Category Archives: Salesforce

Freebies!

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I’ve been following consumerist lately, and have gotten quite a few free coupons. Today, I got a free 8×10 print at Walgreens, free 2-piece grilled chicken meal at KFC, and a free Kashi frozen meal at Safeway. Safeway also has a few good deals this week, including $1.77 milano cookies and $1 blackberries. Yay for cheap-or-free food-or-things. :D

Work has been exciting lately. I’ve been working on reskinning the login page for the past few days… it’s made me realize how behind I am on new webdesign paradigms. Apparently, everything nowadays is done with CSS and the HTML itself is very minimal (sometimes to the extent that the page without CSS looks like a plain text file–unformatted black text on a white background). This is all fine and good except it often involves hardcoding pixel values in the CSS. Unlike tables, which will grow to fit larger text, CSS-styled divs will do strange (and often undesirable) things. This led to a few hacks that I ended up doing to get stuff looking right after localization. Meh. I really need to do webdesign again.

Life has been good. I’ve been working a bit on a redesign of Student Wars v2 to make the cards cleaner (AKA less text). Eventually, I’m going to release the game freely (instead of behind a password) so more people can play. Whee.

Life and reflection

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Life has another update. It’s now complete up through May 2008, so we’re less than a year from present day. Kinda scary. At some point I need to start tagging high school photos so I can work backward in life.

The events in the photos are becoming more and more familiar as I browse through them, picking out the one to choose for a particular day. It’s making me miss the college experience, especially after going through graduation photos again and realizing that it was likely the last time that all of my closest college friends were (or will be) be together in the same place, since not everyone returns for Carnival.
In some ways, that’s what college is really about… the classes are good, sure… but it’s really about the people you meet and the relationships you form. The majority of people I spend time with now are people I knew (no matter how casually) from college. I miss that sense of constantly being around people and being able to easily meet new people. I miss being able to walk up a couple flights of stairs and have spontaneous games, or being able to quickly assemble a group for food on an hour’s notice.
Meh.

Work has seemed largely stagnant lately. I’ve been working almost entirely on bug fixes and test automation, and I’m getting rather bored of it. Unfortunately, I also seem to be in a sort of mental rut where I haven’t been able to come up with interesting projects or initiatives for myself to take on to change this.
This will hopefully pass but, in the meantime, I can’t help but feel like I don’t accomplish anything of value in the time at my desk.
The last time I coded for fun was the framework for life.alanv.org. I haven’t touched the rewrite of the main alanv.org code for a year, and haven’t worked on CMU Adventures in about that time. This really should change, but I just haven’t been having any bouts of inspiration.
It’s not even that I dislike my job (I love my job, and love my coworkers, and enjoy going in every day), just more that I feel uninterested in my current tasks, and don’t have any particular ideas on how to change that or on what I could be doing instead.

I’m glad there’s at least one thing in my life that is going (mostly) the way I want it to. As we close in on 25 months this Saturday, I hope I never lose sight of the things that truly matter in life.

Go Kart Racing

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Today we went Go Kart Racing as a team reward for winning the peer technology award thing. It was a lot of fun. but more difficult than I expected. I ended up 10th out of 14 or something. Oh well.

Some photos from Carnival are posted on Facebook. I mostly just clicked through each of the folders and randomly dragged images into a folder, trying to only include photos with people I knew (with a couple exceptions, such as the Mobot photo). I’ll post more comprehensive galleries to photos 2 later, I just wanted to get something up there so I didn’t feel left out.

Apologies for the lack of photo posts lately. I’ll try to include some with my next entry.

Life

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I mostly just wanted to post that life has gotten an update, since I said I’d post when it does. It’s a small-ish one (a month and a half) but meh. Yay life.

I received my awesome new 50mm f/1.8 lens on Monday, and shot some portraits of Will on Tuesday with it (which can be viewed at portraits). I’m really happy with it… I get awesome shutter speeds indoors and awesome depth of field to boot. Yay lens.

This weekend should be fun. There will be games and awesomeness and I’ll hopefully get to take more photos. Yay fun.

Work has been fun this week. I’ve been doing a bit more dev work this week (the past few weeks have mostly been writing automated tests or working on issues related to the recent release), and it feels good to be writing new code (rather than testing code) again. Yay coding.

I’ve also been attempting to get more exercise, and I think I’m doing pretty well. I’m up to 15 minutes straight running at 6.2mph now, improved from approximately 6 minutes when I started a few weeks ago. I should start doing more of the weight machines and stuff too. Yay exercise.

I’ve been working on a new card game. Right now it’s just the templates for the game, but I’m pretty happy with the way they came out (thanks to Ian, Tim, and Ben for giving feedback). Yay cards.

This turned out to be a longer entry than I was expecting. Yay rambling.

Edit: I was bored and felt like some photoshopping.
Original here.


I’m a fan of the blue background.
The metal in his zipper is bothering me. I should do something about that.
I also think that it’s funny how his face looks so much lighter against the yellow than the blue background, even though I made no changes to anything other than the background.

Video! Release! (In the other order!)

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There was a 158R2 release. I gackwatched R2a, and am on support for R2b. The R2a release was surprisingly smooth and awesome. Yay releases.

Tim made this for me, and it’s simultaneously awesome and frightening. I’m tempted to rip it into an MP3.

Photo tagging goes well. I have now passed the 100,000 photo mark, with ~100,950 photos tagged. I have no idea how many photos I have total now, although the number has certainly gone up (possibly past 170,000) since the last time I checked.

I don’t know. I just felt like I should make an entry.