Work and School

Tagged as Personal

Written on 2010-08-30 15:16:37

It's been 3 weeks since my last post and that is starting to become disappointingly normal. Summer has drawn to a close and the first week of school has flown by. I also got a part-time job during that first week. Friday was my first day and was pretty fun. I'm on a team of six in a company of ten so things are informal, productive and unbureaucratic which is nice. I'll be working about 20 hours a week mostly in PHP and Javascript writing Drupal module extensions. I'm not thrilled about the PHP but needing to use Javascript, CSS and SQL more while working on production web software can only do me good. I've been putting off banging my head against web development for some time now. Hopefully 20 hours a week is the right amount for work/school balance.

As for classes, combinatorics has a good teacher and students but I'm already a little behind. Last week was kinda crazy. My CS courses have been...um...disastrous but I've tweeted about that and don't particularly want to recount it here. Short version: I was told in a 4000-level CS Upper Elective that I should withdraw because there "wouldn't be very much programming" and heard my software engineering professor describe using Save As as "version control". Finally, I have a Chemistry course and lab which is predictably fine. Should be a pretty standard semester.

I didn't code much over the summer but I did fix a few paktahn bugs and just last weekend made a bugfix release with Leslie (0.91). Of course, I've already found and fixed another bug. When no network connection is present and name resolution fails, a usocket:ns-try-again condition gets thrown and the user sees that error message and goes "huh?". Presently, our restarts only catch usocket:socket-error conditions which is a separate condition hierarchy. I lined up a fix in 5 minutes but there's a very little bit of code duplication that's bothering me. I'll come back to it in a day or two and either find a better way or commit it. On the bright side, Leslie says my lisp style is improving. Here's hoping. There's always so much more to learn. :)

I've been in a pretty heavy coma since breaking up with Teresa, not that it's all or even mostly attributable to that event. I've just been burnt out. Cooking, entertaining company (i.e. movie parties), listening to music and skateboarding are the main things I seem to be able to enjoy and make myself do lately. I've been trying to work my way out of it lately and, thanks in part to certain friends, looking at the metalevel of how I can be more organized, productive and happy. My friend Will, for example, sent me a copy of Getting Things Done by David Allen which I've gotten in to the last week or so. There are very valid points in that book about energy, motivation and time management along with ideas that I'll try to apply in the coming weeks.

I can't think of much else to say for now. There's tons of high-level big stuff going on. Oracle is suing Google in a move that can only hurt everyone, Paul Allen apparently can't build working products with billions of dollars and bunches of patents but can sue half the tech world for violating them, etc. Privacy is still going in the trash, Religious Freedom may be in the gutter already as many Americans hopelessly believe that all Islamic people are violent extremists. The programming language world is busy as always with interesting activity I'm aware of in Factor, SBCL, Clozure, Clojure, GHC and more. I could tell you about the good things I've been listening to like Laura Veirs and the Morning Benders. But right now I need to stop and recharge a bit. Cheers.

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