Felocity

I doub the "Now Playing" section will get too many more updates, as I have now switched almost completely to iTunes for Windows. While I have undeniable love for the winamp 2.x series, iTunes really has filled the MP3 void and offers playlist options and configurations that are at my fingertips. If you want, there doesn't even need to be complicated playlists, you can just use the handy search and filter your library. Playing only songs by say, the Beastie Boys is as easy as selecting "Artist" in the filter field, and then typing "Beastie Boys", immediately followed by pressing play. If I add another song to the library I don't have to go in and change up any playlists, and had I gotten in on the iTunes wave earlier, I could even have gotten to my MP3 library from work, really meaning I could have my music anywhere I pleased. But, courtesy of innovation on the Windows platform, I will instead have to wair for an iPod to take my music with me in that sense.

You'll notice the title of this post is Lemon Water, which refers to a small bottle of lemon juice I always keep in my fridge. Here, in Seaside, a near-ocean community, our water is awful. In response to this, I find myself adding lemon juice in hopes that it will hide the taste. The result is never really quite what was intended. Normally I rely on juices, concentrates, and lemonades / teas to help take the chewable nature out of the water. However, sometimes those things aren't on hand and out comes the lemon juice. From what I understand, when I was a little kid, my grandfather used to always have lemon water. I'd sip it, make a funny face, and then ask for more. I think he'd be pleased to know that some 18 years since, I still make those funny faces.…

If I had one complaint about this year's spring break, it is that I slacked off the first few days, and could have gotten a lot more done. I did however come back swinging hard at my senior project, and my coworkers can probably attest to the sillyness of my celebration. The whole reason for the celebration? I made a name move between two boxes when you click on a button. (Yes that is 100% serious, and it took me 3 frickin' hours!) For those keeping score at home, I have the task component left, which if I give it the attention I gave everything else this week, I will complete with at least 4 weeks to spare. This will give me a lot of time to polish it and add pretty touches that make it feel more complete. I also want to implement jGraph support if I have the time, so that an entire project can be viewed as a Gantt Chart. Thankfully once all the structural things are in place, everything else is quite literally features. Add to this the graduate school admission process, and its a wonder I have any time at all for anything.

Today I am going to the Apple Store in San Jose to look at pretty computers. I love Hikaru (my desktop) to death, but there is a small (but growing) need for a portable machine that would let me do work just about anywhere. And when it comes to a laptop, nothing beats an Apple. They just work leaps and bounds above most other machines.…

Head of Convention Operations: wow. I wasn't really expecting things at the convention to be as crazy as they were, but by goodness was I busy. Unlike other cons, ConOps had 4 goals: - Risk Management (keep from getting sued) - Keep Everyone Informed about Everything - Manage Personnel and the Master Convention Schedule - Make sure the Con Experience is Enjoyable

I feel very confident in saying that we succeeded and that thanks to the other staff, RECCACon 2004 was the coolest convention ever. Now for the part that nobody outside really knew about. We turned this around from the November show, which means the actual dedicated time-working-on-con was only 3 months. If we threw a show like this for 600 people in three months, imagine what will happen when we have an entire year to get ready. Oh yes, RECCACon 2005 is going to rock you up, rock you down, and rock you side to side. Our hope is another March show, which seems to work with a lot of Spring breaks, which is an added plus. But now, shoutouts:…

There is something special about the environment that is work. For lunch you can get Thai food that makes your brain throb from the spice. You park in this overflow lot of bark since there isn't much room elsewhere. At 8am, the national anthem plays and the entire base comes to a complete stop for 5-10 minutes. No cars move, no people walk, the base is perfectly still. Apparenlty it also does this about 4:30 or so as well, but I am usually still working at that time. I work with a pointy haired boss straight from Dilbert, and my coworkers may as well be Wally and Alice.

To highlight my example, we have been drafting documentation on how to reboot a Windows 2000 server. Now, for those who use Windows on a regular basis, you would agree that pressing "Start", selecting "Shutdown", etc would be a simple and painless process. This is not the case, as per the feedback we received...…

It's time for guest stories!

For your amusement, things I saw today that i'm sure people are going to hell for:…

I neglect my content, I get a life, I crunch my car, and all within the past week or so. Of course, this also means I haven't written a single thing. I am supposed to be up for work in 6 hours or so, more likely 5 when I finish this entry. Speaking of work, things have been going well. There have been all sorts of issues lately, most of them caused by things that happened long before I got on board the team. The way things work on a large project like this are interesting, and I'm not entirely used to them. So far, it feels like most of the mission critical decisions are made in very high upper-echelons of management, the trickle down effect hitting the team full force days later. So far, it seems the one pressing and redundant hangup is also the one outsourced component. I don't get how outsourcing works, or if it even does. My second outsource experience in the realm of academics hasn't been much better.

Over the past several weeks, my project team for the usability class has been fighting every inch of the way with bug testing an alpha product that the development group claims is beta. There have been major code revisions since we started on the project, and the taxonomy has been a nightmare from wherever the really bad nightmares come from. You know, the ones involving cheese wheels. Anyway, we have been using the Mantis Bugtracker for all our reporting needs. It may be because I have used tracking software like this before (source forge, etc) but it doesn't seem too hard to use. Developers, Reporters, Updaters... New bugs, Assigned Bugs, Resolved Bugs... however, as opposed to the original taxonomy used in Mantis (And in their documentation) the terms have been reorganized into a bizarre mockery of tracking management. When this is all done, I really will look back on the bug reports and our conference folder for email collaboration and laugh. For a select special few, I may even post a few documents. On the plus side, we have finally convinced them that Macs are an important part of the testing process (especially for an educational environment). I still have much to discuss about the notion of clearing the cache every time in order to insure the images for the games load properly from scenario to scenario. I talked with John about a lot of it today, which made me feel much better. I think he sees our team's morale slowly wasting away into nothingness. Most of us really do want to care, but just can't anymore. We aren't getting paid for this work, but we also don't want to do just the minimum to complete the class either. We do want the project to succeed, though I get more and more weary of that goal each time I see a silly bugnote or email.…

I love the house, I really do. Nevermind the broken pocket door, the unweeded garden, the makeshift room consisting of bookcases I call home; and nevermind the smell from the kitchen because nobody can take out the trash, or places things like wet garbage into it and leaves it sitting for three days. Nevermind the house meeting less than three weeks ago when we laid down strict rules about overnight guests, and nevermind the fact that one of the housemates just gave us all the middle finger and went and broke all those rules anyway. I'm glad we could have that talk, the four of us; nevermind it didn't do any good. I have started saving cash, a little from each paycheck, because when the lease is up, I have to go elsewhere. Nevermind any previous promises, because I am slowly reaching the point where I need some time to establish myself in my own place. I have a nice job now, nicer still if I get moved to 30 hours a week over summer and beyond.

Our garage isn't fixed still, and I really am losing any desire to invest into this house. I wouldn't mind meeting my landlord halfway if I thought that he would take care of things he had promised so long ago. There is a lot about my current residence that really gets to me, the most important of these things being that I feel ignored by those I live with, and those I pay money too. I used to think FOAM was bad as far as landlords go, but no. Dare I say there are situations far worse than that.…

It's a bad sign when you fall asleep and then wake up with a splitting headache. Given the hour was too-early o' clock, I wasn't really thinking and didn't bother to take some Advil. It's now about 1 in the afternoon, and boy am I paying for it. Thankfully, Don had some Advil, which was promptly consumed. However, the dull throb has just began to subside.

With graduation looming on the horizon, and the daunting task of further education also near, I am finding myself in an awkward position. My desire to pursue higher education is frequently in conflict with my lack of desire to remain impoverished and formally schooled. The Crooked Timber made a worthwhile post titled "On not having a PhD" that is directly related to this. Unlike Britain, for the longest time, the academic process of the PhD has existed, and in order to instruct others in the field, you must achieve the highest level of academic certification possible. However, this system has one very large flaw: there are now too many PhDs out there, and there is a higher emphasis on the paper than there is on the learning. I was instructed by the dean of my college that they only look at candidates from some of the most prestigious [top 10%] universities for hiring into the department. There was no mention of accomplishments or their performance in a teaching environment, but instead the most fundamental piece is if you have the doctorate. Unfortunately, while this results in very knowledgeable faculty at the University, it also results in the same faculty who may not have the ability to instruct or teach. So then, at an institute that promotes higher learning, why is it that there is a higher emphasis on what was learned as opposed to the learning taking place. As a side-effect of this, there is immense pressure on anyone who wants to teach at the higher-education levels. Those of course, who already have bled for the doctorates would probably argue quite to the contrary.…