She Was A Crusty Old Broad

I am no longer sure how to take Dr. Long anymore. Today’s phrase of the day was something to the effect of “She was a crusty old broad” in reference to Grace Hopper, the finder of the first computer bug, and developer of modern programming technology (Mother of COBOL).

This would be the image he was showing at the time.
I think his whole Navy thing is a bit confusing, maybe im being just a bit hard on him? His trivia is interesting but it is complete bullshit in the way of getting curriculum across to students. We were learning JavaScript, not COBOL and not “the history of entemology”. I think the department should stick him to teaching ITIS1200, freshman seminar. There ya go Dr. Long, the perfect assignment for you.
ok, any volenteers to be next up on my chopping block?
UPDATE: I have revised my opinion of Dr. Long’s statement, it was unprofessional and quite offensive to the legacy of Admiral Hopper. If Dr. Long is going to put these people on a pedestal, he can do it without attempting to insult them, especially the dead ones. (I think a Tim Berners-Lee joke would have been hillarious). No more jokes should be made about the dead, they have suffered enough.

GITI Vision Vs. GITI Reality

GITI was designed as an idea on June 16, 2003. GITI’s primary objective was to be a place for me to keep up with things I do, hence the original module being the schedule module. Part of the idea of GITI is that I could be more social, keep track of my events and perhaps start feeling good about myself. The oringal plan was very simplistic and didn’t involve me working on GITI for more time that I am out being social. In addition to making me more social GITI was also supposed to keep me more organized, well… it met that goal without a problem. I have never been as together as I am now that I have GITI.
Now, GITI is a wall for me to hide behind, as long as there is something popping up in the summary view, then there is something to be done, an excuse for why I can’t do something social. In addition, there is never a sense of completion, or a sense that ive done something worthwhile that will make me feel better about myself, because everytime an assignment gets marked complete, another one comes up from the bottom of the list to take its place, which makes completing assignments seem like an infinite loop.
while (x>= 1)
{
worry = true;
x=x+1;
complete_assignment();
x = x -1;
}

the only way to get away from it is to have nothing left in the queue to do, but that has only happened like once in GITI’s history, and that was at the end of Spring semester this year. Every other time in its life, there has been something in it to do.
In short, I think GITI is beginning to slowly ruin my life.

Using Keywords In Blog Entries

I think im going to try to start using less parenthesis and brakets in my blog entries, and use anchor tags instead to create sort of a keyword effect. I have attempted it in my previous blog entry. If you like it, comment that you do, if you hate it, comment that you do. I do my blog mostly for me, but I like for my audience to be able to benefit from it.

Mistakes Are Fine As Long As They Are Consistent

It would appear that as long as a mistake in logic is consistent, then there is no real error. It would appear that I have been storing ID info for “time” journal entries incorrectly, I have been using all values of the date for them, but omittiing all leading zeros, hence, today is 2005916, not 20050916. Upon looking at the problem closer, I noticed that GITI is retrieving the entries using the same stupid mistake, so I guess as long as all is consistent, it doesn’t give a shit how far off it is… If this does become a problem though, im moving to a less problematic time system… perhaps seconds since Unix Epoch and getting info for an entire day using a range… or maybe Star Dates, at least they use decimals and not some multi-part orgy of numbers for identifying something so solitary as a day.

Disgust with v1

It finally happened, I am now to the point where I can’t stand GITI version 1. It is hard to navigate, a pain to develop for and lacks any form of logical structure. GITI Version 1 has been perfectly fine for me the entire time it has existed until now, and I think im falling in love with version 2’s ease of use and simple navigation. In addition, now that I have the ability to make GITI function uniformly, developing for it is a lot more fun (the “command” module). Version 1’s time is nearing an end. As soon as I have time I must convert all modules to version 2, especially now that v2 has its own modules (Library primarily). A lot of things from version 1 will be joining the Do-Do bird soon, this includes the “Journal” module, it is being replaced by only the “item journal” stuff, since I can treat a day as an object (funny how 20050915 resembles something like 0734 isn’t it?). GITI will remain under the Pythagorean system of organization (numbers, only numbers), so there is no problem with any of that. Another problem area is the concept of making GITI v2 multi-user. In version 1 of GITI, everyone is the same and everyone has access to all functions for their own accounts. This is all well and good for those of us who can ignore superfolous [movable type needs spellcheck] features, but for some users it is confusing. Currently for v2 I am experimenting with a group-driven system, which i plan to expand to group+user-specfic. Yesterday I added my mother to GITI as a member of the “librarians” group, so she has only access to menus specified for that group, which at the current time is Home and Library. I am a member of a group that I called “System”, im not sure why I called it that, but I should probably go back and call it “Full” or something equally non-confusing. At the current time all of the menus are done by client-side JavaScript using a SQL query. This works for group based stuff, but it wont work for group+user specific, unless I want all of the user-specific stuff at the end of the menu. I will probably end up using a standard array for this, so I can have the ability to sort a second time before thowing the information to the Javascript.
On my way home tonight I began considering the many options for replacing my main summary on GITI, which is highly restrictive currently. It isn’t the first time ive gotten ideas for ways to better use the space that is availible to me in v2. I like the ideas of utilizing columns instead of just a centered table with very little information. I have roughly 1024 pixels I can utilize for that page, why should I use just 500 in the middle of the page, and none anywhere else? Before GITI’s summary was called “summary” it was called “GITI Today”, indicating that it was supposed to cover roughly 1 day, maybe 2 at most I think. I have been feeling so overloaded with the stuff that GITI has been showing me, even though some of the stuff can be as far away as 15 days. I shouldn’t feel like my life and ability to do stuff is impeded by the fact that I have 5 things that must be done in the next 15 days. I have time, time for fun, time for whatever the hell I want between now and then. Either GITI must address every possible aspect of my life, or it must be configured to not make me feel like i have some sort of obligation all the time. Since I am not planning to write a module to handle every possible thing I might want to do in my life, then I must get GITI to chill out a bit. I am a very non-motivated and tend to try to stick to my obligations only, this is a very bad practice.

The Music Of Teamwork

“I love to hear a choir. I love the humanity… to see the faces of real people devoting themselves to a piece of music. I like the teamwork. It makes me feel optimistic about the human race when I see them cooperating like that.”
– Paul McCartney
Dr. Cheryl Brown posted this to the class forum today to encourage us in our virtual team projects. I find it somewhat inspirational.

The Problem with Distance Education

For the past few hours UNCC.edu and its team of servers has been inaccessible. I have a quiz due at some point tommorrow that I currently cant access. I’ve been paitiently waiting for these servers to return to service, but it hasn’t happened yet. It would appear that the primary problem is that the primary DNS server isn’t responding and the secondary is responding with “duh….”. Ah, technology at its finest. At the current time CPCC’s servers are all up and running without a problem, and have never had a complete system failure.
I guess this results from all of UNCC’s eggs being in the same library basket. The infrastructure of the Atkins library is responsible for sustaining all of the servers at UNCC. I constantly brag about how awesome distance education is, its “always” there, day or night, you can work on it when you feel like, or when you have time or whatever. Well… I think I just busted my own nuts on that one. With my luck, of course the first failure of Dist. Ed. ive experienced would be in a time of critical need, such as right now when i need to access the stupid Java quiz 🙁
Current Mood: Technologically Inferior / Beaten

Blobs of Fun

Apparently I have started an addiction. Last week I bought a squeezy Nike blob, designed for increasing muscle strength in the hands. Almost immediately Chris wanted one, then the next day my mother chimed in, then tonight Chris’s mother indicated she might want one and now there are various people popping into my mind whom I know will want one as soon as they see them. They come in Green (easy), Orange (medium) and Blue (hard). So… here is the addicting object:

Being Shy Is No Fun

from my friend Guy:
“NineFathomDeep: OMG the man bikini feels so friggen awesome!”
and there we have it, a random, disturbing thought 🙂

Redefining Social Networks

For the past year I have been a student at UNCC, and I have been away from my high school friends for nearly 18 months. During high school towards the middle of my senior year various teachers were telling the seniors as a whole “enjoy the time you have together, for after you graduate, you will likely never see anyone from high school again”. I originally doubted this and I guess went into a self-generated dilousion that through some miracle all of the Highland people would remain in constant contact, but unfortunately that hasnt been the case. I guess I should have realized when Mr. Hudson said it that it wasn’t bullshit. At the current time the only person from high school I really interact with is Guy Broome. Guy wasn’t really around me much in high school, but now he is, its kind of strange. I haven’t seen Matt Lamb in like forever, same with Jeff, although ive talked to him some and he still takes an interest in my life on occasion. Other than these few people, I don’t really have the opportunity to talk to any of my class anymore. Looking back on my senior year, I spent more time hiding from the fact that things were ending than I did on anything else. During senior year I spent a lot of spare time at Highland working with the network and various other things that didn’t really matter all that much, but I wasn’t with people. I spent more time saying goodbye to the building and the technology than I did to the people. In addition to spending time away from people, I also spent time in class at Gaston College, getting a jumpstart on my education, or perhaps just a jumpstart on being alone. Funny thing is, I think I spent more time getting to know the people at Gaston College more than I have tried getting to know people at UNCC. Towards the end of the last semester at Highland I decided to write lettrers to everyone I cared about, but I didn’t make it very far on my list. I only manged to get the letters to Jeff and Matt Lamb written, no one else got one, except Mr. Frost, who got one because I went back during the summer.
Now that I have been at UNCC for a year, I excepted that I would have developed some sort of social network, but I somehow managed to not do that. For the first time since I graduated from high school I have actually started making friends again, very slowly, but still, its progress. I have met one person who is extreamly interesting, but he is a lot more socially active than I am, and I feel really weird when I tell him that I don’t want to do stuff. I really wish I could be a lot more like him, but its not in my personality to be that outgoing. Hes the type of person who goes clubbing, dancing and goes to parties. I wouldn’t mind going to clubs or dancing, but I think I draw the line at going to college parties. That is just absolutely not me. I want to be more socially open, but going from anti-social to party-animal could be too much of a shock to myself, my existing friends and the fabric of space-time in general. Lewis has noted that I am a “nerd”. ok, where is the news flash item here? of course I am, I would prefer to index my book collection than go out and interact with living, breathing fleshy humans any day. For my life to be stable and happy I do need to seek the occasional additional person to add to my social network, but I need people more like me. People I frequently interact with sometimes worry that I wont have time for when when I interact with others, but the situation is really the opposite, I presently do very little with my time and am availible a lot, I just always seem busy. Adding people to my life is likely to make me more human-focused instead of being project-focused. My social network isn’t what it was in high school, and I consider this a good thing. I need people in my life who are able to accept me for who I am and not judge me based upon some sort of predisposed opinion that they conjured up through a confusing set of adolescent influences.