And so comes the birth of a new category, and a minor rearrangement of the existing ones. My 9-5 job I am sure will have some interesting stories to go along with the pay, and while routine, it is hardly [The Usual Bit". Things are a bit hectic, mostly because of an administrative decree. This Thursday is supposed to be an open house at the Knox Library (place of employment). The administration also decided that they wanted our current site functional and working by this time. The request was simple enough except that this coming Thursday happens to be almost two full weeks before the site was supposed to enter the initial "soft launch" testing phase. Most of the morning was spent plugging in data and manipulating database tables. The way everything is linked together here is still odd, and still makes absolutely no sense to me. As a result, these past two weeks have been horrible for getting work done. Most of my time has been spent manipulating servers, remembering passwords, and getting my access card. I didn't think anything could be slower than when I was issued my school identification. At CSUMB, it was two hours and that included waiting in line. Not to be outdone by a state institution, my ID card has been in the "being processed" phase for approximately two weeks. On top of that, I hiked over a good quarter of the Naval Postgraduate School tracking down people and getting forms signed. Almost an hour later and having walked between the library and the ID card place more than a half dozen times, I finally got my shiny card. The hopeful result of this is I won't have to wait for the access list checks again. We will see come morning when I get to the front gate.
I have been experimenting with a few PERL scripts, many of which were never designed for persistent connections, especially when it comes to things like IRC connections. However, I have found a beautiful client called CGI::IRC which does everything I could ever want a web-based IRC client to do, including be fast. I'm not entirely sure how they made a PERL script have almost no lag and have decent processing speed, but it does, and it works wonderfully. This is especially helpful given the over-secure nature of the postgraduate school which limited the number of resources I had access to. IRC, AIM, and E-Mail tend to be my typical forums for asking questions, especially when it comes to technology and troubleshooting.
Classes are going smooth right now, although I must say I have extreme dislike for the Keep Toolkit being used for the assembly of my digital portfolio. Some other people in the class fought with it and lost, so we shall see what things will bring. I have a few ideas about how to render and create mine, but I have yet to explore the limitations of the program. If I can do things like insert a stylesheet or anything fancy like that, I can probably create a decent layout, but if I am limited to the ineffective, static, non-ada compliant, boring, bland layouts everyone else seems to have. I think I will poke around iStockPhoto for some ideas, perhaps even find a good image to base my layout on. The computers at NPS however lack Photoshop or any other image editing program. I might have to look into GIMP or any other number of editors in order to do simple graphical things. Given the nature of my job, I will probably need something eventually anyway, and so I may as well begin my hunt. Plus, working with the toolkit will give me good experience with whatever image editor I decide to go with.
UPP, my mIRC variant seems to have developed an interesting "feature](
It remains a mystery how I am online for 24 hours, 10 minutes in a day.
In response to "There’s a Five o’ Clock World When the Whistle Blows":