baz, bar, foo

Beep is up and running. I’m typing this entry in on him right now. He’s rather a dog right now. I have a 256MB SODIMM from Sugar Daddy Mac that’s going into him in the near future, but it turns out that I need a phillips head screwdriver the size of a gnat in order to install RAM into this iBook. I was unprepared for this eventuality, and so I am living on 128MB currently. Strange, only seven years ago I paid $150 for 16MB RAM for my family’s Power Mac 6100 to bring it up to a whopping 24MB RAM. Damn, was that thing a screamer after that. And now, trying to cope with only 128MB feels like sucking molasses through a straw.

Jobs jobs jobs. Steve and otherwise. My friend Kelly ordered a 15″ AlBook minutes after they were announced. He’s officially a bastard in my book now.
;-)

I had my interview on Monday over the phone. I found out today that it went well. I am doing another interview tomorrow, and more after that. Fun stuff. I have a good degree of hope that something will come out of these efforts. And if not, I am still getting together with my recruiter buddy tomorrow.

whee!

Also, I discovered a weird bug with iRooster today that I am going to need to smoke out. It turns out that having an installed copy of iTunes 2 for Mac OS 9 causes iRooster to have a hissy fit. This will get addressed in iRooster 1.1.

whee!

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September 16, 2003

augh – panic attack

I have been having a constant low-grade panic attack over Monday since I got the fateful call on Thursday. It’s getting to be a little overwhelming. Every time I think I have been able to just deal with what’s happening I remember the gravity of the situation with Company X and my heart starts flopping around like a bunny in a ziploc bag (a phrase shamelessly taken from Neal Stephenson).

So, on the plus side of things I find out what’s happening in about 38 hours from now. This is just far too long for me. I don’t think I have ever wanted a Monday to come this much ever. Oh well. There’s really nothing I can about it for now, so I guess I just need to cope.

My sister moved back to Minneapolis from Boston yesterday; I spent some time with her today. It’s nice to actually get to spend time with family in a relaxed setting every now and then. I forget occasionally how much I really do like my siblings.

I received a UPS tracking number for beep, my 700MHz iBook, today. It should arrive on Tuesday, not Monday. This irritates me slightly, but I feel that this young padawan needs to learn more in the realm of patience on such immutable factors in life.

Music in heavy rotation on my iPod right now:
Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Portishead – Dummy
Radiohead – OK Computer and Hail to the Thief

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September 13, 2003

holy crap (again)!

So I just figured out why iRooster has been so damned popular since Thursday.

Note the URL that this is from.

Holy crap!

apple-enews.jpg

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September 13, 2003

holy crap!

It never rains, it pours.

iRooster appears to have been a featured download on apple.com today. I had several thousand downloads and as many purchases today as I did all last month.

I ordered an ibook from smalldog. It is a stopgap until aluminum 15 inch pbooks come out, and I can afford one.

More developments came today in jobland. I don’t want to say more now, but hopefully Monday will bring good things.

I am typing this entry in on my hiptop. This sucks. A lot. I need my iBook like yesterday. Instead, I am without OS X until Monday. Oh well, like I said, monday will hopefully bring good things in many shapes and sizes….

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September 11, 2003

oh crap

It looks like my 15″ Titanium Powerbook G4, Sugar Daddy Mac, age 21 months, passed away today. Needless to say, I am slightly less than thrilled about this. If anyone can offer some advice on this (i.e. perhaps it’s just mostly dead, to quote Billy Crystal) I would really appreciate it.

Here’s what happened. I was home earlier tonight, I use my laptop to check the weather. I shut the lid, and it goes to sleep. I head off to a coffee shop (same as I usually do) to work on iRooster. I pull the laptop out and try to bring it out of sleep mode. Nothing happens. I write this off as a fluke and decide to read a book instead. I get home tonight, try it again, and still nothing happens.

I remove the battery, toggle the reset button on the back, plug the computer into AC power, and try again. This time, the screen lights up. The computer runs just long enough for me to back my latest revisions to iRooster to my iPod before it hard locks with the screen still showing my desktop. No kernel panic, no nothing. Just dead. I turn off the computer with its power button, and attempt to resuscitate it. I am able to get it to boot into Jaguar again after a while. I run Disk Utility on the hard drive to see if it’s okay. It is. The computer locks up again a minute later. It is now totally unwilling to turn on, although the battery indicates a full charge (courtesy of the indicator LEDs on the battery), and the power adaptor lights up when it’s plugged in.

Any idea what could have caused this?

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September 11, 2003

Career Choices

I had an interesting day today. I re-realized that my co-workers absolutely love me for the simple reason that I do the work I’m expected to do. I don’t need supervision, I get stuff done on time, and it works. Apparently this is a big thing.

The second interesting thing that happened to me today was that I received an email from my recruiter for a previous job. I unsuccessfully applied for a job with this particular software company (of which you are undoubtedly acquainted with) last November, and I was expecting to interview with them again this November. The recruiter expressed a good deal of interest in what I have learned and accomplished over the last twelve months, and asked me to meet with him next week when he’s in Minneapolis.

The third interesting thing that happened to me today was that I received a phone call/interview from the one company I was starting to suspect would never actually call me back (they are apparently notorious about how long it can take to get an interview with them). Once again, you have heard of this company. I had a very pleasant conversation with this company employee, and only belatedly discovered (i.e. about half-way through the phone call) that this was one of those make-or-break sort of moments. I was being interviewed in a cold-call sort of manner. Thank god I can usually think well on my feet: I was asked if and when I would like to do a conference call interview with a few more people.

So, in any case, life is good, job prospects are good, and I’m going to California in a month to visit some people.

Also, in an attempt to better elucidate why I loved working for Microsoft, I highly recommend reading through this book draft. I found the link to it on Don Box’s weblog.

Oh yeah, one last thing (well, two, actually). Dennis Cheung is hilarious, and well worth reading (see the weblogs links to the right). iRooster 1.1 is drawing inexorably closer to beta candidate status. I finally gave the boot to the feeping creaturism that was setting into it. I’m just trying to make a few last sanity check passes through its functionality, and making a few hacked-around UI choices with the Alarm Editor a little more consistency (don’t worry, it’ll still look terrific).

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September 10, 2003

a rather productive day

I feel pretty damn good about the changes I made to iRooster today. I finally settled on a new design for the Alarm Editor (a picture of the old design is the link there). It’s a little bit more complex, but not too much. Also, this is rather unavoidable since I’m adding more stuff to what you can actually do with alarms (for the curious: this would be wake-from-sleep and repeating alarms).

A particularly needed change that was just implemented today was the removal of two of those NSStepper controls on the alarm editor. The interface looks far less cluttered with only one left. A beautiful–and thoroughly unexpected–bonus of removing two of those NSSteppers was that the code responsible for managing time changes became substantially less complex. Of course, Objective C’s management of selectors through the SEL datatype, along with the -performSelector:withObject: method saved me a lot of energy too.

On a non-technical note, I had a pretty good weekend. Friday was spent criticizing the implementation of Six-Sigma with my friend Amanda over dinner, and discussing life on the East Side of Seattle with her boyfriend.

Saturday was far more involved, but not bad by any means. I saw a documentary entitled Bonhoeffer, which had been playing at the U of Minnesota’s U Film Society. I worked for a while after that, hung out with my two of my token Asian friends, Stef and Kari (sheesh, it was a joke). I ended up hanging out with another friend, Lori, later that night. We ended up going to a house party around 1am. Everyone present was hot, tired, sweaty, and thoroughly drunk. Shortly thereafter we changed our minds about being present, took Stef, and went to Pizza Luce. For the record, anyone visiting Minneapolis should definitely check it out at least once. It’s easily the best pizza in the Twin Cities.

Sunday was, once again, uninvolved. I didn’t get up until 2:30 in the afternoon (god, I love being done with school). I hung out at the Purple Onion, worked on iRooster (hence the first half of this blog entry), and a good three or four hours of work for Honeywell too.

I have yet another demo on Tuesday of my project, and I’ve been working very, very dilligently in reimplementing the entire damned thing in C# (as opposed to VB6). The upside of using C# (besides the fact that I actually feel really comfortable with the language) is that its class library isn’t psychotic, which I feel is the case with VB6. Unsurprisingly, work has progressed far more rapidly and smoothly in C# than it ever did in Visual Basic. Mind you, I’m not knocking VB. It’s really great for some stuff, and I’m sure that if I had actually spent as much time working with VB as I have with C/Objective C and C# I would probably come to appreciate it. Nevertheless, for the time being I find it frustrating and limiting in the strangest ways.

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September 8, 2003

error: does not compute

Is it just my imagination, or does this make absolutely no sense?

pressherald.com: Benson’s program is a modest version of one begun by Maine last year. Maine gave laptops to 17,000 seventh-graders and 3,000 teachers in all the state’s public middle schools. Maine considers the program a success and this year will expand it to eighth-graders for a total of 33,000 laptops in use despite a projected budget shortfall. Absences, tardiness and disciplinary trips to the principal dropped significantly in one Maine school with the laptops, Benson said.” “If that doesn’t tell you this works, nothing else will,” he said.

Specifically, I’d like to draw your attention to two places.

First, 17,000 seventh-graders received these laptops. I am not quite sure what the average size of a middle school in Maine is, but if it’s anything like Minnesota, there are approximately 1000 7th and 8th graders total per school. This means that there are 500 7th graders per school. Given that Maine gave laptops to 17000 of these kids, this would imply that approximately 34 schools received laptops for their 7th graders.

Second, Benson attempts to link the drop in “absences, tardiness and disciplinary trips to the principals office.” Of course, if 3% of schools didn’t show marked improvement in an area like discipline every year we’d probably abolish public schools altogether. Benson prattles on to say, “If that doesn’t tell you this works, nothing else will.” Well, Gov. Benson, I don’t think anything’s going to convince me.

I don’t see any reason why a seventh grader needs a laptop. I sure as hell didn’t back then (in case you were wondering how old (or young, really) I am, I was in 7th grade during the 1994-1995 school year, which makes me 21 now). I just graduated with a computer science degree, i develop software all day to pay my bills, and I probably wouldn’t be able to figure out movie showtimes without the Internet. Nevertheless, I simply did not need a computer in 7th grade. My family still had one (a Power Mac 6100 running System 7.5), but I never did anything but play Spectre VR and Spin Doctor on it.

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September 6, 2003

Michelle Lai blinded me with science

A line from my stats page:
62: 6.72%: dolby.com

life is rather boring at the moment. I discovered today that my productivity goes through the roof when I’m not actually at work. Around 3 yesterday afternoon I attached a “working from home” post-it note to my office and left. I didn’t go in today at all. I got more done yesterday and today than I did all of last week. Does anyone else out there suffer from similar problems? I mean, I have always worked better in coffee shops than in offices, but it’s never been as pronounced as this. Weird shit. In other news, I’ve been merrily plugging away at bugs in iRooster, and getting the repeating alarms to work juuuuust right. Big mad props go out to Koen, who localised (not a typo) iRooster into Dutch for no reason other than he just rocks. The localization will be online soon. I have just been too busy since I got back from Madison to do anything other than Honeywell+iRooster 1.1.

School’s back in session here in Minnesota. The area I live in is teeming with college students again. They’re all starting to look young, which scares me a bit (considering that I’m only 21). I am starting to think that I should have just sucked it up for another two years and gone into an M.S. program (for Comp Sci or SwEng). Then again, if I was doing that right now I would be thinking that I’d rather be right where I am now. I guess I can’t really win at the moment. All I really know is that I don’t want to be living in Minnesota. Winter’s going to be coming soon and that will not be very pleasant. I’ve lived through my fair share of cold, snowy months here (considering snow tends to be on the ground for 6 months of the year, I have now spent upwards of 130 wintry months in Minnesota).

Say, does anyone on the west coast (read: Silicon Valley/San Francisco or Seattle/Redmond) want to hire a strapping young lad fresh out of college? (for software development work, I hasten to point out :-)

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September 4, 2003