Fear the Crab

The subject is a tad misleading. I’m here, but I haven’t been here here, if you know what I mean. My last post was almost a year ago, and that was during football season (UH won 7 games and went to the Hawai’i Bowl, btw).

Nowadays I’ve been continually working at The Office and The Lab. I am still taking courses in ICS.

Where to start?

My project at The Office has gone beta. We conducted a loadtest on the server, and ended up overworking the poor database. Thankfully the problem wasn’t caused by what I had done, but what someone else did a long time ago. We went from 9 student employees to 3, including myself. That means there are other miscellaneous tasks to be shared by everyone.

The Lab is The Lab. Usual politics, usual work. At least the parties are cool, and the snack area is filled with the delectable bounty of fattening goodness.

School is nearing the end of its stint. I can expect to graduate in March of 2006, provided I don’t turn into a Senior and neglect my work. This summer I’m taking a software engineering class that doesn’t seem to be engineering software. I’m also enrolled in a rather interesting class, Information Technology/Culture, which looks at our lives as it is integrated with technology, be it computers or cell phones. We’ve discussed the rise of computers and networks, the virtual communities created by multiplayer games and MUDs and things like Xanga, mySpace and LiveJournal. We’re going over the Panopticon right now.

Oh, I got me an iPod. It is musical.

Today is the first day of the fall semester. I’ll be taking ICS 321 and 331 this year. Only two classes, but they span four days out of the week, including Saturday. This means I’ll only be able to work at The Lab two days, but hopefully they’ll let me stay longer so I can earn more money and not worry about making enough hours to qualify for medical. Best case scenario is to work 6-7 hours a day at The Lab, while pulling in 20 hours a week at The Office. I should still have enough time to get any homework done, since there will be time at the Office to take care of stuff.

Parking is going to be a problem for many people, so I will have to revert back to my original schedule. I think waking up at 0500 is worth the ease in traffic and the bounty of parking stalls at the structure, so long as I manage to leave the house by 0545.

I’ve decided to start work at The Office an hour later, at 0800, so that I can grab some breakfast at the caf when it opens at 0700. I do this because I’m not particularly enthused about tummy-rumbles during work. It’s very uncomfortable.

Bought a new game called Black & White the other day. It’s some sort of god-type game where you micromanage villages and people, flaunt your godly powers, and control some kind of magical giant creature to act as an Avatar. Seems a simple concept, one that’s been used for many years, but this time there’s a level of complication that isn’t advertised in the fine print. For one thing, each village and your creature have minds of their own, and if you leave them alone for a bit they’ll do their own thing. In terms of villages the effects of this aren’t that earth-shattering, stuff like eating too much food or breeding like rabbits and sucking the earth dry, but the creature can do things that you might not like, such as eating the villagers or pooping on the temple. Training the creature is not unlike housebreaking a pet; you give it love when it does something good, and slap it around when it does something bad. I was going over some gameplay tips online and the sheer amount of tasks one must accomplish to have a “decent” game is staggering. I don’t think I’ll be playing it with much enthusiasm, especially with school.

In the meantime I drink coffee to stay awake and ponder how much notes I will have to take with just binder paper. I seem to have forgotten my new notebook at home.

Today I’ll be taking Maile and Malia (sp?) home today. Since parking is an issue, they’ll be dropped off and I’ll drive them home. This won’t happen every day, of course, since schedules are so different. It’s too bad they can’t reserve a parking permit right now, since they’re not that high up on the registration scale, but I believe after a couple of semesters they’ll be able to. Otherwise they’ll get the hang of finding free parking around the Manoa area. I found some numbers for alternate parking that they can try to take advantage of.

Since Marissa has been reading my LiveJournal, it has occured to me that I haven’t been that diligent in maintaining it. I’m sure many of you really don’t care, but it says something about persistence and dedication if I can at least write something once a month.

I’m no longer driving for The Lab, except on Saturdays. They’ve hired two new guys, who both work all week, so instead I’m grinding contacts. Not lenses, but the areas where the crowns touch other teeth. It’s good work, because I get to use the small handheld rotary tools and really screw up my tasks. I get to sit down at a small desk with magnifying goggles around my eyes. But the best part is that I can listen to CDs while working.

Granted, I’ve always listened to CDs while working, even when I was driving, because the lab car has a CD player. Nowadays I’m listening to what other people call dance goth. I have no idea what makes goth dancable, but I don’t really care. I like it. Today I’ve been listening to Switchblade Symphony, a band I recently found out had broken up in 1999. Too bad.

At the Office, I’ve finally starting coding the identity management tool for the University. It’s in PHP with a lot of HTML involved, and it makes me realize just how much I actually know. For those of you who don’t understand, don’t worry, because I don’t, either.

Next semester I will take ICS 321 and 331. Or something like that. I actually wanted to start taking some of my 400 level courses, but there’s a new rule that 400 level courses are first reserved for seniors who are going to graduate. I understand why that rule is in place, because seniors who can’t take their required courses can’t graduate. It still puts me in a bind, though, because those classes fill up so fast that I’m forced to take classes that, while I need them, I don’t want to take them just yet.

Maile and I are going to start an exercise program. We’re also going to try and quit smoking. Starting the healthy life, yo.

Since Marissa has been reading my thoughts, it seems that perhaps I should tone down the content. Yet that sort of defeats the purpose of having a journal. However, it’s online and therefore public and open to scrutiny. A compromise must be found.

Still, Marissa has her own journal-type thing and her handle is dis-be-yo-pimpette, so who am I to judge?

I’d better get back to work.

Well, I actually haven’t gone anywhere, but work and school have kept me sufficiently occupied to force livejournal into the messy back seat of life. I’ve been so busy, in fact, that Animal Crossing has become literally non-existant. I haven’t played that game since the 25th of July.News news.. lessee. I’m still working at The Office and The Lab, though these early rising mornings have certainly taken their toll on me. Work at the Office is normal, I’ve been given several projects in the past months, though they were all minor, usually involving a fix or two to current code. Up next I will be expected to coordinate several meetings to help design a new web page for the students and staff that work in the Help Desk. The first round of meetings is set for this Thursday, mostly to come up with “problem scenarios” in which we determine what areas of the current design need improvement. Once that’s done, we’ll move on to “activity scenarios” where we propose solutions to those problems. It’s going to be a long process, I gather, since this kind of stuff just doesn’t complete itself overnight.

Work at the Lab is becoming tedious. I think I’ve been allowing the stress of driving and meeting deadlines to overwhelm me, as I’ve been a bit.. well, snappy, as Maile would put it. It’s not like working at the Office, where I really enjoy what I do. I hate driving in traffic, and I hate having to ferry teeth from one dentist to another in the span of a few minutes. Recently I’ve been getting more deliveries that have to be completed by 0800 and the locations are all over the place. Add to that the frequent “update calls” I get, where I have to change my route to accommodate some dentist who waited until the last minute to announce his pickup. I especially hate it when I’ve already left that area.

I’ve gained weight, thanks to a significant lack of exercise.

School has been going fairly well. This fall semester I’m taking ICS 311, which is simplistically titled Algorithms. But it’s theory, and I’ve never been a very good theorist. I guess I’m handling myself okay, though, as I’m not failing. What helps is that I can work with a partner to complete assignments and programming projects, and it just so happens that my classmate is also my co-worker at the Office. So when we’re not working on anything, we’re working on the 311 stuff. I’m also taking Spanish 101, and that class is really cool. The professor is muy interesante, y muy paciente con sus estudiantes. Despues, yo voy a asistir la clase de Espanol 102, con el profesor mismo.

I don’t know if I said that right.

Anyway, in musical notes I’ve taken to listening to a lot more goth and metal. Lately I bought a few albums from My Ruin, and I really like their stuff. I also bought a couple of cheap-ass Goth CDs, and those put me in a really good mood.

And a lot of people are probably wondering how the little prince is doing. All I can say is, it’s cool. Drives like a Ferrarri.

Hm. I can’t recall if there’s anything I’ve left out, as far as what’s been going on the past several months. But fear not, as I can always mention them next time.

Well it’s been a long long time, and I can thank school and work for that. I’ve been getting a couple of projects from The Office that are giving me hassles, but in ways that I have no control over. For example, I need to manipulate some files, but unbeknownst to me, I don’t have permission to do that. I (and everyone else, apparently) don’t usually realize this until I’ve spent a day whitening my hair. As far as The Lab goes, it goes. I’ve noticed they’re sending me to some dentists that aren’t under my jurisdiction of “town.” It’s only been a couple of times, but since I don’t do “Leeward” I have no idea where these dentists are. I make sure to act dumb when they call, too, just so I can hear them fumble around trying to give me directions.

Speaking of white hairs, Maile noticed I have one growing on my neck, in the beardy area. It’s kinda bright when I let it grow out some. But it’s not in a sexy-sexy place, it’s sorta right under the mandibular angle (for you anatomy freaks), so it just looks weird.

In Animal Crossing news, I’ve been spending some time drawing textures. I made a couple of Mashimaro designs, the University of Hawai`i athletic logo, the Decepticon and Cobra and Star Wars Empire insignias, and my current fave, GIR in a dog suit. The GIR design I especially like, because from far away it actually looks like him. It’s too bad there’s no way to “trade” designs with other people short of having to actually visit their towns; I know a couple of people who might be interested in ’em. Of course, when these designs are put on a shirt or umbrella, the results are very humorous. But I think they look neat on signboards strategically placed in strategic areas.

My summer class is going.. okay. There was a bit of a problem with my most recent homework assignment. I had to get input from the user, and it seems the code would “catch” the carriage return and pass that to the variables, making the whole thing look funny. I had to incorporate a dummy variable to grab those annoying newline characters so that the real variables could get the proper data.
But this opened up another can of worms. I’ve set up the code so that it will only accept a certain amount of characters, truncating the data so that it will always fit. It seems to work fine when I test it, but when two or three distinct variables are processed (one after the other), the previous variables lose their data as the later are assigned. And I have no idea how to fix that.

I just finished off lunch, some suck-ass chicken katsu that came from the cafeteria. Bleah.

Next semester I hope to take ICS 312, which is supposed to be a continuation of the C class I’m taking now. I was planning to go for 311, which involves more theory, but the prof who’s teaching it in the Fall is, while uber-smart, kinda hard to understand. By which I mean that only if the student is also uber-smart will the student learn anything.

So, since I need 6 credits to continue working for ITS, I’m going to take Spanish at Leeward. Oddly enough, Maile is also going to take Spanish because she needs the credits, too. We’re going to be taking the same class at the same time. I think it’ll be fun!

I have an urge to get together with all the old folk that have some connection to DFS. It’s been a while since I’ve been out, and I consider a month as a long time. What with all the schedule changes, though, I imagine it’ll be hard to arrange. And while I’m on the subject, why am I the one who always seems to coordinate these things? Maybe that’s why I’m getting more white hairs than a Maltese.

Just kidding.

Well, it certainly has been a while. You can thank Animal Crossing and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker for my prolonged absence. There’s just so much to do in Zelda that it’s almost a sure-fire way to lose your social life. Thankfully Maile is very good at bringing me back to reality.

Let’s see, what’s happened so far? I think I’ve gotten into the groove of things at my new job(s). Deliveries for The Lab are becoming a habit, and many of the offices are permanently scarred into my memory. Sometimes I can get done with my rounds in less than three hours, which doesn’t mean good things for my paycheck since I’m on hourly. The Office has been holding steady; at least, I’m able to do the simple things. I haven’t gotten any major projects to work on yet, mostly because there really isn’t anything to do right now. There are still aspects of that job that I have yet to touch, but it seems I have to rely on my fellow student workers to show me the ropes, since the bosses are really busy with fixing another highly-visible project. And being that it’s finals week, I rarely see my coworkers. So I busy myself with checking Postmaster mail and setting up mailing lists while browsing the web pages for weird stuff.

On the homefront, life has been normal for me. I finished off my ICS 241 math class, and feel fairly confident I’ll pass with at least a C. That was my main goal, and if I score better, it’ll be all the more sweeter. Those E-Commerce classes I took were interesting, and I think I learned a few things, but the way they were carried out left something to be desired. The prof stressed communication, but it seemed to be lacking on his part. I would email him with a question, and wouldn’t get a reply for several days, if ever! Thankfully they were 100-level courses and pretty easy, otherwise I’d have more white hairs than I do now.

Life, however, has been anything BUT normal for Maile. Her brother’s back on crack again, and I actually witnessed the demon itself one day. He barged into the room and demanded the money Maile has been holding for him (because he’s so irresponsible with finances). When she refused, he got angry and tried to take her purse. Instead he missed and grabbed her backpack. Despite not having any money in the backpack, he ransacked through it, all the while spewing curses out of his retarded mouth. Maile finally gave him his money and he left. I found out later that everyone’s suspected he’s been on the rock from way before. Apparently he was given money to buy a nice present for his son’s 1st birthday and attend a small party, but instead he spent the money on crack and didn’t go. He’s back with this mental-case girl named Josephine who’s also on the rock (and with whom he had his son). Maile’s brother hasn’t been back for about a week, but he’ll start coming around once he wastes his cash.

The sad thing is that he blames Maile and the mom for his condition. Talk about a lame cop-out. His claim is that he was given too much responsibilities to handle, that Maile and the mom expected more from him than he could produce. Whatever. All they asked was that he help contribute to the house, either by getting a job or something. But no, the mere thought of hard work seems to be like a bad case of SARS for this whelp. Oh, and he also believes he has a mental condition, which is why he acts this way. I would tend to agree, but not for the reasons he gives. He feels it is justification for his behavior. I feel it’s simply stupidity. The guy is just spoiled, thinking the world has to give him what he wants without him working for it. I told him once that I was able to buy a new truck and these video games only because I worked and budgeted my money. At the time he seemed to take it to heart, but I guess he can only think short-term and can’t stand waiting for hard work to bear fruit.

So now the house has become like a fortress, with secured doors and a significant change in lifestyle. It’s like everyone’s on alert, since no one knows when he’ll drop by with some fake-ass sob story to try and wheedle pity and money out of the family. Pretty soon we’ll have to start using passwords and retina scans.

So far my Perl learning is progressing. I’m still at that “simple program” level, making Perl able to say “hello world” and other such things of that sort. At least I have some of the basic concepts down, and I can always refer back to the book for when I ultimately get a programming project from The Office boss.

I’ve just received word that I’ve been accepted as an undergraduate classified student for Fall 2003. This is good news, because it means I’ll pay less tuition and be able to register earlier. Of course, I’m also considered a “new” student, so for Fall I’ll still have to register late, but once that’s done, I’ll have seniority. It seems UH@M has classified me as a “second degree” student, which I think is a bit higher, if not equal, to senior status. So I’ll really register early, and possibly have an opportunity to get a parking pass.

Driving for The Lab is starting to become second nature now. I’ll be expected to do slight office work, mostly logging in whatever I bring back from the dentists’ offices. And if they don’t have anything for me, I can go home without worrying about making my 20 hours a week; they’ll take care of the medical regardless. That’s good news, in a way, because it means I won’t have to worry and count hours all the time. It also means I won’t get paid as much on the slow days, but I’m fine with that, because I’m mainly interested in maintaining my medical, not getting money.

I mean, I could always use the money, but at this point in my life, school is the more important issue, so I want to concentrate on that.

It took a while, but yesterday was my second day at The Office. So far I’ve just been sitting around for eight hours each day reading a book on Perl, a programming language. I think Perl is what the department uses to program, so naturally it follows that I should learn it. The people there are pretty cool. In fact, one staff member went to the same high school as me, and was on the bowling team, and played in band. Small world.

Meanwhile, it’s my third week at The Lab. I’m still trying to get the hang of which dentists are open at what time, but at least I know my way around town. The funny thing is, I need 20 hours to qualify for medical, but the courier position sometimes gets done early, meaning I have to find some way of busying myself. I figured I’d learn how to do die work, which is making a hard mold of the impressions so the techs can work on fitting a crown or bridge (or whatever). But I just found out that the boss doesn’t want me doing die work. So what will I do to make up my hours? I have no idea. They’re supposed to talk to me about it, work up some sort of arrangement, so I guess I’ll have to wait and see.

It’s been a hectic week. I started training as a driver at The Lab. Most of it is pretty straightforward, so the real trial is just figuring out which dentist needs something delivered by what time, and what time does their office open. It seems there are some dentists that open at 0800 and expect their deliveries at 0800. Just yesterday, in fact, two dentists opened at 0800 and had cases due at 0800, and they were on opposite sides of downtown.

I managed to work out an arrangement for The Office position. I enrolled at Leeward for three one-month courses, all dealing with e-commerce. I’m not sure what will be involved with those classes, but they’re online, and I have a feeling they involve spamming people with advertisements and constructing mailing lists. I have to take three courses because they’re all 1 credit each, and I need 3 credits to become eligible to work. UH Student Employment doesn’t seem to care that the classes are only one month, as they are more interested in whether I have a total of 6 credits. At least, that’s the impression I got when I showed my tuition receipt to the SECE office. They cleared my hold, so now my application for that student programming job is underway and looking okay. I’m still pending approval, but according to everyone I’ve spoken to, I should be in the clear.