Author: Jessica

Long day at work today…I was supposed to leave at 6:10 or so….didn’t end up leaving until about 6:50. “oooh, lets just try and continue to figure out this one bug before leaving” is about how it went. I kept causing a jar file to throw an exception–an exception in something that theoretically should be stable tested code that we do not have the source to. Well, after looking at every possible thing I could be doing wrong (is my array really the right size, there’s no nulls getting passed in, etc), we finally took to de-compiling the error causing file, and found a rather suspicious line of code where it was iterating over the array giving me an exception using the wrong variable–well, that’s great, means its not my code that’s wrong–but that doesn’t recompile the jar into working code…Might be able to temporarily work around the problem by changing how many items are in the other array…

I find it vaguely amusing that when I started here I had one chair. I was complaining one day that I didn’t have a guest chair, and some guy I didn’t really recognize (who no longer sits near me) gave me their spare (albeit slightly broken–the armrest is really crooked) guest chair.

A while later, a facilities guy came to bring the guy in the office across from me a guest chair–but apparently he didn’t need it, and the facilities guy didn’t want to take it over to the other building, so he said “here, have a guest chair” and left it. Then my chairs were in happy equilibrium for a long time.

Then some people started borrowing my guest chairs to take to staff meetings in Mary’s office. My two guest chairs would disappear for a few hours, and then reappear a few later. They happily came and went at will. And all was good.

Eventually one day I was sitting in my cubicle, and noticed something odd–rather than one chair behind my desk and one in front of it -or- two chairs in front of my desk and none behind it, there was now one chair behind my desk and two chairs in front of my desk. The old guest chair brought home a twin. “Wait, there’s one too many, where did that one come from?” I thought to myself, confused as to how long the clone chair had been there, and how it replicated itself into such an identical copy, complete with the funny armrest)

No one nearby has come looking for a missing chair, so in my cubicle the clone has stayed, happily running off its own to meetings in Mary’s office every now and then, only to reappear later–it always seems to come back. But its not like my cubicle doesn’t have room for spare chairs…so I guess it stays?

First day back at work after vacation is always nuts. Inbox overflowing with mail, most of which was urgent–at least, it was last week, but is past due and/or therefore no longer urgent. We have self-evaluations due in a couple days–and I wasn’t here last week to work on that, so after an hour or so of doing nothing but reading all the emails, and then spending a half hour making a list of all the things I need to be working on and take care of…I spent anohter half hour chasing around trying to track down my last year’s performance evaluation to get a copy of the goals I was supposed to explain whether I met them or not.

Other than that though, its been a pretty quiet day, no people dropping by to pile more work on my desk because they’re still all in “is she still out on vacation?” mode. The stuff I’m working on right now in Java (instead of C), which is cool, cuz oooh, *drools at being able to do real code reuse without copy/paste*, but at the same time is really ugly because Java does not have unsigned data types. Ohh, but they do have unsigned bit shifting–go figure that one. So its a new and different challenge, and the particular code I’m doing (message structures/classes) is pretty straightforward just a lot of work to do, few questions to need to ask. Good stuff.

I was working on my webpage a little bit yesterday. One of the things I did, besides the main part of updating the recipes section, was set up an atom feed of my update log. That’s been something I’ve wanted to do for a while.

And since I could, I decided to sign up for a “beta” Gmail account just because I can, even though I haven’t a clue whether I’m actually going to do anything with it. Well, if I think of anything useful to do with it, I have it.

I was thinking “I need a remote” for my desktop/winamp as a song I didn’t want to hear jumped up on the playlist. And I was thinking about how my friend H. said on Sunday how he uses his wireless keyboard as an “expensive remote for playing music controls. “I should get one of those,” I thought, suddenly realizing I could do the same thing using my laptop and VNC!

It worked like a charm. Yay, I can play Winamp coming out the nice speakers attached to my desktop rather than the ones built in my laptop…AND still control it from across the room using my laptop. Yay.

There’s one thing I like better about Word than HTML, you have a much greater control over the aesthetic presentation to completely visually reflect what you’re trying to convey. Spacing and indentation are much easier, as well as adding headings, shading, color, pictures, etc. Raw HTML doesn’t give you that satisfaction, as you imagine the “<i>” tags magically turning into italicized text in the finished product, though a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver can help a bit with that.

Sometimes I find the medium of a computer screen too flexible, the canvas is more like a scroll than sheets of paper. Quite frankly, webpages that try and break articles into “pages” arbitrarily by making you click links to get to the next “page” of it? I find that really cumbersome; it’s not something you can flip through easy like a printed book with separate pages. The internet has a different set of rules than printed mediums.

I like the visual aesthetic control you have working with the printed page. I like to add bits of page layout, columns, outlined boxes of text in a different color to make things stand out, or to clarify that something is an aside from my subject matter, sometimes I even add pictures in the margins and as I feel fit–its not just about the words coming off my pen, it has to look visually appealing as well.