Cerrisian Blog

Work is really stressful at the moment. I had to work at night to get as much of my work done as possible. Hopefully it’ll all be done by the end of the week. A lot of my coworkers were also working late today, talked to them on IM.

I really dislike doing heroics like this to get something done…It’s just not my style.

I ended up shocking myself when I unplugged my laptop, I’m really tired.

Oh! I did get some more diagrams of continental drift done.

My manager showed a lot of interest in doing another UCCS learning seminar…I’ll have to organize a new session

Tomorrow is OSUG meeting!!

Well, I had an extremely full day. First, at about 1:00 AM I wrote down what my ideal day would be like (subject to change, gotta publish it somewhere I got it from some self-improvement book online…I’ll link to it eventually.

The Perfect Day

• 8:00 AM
  • Get up by sitting up in bed and waking up slowly. Eat protein, take shower, get dressed. Do the morning blessing.
• 8:30 AM
  • Head out to work.
• 12:00 PM
  • Eat lunch with coworkers, socialize and do athletics (frisbee golf and kickball, or whatever.)
• 4:55 PM
  • Log all work in xplanner dividing the day into 7~9 hours and assuming on-task at all time.
• 5:25 PM
  • Come home from work with some energy.
  • Cook dinner, work on website.
• 6:30 PM
  • Eat dinner with family and friends
  • Exercise after dinner (Hike, kickball, swimming, weights.)
• 8:00 PM
  • Work on website
• 10:45 PM
  • Do spaced learning and quick study.
• 11:15 PM
  • Blog about day
• 11:30 PM
  • Head to bed.

Now, that’s my assumed ideal day. Every day I’ll log how I was able to get closer to this goal. Today I blogged at 11:00 PM and got up at 8:13 AM. I was able to work on the website from about 7:00 to 8:00 PM, but I didn’t get out, but I did play kickball in the afternoon.

I’ve been following the RepRap project for a few years, and they’ve finally succeeded in doing a full replication!

It’s a rapid prototyping machine designed to be able to create all the parts needed to build another one (except a few things like screws, metal rods, ICs, PCBs, etc.)

The quality of the printed parts has gone up a TON as well, it’s actually a legitmate rapid prototyping machine now.

Fab@Home has also progressed, but it’s not as cheap or interesting.

Woo, it’s been quite a week.

Went to two potlucks (one for interns/new hires at work, one at church). Finished watching Blue Submarine Number 6, went to California Pizza Kitchen for the first time in a while, explored Drupal, finished up another feature at work, setup my new laptop.

Did I mention I’ve started using mnemosyne? It’s a flashcard program that uses spaced learning. So far, I’ve been quite impressed. I’m using it to learn the CSS 2.1 specifications and keep some drawing techniques in the forefront of my mind, as well as anything else that comes to interest. I have about 60 cards now, The 20 Rules of Formulating Knowledge For Learning really has good advice on making cards for mnemosyne.

It definitely seems to make studying easier, I’m definitely going to try it this semester, as well. It should be really useful in Astrophysics and Operating Systems (my two hardest classes, besides Senior Seminar).

I haven’t been taking very many photos or hiking this week, and I forgot to exercise this evening, but that’s ok. I need extra time to prepare for the next potluck

Last night I went to a web design meetup. I was really impressed with the tech people from Colorado Springs that showed up. The organizer is a board member of the Zikula (formerly PostNuke) project. The co-organizer has won two Academy Awards for special effects and works with one of my professors at UCCS.

After introductions we discussed web technologies. I got a few recommendations for Drupal over Joomla. Drupal seems a bit slicker and and more features are integrated into the core (blog, aggregator, gallery) although it appears that Joomla has more add-ons. I’ll also have to check out Zikula in more detail.

We also discussed the state of net neutrality, bandwidth caps and security. The people were really knowledgeable. Most of them worked either on non-profit websites or ran home based web design/consulting businesses. Definitely my kind of people.

Pikes Perk downtime is comfortable, the baristas were friendly and attentive, and my chai tea was quite good. There was live music upstairs which made it a bit difficult to talk, but it was still a good venue.

I’m definitely going to make this meetup a habit.

So, I spent some time with my Dad tonight and here are some of the notable quotes and stories.

“You know, being frustrated is a sign of retardation.”

“That hotel over there, all the old people lived there after they retired. Every day they’d go outside and play shuffle board, then they’d go in and party. The ballroom had a live band, and they’d just dance all night.”

I read this cool blog post about some readability and “Functional Programming” type stuff to do in java. Looking at how much cleaner it is than calling new all the time…I wonder why something like this isn’t included in the Java standard library.

Most of the stuff is just using parameter lists to create Lists, and from there creating Hashes from two arrays of the same size (ala a zip function). The other things are mostly “fluent interfaces” and nice uses of static methods. Still…why haven’t I seen any API’s (besides EasyMock) that have this type of stuff?

Well, I just ripped up my bookshelves and dressers searching my my eraseable black marker, among the things I found: 4 brand new keychain/belthook things, 3 mini notebooks,  my ‘real’ notebook of webpage notes. In one of the little notebooks, I found:

• Doodles of the roman numeral IX, a three-line asterisk, triangles, and 2^4
• Directions to Front Range Honda, a list of the different colors of carnations… (with doodles of the Greek letter Sigma)
• The words “Tiger Lilly” crossed out.
• The lines:

Make Pizza
do headlines

I feel red Carnations and white rose
I now think indian paintbrush is all I’ll ever feel like

Needless to say, I had totally forgotten writing those things down, (I probably did it 2 years ago), and have no real clue why I wrote them down, although I do like Indian Paintbrush…I vaguely remember talking to a girl that like carnations, maybe that’s what it has to do with.

There’s a new Hollywood Theaters in town, something like 20 screens, all digital audio and video, stadium seating. And right by my house. I must say, it really beats Cinemark.