Tcepsa's Thoughts

I love computers. I especially like programming them, finding new and clever ways to make them do things. My favorite course in college was Introduction to Microcontrollers, in which we did all sorts of really fun things with an F1 board running a Motorola HC11; I really enjoyed playing around with the low-level stuff, knowing that this command was causing this particular bit to be set this particular way and having a very specific impact right down to the physical state of the board (it wasn't quite a butterfly, or a magnetized needle and a steady hand, but it felt like the next best thing). So now I'm trying to get an idea of what would be best for me to do to continue to pursue things in that direction and get paid for it. I figure the way I'm juggling my life right now, I could probably make the time to either focus more on keeping current with new technologies or pursue a higher degree, but probably not both.

Poll #1198243 Career Question (Degree or Applied)
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Which would you recommend for someone with a deep passion and about five years of workforce programming experience (much more if you count hobby-tinkering) who wanted to continue to write code as his main source of income for the foreseeable future?

I think I'll be posting stuff from the Russia trip in fragments, since there's way too much to try to get down in sequential order and even then I always feel like I'm just reciting a list of Stuff That Happened (We did X. Then we did Y. The trees were beautiful. The wind was cold. They brusquely confiscated the bottle from him.) and I could do that, but I'd rather try to tell stories. In manageable chunks.

That having been said, ( The Tale of Babushka's Computer )

I may Need need to get my internal roleplay engine back online. I also need to realize that it's been about fifteen years since I used it with anyone else, so trying to start having that kind of interaction with people is going to take some serious refurbishing (to say nothing of having to overcome a small mountain of inhibitions, shynesses, and anxieties hadn't really had time to form when I started playing like that the first time).

"So, does the bottom part of a fraction un-eat things?"

Thoughts that I developed after a conversation this evening:

I tend to be pretty bad in general about starting conversations. I feel like I do reasonably well at carrying them on and even helping them develop in new directions once they've gotten going, but... ~wry grin~ I seem to have a high conversational inertia.

(And sometimes there's a high coefficient of conversational friction, which also works against me...)

I ran into a mental block trying to think of a name for a character in a story this evening, so I decide to scout around the web and see whether I could find inspiration there. I discovered something surprising: apparently, there are only a handful of grown-up names on the Internet; most of the sites that my search turned up only had baby names.

Today has been one of those days where I walk away feeling like "Wow I learned a lot!", and even though I didn't write a single line of code that will actually be included in the final product I consider the time well-spent as tomorrow (or more likely early next week; I'm trying to learn Spring and Hibernate and I haven't even gotten started on Hibernate...) I will be writing code, and it will be very good code thanks to the time I've invested today.

Levels gained:

• 2 in Spring
• 1 in Dependency Injection
• 1 in Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP)
• 1 in Logging (with Log4j)
• 1 in Unit Testing (with JUnit)
• 1 in Eclipse

And there might be more tonight, if I don't decide that I've had enough. I hit a kind of frustrating point just now with the AOP side of things (or I could have maybe claimed two levels in it alone... ah well): it isn't actually executing what ought to be "before" and "after" advice (separate code blocks that run before and after a given method is executed, respectively). I'm not seeing anything obvious wrong with my config file, but I'm also not familiar enough with the AspectJ notation to say whether I did the pattern for the pointcut right, either.

There is a symbol before me
What was it for, now?
I think it used to have meaning

gipsieee and I and some of her classmates are all going to see the play History Boys at The Studio Theater in DC tomorrow (details here). We've got an extra ticket going for $39 if anyone is interested. I'm probably not going to be checking responses to LJ this evening (an interesting and unfortunate twist, I know) but if you have my cell number and are interested, give me a call!

One of the ways that Snickers is currently advertising is through the use of made up words. The one I got on my Snickers bar today was:

Substantialiscious \sub-'stan(t)-shu-'li-shus\ (noun). The weight of something when you weigh it with your tongue.

First off, what kind of a sentence is that for a definition? No self-respecting dictionary (except possibly urban dictionaries) uses the second person voice. Secondly, a noun? WTF? Weight is a noun. As in, you can say "What is the weight of that thing?" Try saying "What is the substantialicious of that thing?" and it sounds ridiculous. Why? Because words that end in "ious" are adjectives!

Allow me to close with another example of why that word should not be a noun:

My brain hates your stupid definition even as my tongue savors your substantialiscious.

[PS I blame the sleep deprivation]

I was up until two this morning working on a desk and honing my woodworking skills.

I learned the following lessons:

1. Ryobas are awesome.
2. It's really easy to get sidetracked for a couple of hours making wooden jaws for your vice.
3. As awesome as ryoba are, they're not good for making right-angled internal cuts. They are, however, fantastic for making parallel cuts to help chop out the joint, which should then be done with a hammer and chisel.
4. I need a bigger chisel.
5. I can simultaneously chop out a joint and help revise applications over AIM after midnight.
6. Tearout sucks. I need to be more careful when chopping out joints and do a deeper prechop at the inside edge of the side that I'm not chopping from.
7. Staying up until 2 AM on a school night really sucks, but it still may have been worth it...
8. I really love projects like this, especially now that I'm getting to the point where my workspace is set up to facilitate them more

Even with the fact that I am bleary and feel like I have little to no energy or motivation today, it's a sort of content bleary lethargy. While I was working (once I got past the hassles with the vice), I was in that space that feels like it's got boundless energy. I stopped at 2 AM but I felt like I could have gone for a couple of hours more if I wasn't already going to be regretting it today. I want to explore that more!

Last night, I had the experience of being the only person to laugh at a certain point in a play. The play was Shakespeare's Love's Labours Lost, and the line was "He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument."

I couldn't help myself; I had a fibergeekgasm right there on the spot.

That's two particularly wonderful turns of phrase in the past week... woo! (The other one was "I'm accused of being deliberately obtuse because people who understand the things I don't understand can't understand how anyone can possibly not understand them." from this post on Autism)

With the current project I am on, the build consists of a couple of steps:
1) Shutdown Tomcat
2) Run an ant script that does the actual compiling and putting things where they go
3) Startup Tomcat

(When I want to deploy changes that I just made to relatively static things, like Javascript files, I can just do step two)

( Cut for excessive geekery )

ViolinWithShoulderRest >= 1000 * ViolinWithoutShoulderRest

And all that time I figured I was just doing something wrong by not being able to hold the violin up without my hands. Apparently what I was doing wrong was trying to make that work without a shoulder rest ^_^

Long neck is looooong.

I just gained at least one, possibly two levels in Regular Expressions.

I'm all tingly now... ^_^

Me: Did you deposit that check that I wrote you yet?
Her: Not yet, no.
Me: Oh good... Could you hold off on that for another ten minutes or so?

(Note the timestamp)

Created by OnePlusYou


The irony here being that I haven't had any caffeine for days.

"I just made Spring!"

I made you a pi, but we eated it! ^_^



Created by gipsieee and myself in recognition of pi day, it's a mock mince pie. And as you can see, to facilitate easy calculation of its area, our pie r squared ^_^

Shuggle, n.: A very nice, fuzzy, cuddly Shoggoth.

how much wood would a wood chuck chuck if a wood chuck could chuck wood?

A wood chuck would chuck as much wood as he would if a wood chuck could chuck wood.