Felocity

Well, before I got a chance to put up my report of day 3's wild and crazy adventures, I got back into the wild and crazy life. Well, okay, there was nothing wild or crazy about it, aside from the packing.

Today at work was our boss' birthday. Actually, it was tomorrow, but we strive to surprise. As if the singing and the cake wasn't bad enough, part way through the party, a woman in a giant chicken suit busts in with a trumpet player and begins to sing. Yes, our work is cool enough to order a singing telegram for a birthday. I've never witnessed such a sight before in my life. One of the people in attendance knows higher-ups at the postgraduate school, and we believe the event was photographed, meaning it will apear in the Intranet Home Page tomorrow. And yes, I fully intend to take a screen capture and post it.…

Day two of the uPortal Fundamentals Training I would deem a worthwhile success- I certainly got my money's worth. We focused mainly on XML and XSLT, and my pages of notes grew regarding how we could redesign the uPortal. It also dealt heavily with several problems in NextBrick's code, things I am not going to be happy to report. We've been for the past several months, effectivly hacking up a good portal, not effectivly transforming the content and information into something truly usable. There are effective ways to develop, and we took advantage of none of them. Administration is a simple thing, controlled ideally via properties and XML files... or at least it is supposed to be. Many of the personalizations we are paying for are built in to the portal, and even worse, many of these things don't need entire new channels. For example, our weblog did not need a custom channel. It could have gone through a simple XML/XSLT transformation. Furthermore, it would have been possible to render the blog's content entirely in the portal, which has always been our ideal goal. I'm kinda nervous about sitting down with my boss to discuss this laundry list of things, but there are so many things that would not only make our portal faster, but make it more reliable, allow for faster development, and reduce the HSDL's dependencies on external development solutions. I've avoided Java more out of a fear of spreading my langauge knowledge too thin than of anything else. I prefer to weild one or two languages well, but it looks like I'm about to pick up a few more. For those that have been keeping score since mechanicalruins,net, I like to mention my "comfort" zone on a sliding 1-5 scale, 5 being comfortably adept, 1 being ignorant. If it is not listed, I simply don't know it.

PHP (4. Up 1 point) (X)HTML (4. No change) XML/XSLT (2. Up 1 point) C++ (2. Down 1 point) Java (2. Up 1 point) PERL (2. No Change) Python (1. No change)…

San Francisco is an amazing city; it's always been a fun place to visit, though I've come here on pleasure alone and never for more than a day trip. At least that's how it was before the training today. First it was on, then it was cancelled, and then at the last second it was back on once more. I'm staying at the Holliday Inn Select about a block from Chinatown, and I've already noticed three major things about business traveling.

A half mile with your luggage isn't that bad. 411 info really is worthless The hotel lied about high speed access…

Gaia would be the second of my distractions, one that has taken up my usual "waste time on the Internet" time. Not that this is a bad thing, but it is a time consuming thing, if nothing else. Moderating for Gaia Online has been an experience all its own. After the work I had done with Fanboy Otaku Gamer and Kaizoku-Fansubs, both sites with relatively active forums, I was still unprepared for the chaos of Gaia. Moderating is a major task, as you feel almost an obligation to be helping and answering PMs the instant you go to the site. For some, like myself, its a lot of fun, but it is also really demanding. Dare I say, it is also a bit stressful at times.

Work's been okay the past few days, just been spending my time retooling import scripts to work with a change in the way we handle users. It was an eight our project, and it saved the company something like $6,000. Not bad for a day's work, I'd say.…

I've been busy with three things as of late, and since I need to get back into the routine of posting entries every once in a while, I'll probably spend a post per time distraction. The first of these distractions is actually my site, amusingly enough. I've been preparing B2's search engine to work through my posts, and I have been restructuring my archives. However, to truly make this effective, I need to also categorize my items topically. And so I've been going through my entries by hand, updating the information for them by hand, and trying to lessen the number of things in "The Usual Bit" and group things a bit better. At the very least, Stuff that wasn't just about my day-to-day life is a bit more accessible. Coupled with a search engine, I think I may be able to make felocity.org a bit easier to find things in. At the very least, Google has been a good search engine and been providing a good indexing of my site, so I might adopt that as my spider of choice. I'm on blog entry 525 of my 800+ posts right now, so I forsee this taking a bit more time yet. At an hour per 100 posts, I should be done in three more hours. Of course, that is three more uninterrupted hours when I am not taking care of the thousands of other things I have to do.

And since I'm falling asleep at 11 at night, that's my clue to call it a night. Finished at blog #550. Such a long ways to go.…