gives the guy you're following a chance to get a kill.
I went to my jiu-jitsu class. Tonight we learned a bunch of interesting throws and take downs. After that, we sparred. I managed to do okay, although I still never win any fights... I am becoming really good at it.
This week I will be setting two of my schemes in motion. The first will be a big poker game at my place. I have to pick a day and get the word out about it. I figure a $40 buy in ought to make for an interesting game. We could do $10 hold 'em tournaments.
The other scheme is a little more involved. I have wanted to set a computer up on my home network which is a dedicated mp3 server. Not to share music with the outside world, but just to be able to use at home as a jukebox. The premise would be a simple linux based system with enough storage to load up a few thousand tunes. It would have a NIC so I could get to the tunes with my laptop or my roomates' laptop.
Now, I could do this the cheap and easy way, but I have been inspired by the guys over at mini-itx.com. Now I want to make something which marries both form and function into something beautiful. Is that a Frank Lloyd Wright quote? Could be...
My idea, would be to get a statuette of Buddha, and figure out a way to put the computer in there. The plan is to get a hold of a Dremel, drilling out the base of the statue and then filling it with the mini-itx board, the memory, the hard drive and the NIC.
I was actually thinking it might be cool to get a concrete mold and cast the Buddha myself, that way I could insert some filler where the hardware ould go. I changed my mind when I saw how much those concrete molds go for.
Okay, that's it for now. See you later!
Today begins the first day of this new blog. I was unsatisfied with my old one because it couldn't
host images... This one can, albeit the space is limited.