13 Aug 2004
*sticks fingers in ears* I CAN’T HEAR THE ASSESSMENTS LOOMING! THEY’RE NOT THERE!!!
Sigh. Had physics today, that was good for a laugh. Or a cry at its pathetic nature. Or something. That said, I can just see myself really bombing out SOMEHOW when the marks come back. Pfft.
Oh, yeah, and they just went and moved our yearlies back two weeks. Three weeks to go, or thereabouts. Maybe four? I don’t know. I don’t remember the date, but it’s too close.
Pfft, screw the yearly drama production.
The school can hire more people like Will to do stuff for them. Throughly uninterested. I’m so over it, really. Sure, the fact that our exams are a week after or something probably doesn’t INCREASE my interest, but that’s not the only factor influencing the decision, either.
I have an extension assessment/seminar presentation to give on Monday. I consider myself to be screwed for it, and am preparing to fail. No, that wasn’t a defeatist attitude speaking… it was me, typing. This one seems to have sort of crept up on me without notice… although I know that’s not true. AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
Yes, anyway. At least there is a day of Nothingness next week. I really AM looking forward to the atheletics carnival, as scary as that may seem. It’s a day sans work or assessments or immediate stress. Can’t wait.
I need sleep. Today was so exhausting. Goodnight, all.
11 Aug 2004
Yeah! Brrraaaaaaand new BenQ 19” LCD just arrived, and it’s kickin’.
http://www.benq.com.au/HomeShowProduct.asp?prodID=239
Model number is FP992, and it’s pretty funky. Aside from being just plain HUUUUUUUGE, it also displays Stuff™, which is always desirable in a monitor. Further, it’s the heaviest damn LCD screen I’ve ever had to deal with. And it does portrait mode, which is always interesting. Haven’t had a chance to play with that properly, yet. On the to-do list.
Oh, yeah, and it works sexily with our DVD player (which has VGA output), after a spot of hacking (yeah, go figure – less than 3 hours out of the box, and already it’s being hacked with!).
This evening has been throughly unproductive, I’m glad to say. Eye-candy for the masses!
09 Aug 2004
I stumbled across this today, speaking of the transition between tables-based and non-standards centric design to CSS, standards compliant development.
I’m looking forward to the next person asking me why I care about standards at all getting stabbed in the face with this quote:
As for bandwidth, roughly speaking Multimap.com serves 4 million pages a day. On average, the HTML of the old site weighed in at 65kb per page. The new site pages are half that at 35Kb. That’s a saving of 40,000 Gb of bandwidth per year! I’ll leave you to translate that into money, but I can tell you the move to Web standards paid for itself within a month.
“The move to Web standards paid for itself within a month.”
How incredible is that? Admittedly, a website attracting this volume of traffic isn’t exactly typical of most, but that isn’t the point.
This demonstrates REAL and TANGIBLE benefits to standards compliance, besides the other, self-evident benefits of the same. What’s not to like about making the web more accessible, display better on all platforms, and ultimately allow a wider audience access to your resource?
I could rant about this for longer, of course. I won’t, though. Check out http://webstandardsgroup.org/ for the source of that quotation… they’ve also got a whole heap of other interesting stuff on there.
08 Aug 2004
Well, sort of playing catchup. I’m figuring that I hadn’t been posting much the past few days, and posts will again diminish in frequency in the coming week, so whilst I’ve got time, I’m on a bit of a posting spree.
So, yesterday was a supreme waste of time. An enjoyable waste, but a waste, nonetheless. The day ended up being a bit of a write-off, actually: my team was playing soccer at 12:30, which normally would have been an inconvenience, but not too much so. Except for the fact that we were playing in Bowral. Which, for those who aren’t acquainted with the geography of the areas surrounding Sydney, is approximately two hours away (from the City centre… it’s about 1:45 to 1:30 from my place of residence).
Except, that didn’t mean that I lost the time between 10:30 and 3:30 – due to circumstances, and the departure times of certain buses going to Chevalier, I left at 7:15 from the city.
The trip down was okay; I finished a book, and started another, and realised that all the work I’d brought to do was fairly impossible… something which may be attributed to my failure to remember a pen. Good work, Josh.
Time passed uneventfully until our game at 12:30, which was a lot of fun… we had a mildly penalty-happy ref., but that’s okay… he didn’t quite choke on the whistle, although we were concerned for a while there. Final score was 1-0 to Chev, but they were a really good team to play against (they were really friendly, we all had a laugh at the ref ;)).
The trip back really sucked, because although I did have some more stuff to read, the incessant stupidity of “Bean” rendered it all throughly unproductive. And the movie sucked, too. Pfft.
On another note, that was our last game for the season! Eeep! Actually, that was probably the last game of soccer I shall ever play for St. Andrews (unless I magically find more time next year to the point where I don’t mind losing an afternoon a week and Saturdays for sport). Now that’s scary.
I really need to start jogging again, regularly, soon.
I also need to re-code this website. Because I want the usability, not because it is a task I will particularly enjoy. It’s just little things, like being able to specify an Abstract for posts, instead of having it manually truncated at a certain length. And proper comment administration (my goodness, I haven’t even bothered to upload a script to DO that yet – I’m currently just using a web administration utility which hooks directly into the database!). And mod_rewrite support, so Google will finally index this thing properly, instead of just linking generically to the newspage an article is on (as opposed to the article permalink itself). And custom, page-specific styles administered from within the CMS panel. Not to mention direct and tighter integration between the administration panels for the CMS and news subsystem.
And people wonder why I dislike coding. ARGH!!!
I want to be bored. Not because a task is boring, but simply because I have nothing to do. Or at least, nothing that I am MEANT to be doing. I could deal with that kind of boredom.
I’ve currently got four assessments pending, with another likely to be announced within the next several days. And then there is a web project or two which are… there. And then, in five weeks (I think), yearly exams hit. I really want to be bored.
Bleh!
A question to the masses: Is it worth my while moving this website over to a mainstream blogging system? Roll-your-own is neat and all, but what if they offer a level of functionality and integration with the greater WWW that rolling-your-own can’t hope to match without a significant investment of time and resources? My biggest qualm here is the desire to move content over NOW, so that if any manual processing must occur (unlikely – I am fairly confident that a script or three could dump data into the appropriate tables sans manual intervention), then it will be at a minimum.
Perhaps I am brain-damaged? I’m right handed, afterall. Making use of faculties resident to the other sphere is something which is illegal, apparently ;)
I prefer L+D and the satisfaction of standards and other such academic concerns over coding, I think. Development isn’t holding the interest now that it did some months ago.
Appreciation of work diminishes motivation, I think. If I were to open-source my hard drive today, then it is unlikely that any further code would come forth to be released building upon that work. Because others would extend it, take it beyond what I could, or would, or something. And then code fragmentation occurs.
There is another problem, even without fragmentation of actual code occurring. Conceptual fragmentation – usability, and coding principle division. Not even division, necessarily. I can’t pursue multiple coding targets within the one application (or project, to take a holistic approach) simultaneously… at least, not easily. Whilst this isn’t anyone else’s fault, it does substantially impact productivity, and motivation to complete work.
“Where do I start!?” – it’s like waking up from a six-month long coma the morning before an exam, and wondering what you will be tested on. Personally, I want to go straight back into that coma. It’s not so much that learning (mixing metaphors here) is prohibitive in itself, but simply that the TIMING and sheer VOLUME of goals (or content, in our exam example) is apparently too great.
Discussion is good. I like discussion. I also like feature freeze. And discussion BEFORE the commencement of a project, with established guidelines as to what is ALREADY, and what is to CHANGE, and what is to be DEVELOPED. Defining what is ALREADY, starting DEVELOPING, and then defining what is to CHANGE is something which shall create problems. If only because the development has passed the point at which a change, had it been discussed initially, would be implemented.
This is a part of the frustration behind coding and development for me – but then, it can’t be the only thing, as I am not inclined to develop free of the constraints of defined projects, even if that definition occurs in an appropriate manner!
I think I’ve lost the point of this post somewhere a few hundred lines up. This really belongs in the much-neglected “My Ramblings” section, seeing that much of this was the formulation of my thoughts in text. I’m trying to figure out WHY, and apparently failing. But that’s okay. This all provides (professional) insight, and is therefore probably more valuable than any private journal or Ramblings file which I may or may not keep.
The frustration remains. I still don’t know why. Looking to place blame elsewhere probably isn’t assisting matters; I should have made some thoughts on development goals clear sooner, or just said “No.” or something. I just need to set the apparent enormity of everything aside, take about 300 steps back, and appraise it as an insignificant stack of paper sitting in the great carpark of life.
Strange image? Yes, well, I saw that today and thought of life at the moment… I laughed. Had I a camera at that time, I would have captured it. Hahaha. Proper image uploading and inclusion is yet another feature to add here.
*Converses with self* STOP! Okay. *Directs attention back to post*
I think I’ll go and attack some work which is due tomorrow. My work ethic at the minute isn’t exactly helping this situation. Neither, come to think of it, is this webpage. I don’t really want to delete it, because it’s too much fun to write on. I won’t delete it. Not again. Oh, that’s irony. Deletion itself now brings bad memories? Hah.
This has definitely decimated into rambling territory. I’m stopping now. The next post shall come… when I next allow myself to procrastinate long enough to write, but not long enough that a cookie be consumed. ;)
08 Aug 2004
The previous post was trivial compared to this. This is amazing, astounding news.
THEY CHANGED THE DESIGN OF MY FAVORITE PEN!!!
It wasn’t a MAJOR design change, but this surpasses all other things, simply because it’s my favorite pen!
What did they do? Just removed some BIC branding from the side of the barrel, nothing major. But it FEELS different to hold! It’s WEIRD!
Ah well. I’ll get used to it in a few weeks/days/hours.
The thing is, I consistently replace my pens with the same – yes, that’s right – stationary brand loyalty! Except it’s more defined than that… this is PRODUCT loyalty!
If I didn’t, then I would wind up feeling like this, which would really suck a lot. The line begins to fade? Buy a new pen, exactly the same! Don’t notice the difference, except the line becomes thicker, richer, better – I love my pen.