Category Archives: Photography

CtFwRM, jobs, kernel, and foo

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Today was the bi-annual game of Capture the Flag with Stuff made more fun by the addition of a certain author of a certain webcomic.
So yeah, I guess it would be more accurate to say there was Capture the Flag with Randall Munroe.
Basically, he came to campus to give a talk and was invited to CtFwS, and stopped by and sat in the judges’ room and talked with people.
I got a photo of myself with him and also got him to sign a t-shirt for me. Awesome. The guy is absolutely brilliant.


I hope I didn’t annoy him too incredibly much with photos.

On the jobs front, in addition to the 5 offers, I completed a Google Pittsburgh interview today, am doing another second round phone interview with Apple sometime next week, and am flying out to Yahoo! for their final round after Thanksgiving. This is generally awesome and amazing. I dunno, I guess it’s still too early to think about jobs, since I need to get unstressed after kernel first, but I can say I’m definitely leaning certain ways.

On the kernel front, I’m feeling much better about things since my last entry. A bit after I wrote that entry, we managed to get wait and exit working, and started running tests… we pass enough basic tests to pass the kernel project, and we only need to pass one more solidity test (out of three unpassed) and one of the two cho tests to pass the kernel. This makes me feel much, much better about the entire thing, because the end is now in sight. Granted, there’s a ton of work to do between now and then (a scheduler rewrite, a shit-ton of race condition bugs to debug, and code to clean up and document), but at least I have some concrete way of showing that we’ve made progress, and that’s awesome.

So yeah, if anyone missed the links above…
Randall Munroe photos (from his talk and CtFwS afterwards)
Capture the Flag with Stuff photos from this semester’s game

Camera repairs, take gaaah

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I had a wonderful weekend… however, two things could have made it better
1) The weather could have been nice instead of being all rainy and muggy and cloudy and bleh.
2) My camera could actually be fixed instead of having the exact same problem within minutes of me pulling it out to use again.

So yeah, they didn’t actually fix my camera… same issue as before, except that I am now $250 in the hole.
I’m going back there tomorrow morning (even more inconvenience for me and for Greg, who has been amazing and helped out so much in dealing with their terrible hours and such) to get them to fix it for reals. So meh.

Camera repairs, take four

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I wish this could be a “my camera is back and I am happy” entry….
My camera *is* back. However, they somehow lost the button that pops up the flash, so I currently have a paperclip attached to the strap that I have to insert into the hole to pop the flash.
Grrr.
There should not be this many problems with a company that is named for doing camera repairs.

In any case, work on Friday was amazing. I now have a total of about 28 bug fixes integrated into the codebase, fixing everything from minor code cleanup issues to major exception-at-runtime-and-loss-of-data issues.
I also worked a bit with another intern trying to get some software running off of the web.
Yay job satisfaction!

There was tasty dinner followed by 3-layer vanilla bean cake last night. I think this was actually the first time I’d eaten out in a while… and it just made me appreciate more how much cheaper it is to cook yourself (and not any less enjoyable than eating out if you have someone else to cook for :) ).

This weekend (later today, actually) is Ohio funness for twinsday. I get to photograph twins! Here’s hoping my camera holds up… given how much I paid to have it fixed, it’d better.
I should also call the company today and complain about the flash button. Bleh.

So yeah, I don’t recommend this camera repair service.

Camera repairs, take three

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As further proof that it only takes one thing to ruin my day, I offer today as an example.

I had a very good day at work. Today was mostly spent integrating my bug fixes into the code base and ensuring that I didn’t break anything.
A nice surprise came at around 10 AM when the camera repair shop called me to tell me my camera was fixed. Yay!
I talked to another programmer about one of my bug fixes, as he had a similar issue that he was working on. He praised my fix and wondered how he hadn’t thought of that before, and said that he was going to base his fix on mine. That made me feel really good about my ability, especially since this was probably the most complicated fix I’ve done this summer (involving multiple asynchronous calls and interaction between more than three threads).
My boss said that he liked many of my fixes, and that the issues he was bringing up were all nitpicks.
Overall, I integrated over 10 bug fixes into the codebase today, fixing two priority 1 bugs, as well as a bunch of other lower priority bugs.

I headed home a bit early to grab my credit card, lens, and memory card (so I could pay and test my camera), leaving work feeling very satisfied.
I bused to the camera repair shop. It took about 30 minutes.

So apparently they decided to close over an hour early today, and hadn’t bothered to tell me this morning when they called about my camera… you know, in case I decided to go and pick it up today or something.
As a result, I was in a rather bad mood as I boarded the bus home.
The bus back was extremely packed and I was getting claustrophobic, and people were blatantly ignoring the “please move to the rear” signs resulting in there being about 10 people standing at the VERY FRONT of the bus (despite the fact that there were both seats in the very back and nobody standing behind the first row of seats), making me miss my stop at Craig.
Overall I spent over an hour on two buses going downtown and back. I was not very happy when I was coming into Fairfax.
As I approached the elevator, I saw this girl entering the building from the front, and held the elevator for her. Not only did she take forever to walk to the elevator (almost as if she was going deliberately slow to spite me, since she definetly acknowledged that I was holding the elevator for her and she wanted it). Then she proceeds to take the elevator to the second floor.
GAAAH.

Now I am rather annoyed at the world and this company, given that they took 4 days to even tell me what was wrong with my camera (because their technician was out… but it seems to me that if your company is named “Camera Repair Store”, you should have more than one technician), the repair was more expensive than I was expecting (although, to be fair, I suppose that wasn’t their fault), and they closed early and made me waste over an hour of my day for nothing. And I am still cameraless.
*sighs*

Camera repairs, take two

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So my camera cost over $250 to fix. That’s over a third the cost of a new D50 (theoretically speaking, since you can’t buy them anymore), half the cost of a new D40, and a fourth the cost of a new D80 (which I want).
Oh well.
If it needs another major repair, I’ll scrap it and buy a new camera.
Unfortunately, it probably won’t be fixed by this weekend, but meh. Alisa is awesome and is letting me borrow hers, which means I don’t have to worry.

Life has been really weird the past few days. Greg and I have had parallel-but-off-by-one weeks in that he had a bad day on Monday and spent a lot of money on repairing his car on Tuesday… and I had a bad day yesterday and spent a lot of money repairing my camera today. Meh.
Relatedly, all the things that were getting me down yesterday (problems with payroll at work, not having a camera for this weekend, my camera being broken, and feeling like I wasn’t doing well enough at work) got resolved today (payroll got sorted out, Alisa is letting me borrow her camera, my camera is being repaired, and I got a positive job review from my boss at work today), so whee.
Life is good.

I’m almost definetly going to continue work next semester, part time, and drop down to being a part-time student. So far, my schedule looks like work, OS, and Pen-Based Computing. I need to talk to my boss to make sure I can get time off around kernel crunch time, but I feel like I can handle that (especially since work would be like taking another class, except with no homework, and I’d only be working at most 20 hours a week). I’ve already talked to 8 (my OS partner) and he’s okay with it too. Whee!