Things have gotten quite complicated lately. I thought recently that maybe
it’s time I got back to updating my log, since a few things have cleared on my schedule. So here’s all the things you’ve missed since I went on hermitage.
On the school front, I completed my first course in eight years and I received an A. I was quite relieved when the class ended, because it freed up time that I needed for other things including my work and house-hunting.
I finally found a house I liked. It’s not small, but it isn’t too big either. Actually, it’s more floor space than I had actually wanted. I was after a low maintenance house. The best part is that it has a great backyard deck. The original owner had it professionally built and kept it well-maintained. The yard is small enough for me to handle by myself. Overall, there wasn’t anything I disapproved of, but I do need to update a few things to match my own taste.
I started on a new project in February that kept me in a state of deep concentration. When I’m in that state, I block out all but essential information that comes my way. I don’t shave as often. I didn’t shave all that often before, but less so during this period. My apartment gets into state of disarray. Anyway, all that is lessening because I’ve pretty much gotten the essential meat of the project out of the way. Now it’s mostly clean-up work. Here’s something I learned that’s quite interesting during this project. I learned that the saying “There’s no such thing as a stupid question” does not apply to the internet especially when it comes to open-source software developers. The whole story goes like this. I’m handed a project to evaluate an open-source piece of software to see whether it’s feasible for our own use or not. For anyone who doesn’t know what “open-source” is, it’s a method, philosophy, paradigm of software development which espouses that the underlying code be available upon request from anyone who uses and wants it.
In this way, the user may modify the software however he/she wishes. The catch is that the modifications must be made available to other users. It cannot be made proprietary and secret unless certain conditions are met in regards only to the modifications made. Anyway, I diverge. So I go to the website of this open-source project and sign up on the mailing list so that as I go along and find problems that I can’t solve, I can relay my questions to the community and theoretically get a prompt reply. Well, I can say from my own experience that this was not the case. I posted 5 questions and only received 1 reply. The reply was only for my first question. The rest remained unanswered. The moral of the story is: Don’t ask trivial questions on the internet. Incredibly intelligent people on the internet will not answer them. They have better things to do like putting up useless half-baked websites. The project did get further along without the “help” of the community, but it took longer than I had hoped.
The good news at work is that one of the other projects I was involved in finally went to field testing and it’s all good, mostly. They’re at the point where they’re going to production and documentation. I wasn’t involved during the last couple of months, because of previously mentioned project.
I also took a vacation to LA and San Francisco (SF) with my folks. We went to see my grandmother and uncle in LA. My parents and I then rented a ar
and drove up to SF to meet my parents’ friends. Friends they hadn’t seen in a long time. Overall, it was a good break for my parents and myself. It gave us a lot of time to simply relax. Something none of us had done in awhile. For myself, it helped to allow me time to think through some things in my personal and professional life that needed sorting out.