Author Archives: Alan V

Life updates

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I really should write in this thing more often.

My recent big task at work (the big unit test thing) was finished on Monday. Following a little more cleanup, it was integrated into the main system on Tuesday, so yay. I’m now working on a bunch of smaller unit tests for the system fundamentals. It’s a lot, lot, lot more boring than the other one (which actually had me looking forward to work every day… as much as you can at 7 AM when you’re tired), but whatever. Work can’t be all fun all the time, can it?

Last night was “Homeless: The Musical!” presented at Dusquene University. It was amazing… it runs this weekend and next weekend, and I highly, highly recommend you go if you have the chance. Thanks to Mars for telling us about it in the first place!

Personal life has been full of happiness lately. It’s nice to feel cared for, and to have someone to care about.

I’m leaving for Colorado logical tomorrow (Saturday morning at 7 AM is when my plane takes off) and won’t be back until Monday evening. On the plus side, I get to see my parents (yay) and my grandpa, whom I haven’t seen since the end of high school (super yay). On the downside, I have to miss a day of work, but meh.
I suppose that’s a testiment to how much I’m enjoying my job (or maybe, to a lesser extent, not being a poor college student… at least until I have to pay rent again).

Life is amazing and full of awesome.

Work day 29

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Work today was actually really interesting and fun… and the day went by rather quickly too, which was awesome.
I spent the day working on some JUnit tests. In the process, I feel like I learned a lot more about how the system as a whole works… I mean, I’m still asking a lot of questions of other people, but at least my questions now aren’t idiotic questions, but are actually decently put-together and whatnot.
Also, I learned that Java reflection is horrible and can do amazingly bad things… for example, you can access a class’ private variables indirectly through reflection (I needed to access a private boolean in a certain instance, and modifying that code would have been less than ideal).
Ew. Ew. Ew.
At least it was nicer than what I was doing before, which involed multiple runtime casts and a stack of something like 8 method calls, along with hardcoded values.

Um, yeah.
Foooooooooooooom.

Sicko

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I saw Michael Moore’s new movie, “Sicko,” today with Mars and Ian.
It was really good, actually, and made me kinda question the entire health care system in America. I mean, why are we the only Western nation without government health care? Why does our health care suck so much more than even Cuba’s?
The more stuff I discover about the government and the more pissed off I get with Bush, the more I want to move to Canada or something after I graduate.
Want to come with me?

Anyway, yeah, not much else going on.
You should see the movie. Definetly.

Blar

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It felt like Monday today.

Perhaps I should work 10 hour days for 4 days a week instead (and take Wednesdays off). Hmm…
The thing is, I don’t really know how much I like the idea of getting home around 7 PM every day.

Also, there was an awesome potluck party tonight… yay for delicious food and awesome company.

Kennywood

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Happy fireworks day to everyone.

We (Keith, Ian, Mars, Greg, and I) spent the day at Kennywood. It was lots of fun… I rode my first roller coaster (and confirmed that I hate roller coasters, and will probably never ride one again) as well as a lot of tamer rides. There was also tasty funnel cake supreme… funnel cake topped with ice cream, strawberries, and whipped cream. Also, there was the East Winds Synphonic Band concert that Keith was in (the entire reason we went in the first place). Alas, we missed the fireworks displays (we were at Steak n Shake at the time, eating dinner, since we didn’t realize how late it was), but it worked out for the best as we all just headed home afterwards to sleep… which I should now do.

Also, I am amazingly content and happy with certain parts of my life right now. I still wonder sometimes what I ever did to deserve something like this…
^_^