Category Archives: Work

Annoyances

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Despite work going pretty well (if a bit slow), the rest of my life today hasn’t gone nearly as smoothly or happily.

So I still don’t have internet at home, despite the fact that I was supposed to have had it this past Monday. Three calls to ATT later, no luck. They’re sending someone out to look at the line tomorrow (which I fortunately don’t have to be home for). If (and likely when) that doesn’t resolve the issue, they’re going to have to send someone to look at it inside, which means I’m going to have to be home and skip work (at least for a bit). This sucks. Sucks sucks sucks. Hate.

Also, the calls and such have used up around 40 minutes on my cell phone, which is 40 less minutes I have to call people I really need to call instead of calling people to deal with things that shouldn’t even be problems in the first place.

So I come to the coffeeshop to try and read my email and whatnot. My laptop can’t connect to the wireless. I try rebooting, and it refuses to shut down. When I finally do get it rebooted, it still can’t connect. Try turning it off (which of course it refuses to do) and waiting… no luck. Just when I’m about to give up 40 minutes later (when my tea is all cold and my muffin is gone), it finally decides to connect. Hate. Hate.

Had a ton of trouble at work today with even the most simple of tasks, like installing software so I can set up my development environment and start writing code. Sometimes I feel like I fail so badly at things. Hate.

Also, I’m looking at flights to Pittsburgh for April (Carnival) and May (graduation), and they’re all really expensive. Major suckage. Hate.
I’m half tempted to not put down the $300+ it’s going to cost me to fly there in April (since I’m going to be there less than a month later anyway), but meh… I promised a bunch of people, and I am really missing everyone there. So yeah. Hate.

Also also, the floating holidays I have at work (4 of them) aren’t usable at any time… only a preset number of dates (such as your birthday, MLK day, etc) which means I can’t use them for April or May… which means I’ll be using up 4 days of PTO (two for Carnival if I fly in Thursday like I want to, 2 for graduation). This sucks… and it’s also frustrating because I feel like spending so much money to be in Pittsburgh for, essentially, a weekend isn’t worth it… I’d rather spend an entire week there. We’ll have to see… maybe I can justify missing more days (I do get 15 days PTO per year) in April so I can get there for the opening of Carnival (maybe fly out Wednesday).

I also feel weird taking so much time off given that I’m so new and that I’m likely going to be taking a month off (unpaid) in June to visit Thailand with my parents. I’m emailing my boss asking his opinion.

Relatedly, I found out today that our next major release is in June. If I can’t get the time off, I wonder if I can move the Thailand trip we were planning to July instead. Blar.

So in general, I am in a really shitty mood at the moment. Nothing’s going right today.

Final #1 done… college done

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I just got out of my OS final. Overall, it wasn’t bad. By the end, I was at the point of just not caring anymore (perhaps not the best place to be, but meh). I mean, I have a job, and it’s not like getting a B or C in OS is going to make them retract their offer. I kinda BS’d the last problem (worth 1/5 of the final, but meh).

So yeah, with that, my undergrad is over. At this point, I don’t think there’s any possible way for me to fail, since I only had to pass one of my two classes this semester to graduate and I’ve basically already passed the other one (Pen-based computing, which doesn’t have a final).

…
I am strangely sad right now, seeing the parts of my life over the past 3.5 years scattered around the room in various boxes or suitcases.
I really don’t want to leave CMU.

*sighs*

I leave for home on Sunday.
I wish Sunday would never come.

Posted in OS

Job acceptance

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Job offer (informally) accepted (formal acceptance going out later today, if I can get the paperwork completed in time).

Starting early next year, I’ll be working for Salesforce.com in San Francisco.

…
That decision was harder than it really should have been.

Now comes the not-so-fun task of finding housing. Epic fail.

Day of endings

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Today was my last day of work at Viz. It was good… got the testing infrastructure started. Did as much as I could given I only had 8 hours to work on it. Managed to get it done after 5.5 (Wednesday plus some of today) and did some final bug fixing and integrating afterwards. Bid farewell to everyone.

Today was our P3 interview, which marked the end of our kernel project. His main criticism was that we used 5 locking primitives in our kernel (mutex, cond [condition variable], icond [internal condition variable], ENTER_CRIT/EXIT_CRIT, and disable_interrupts/enable_interrupts). He said this was indicative of “running away” from problems by creating more locking primitives than figuring out those problems. Yeah, sounds about right. He also found a potential deadlock in our kernel (that, at least, is very very unlikely) and a few problems with the scheduler. Also, one part of our kernel (a function that either copies to/from userspace/kernel space or vice versa depending on where the pointer you pass to it is) was called a 1337 hax and we were told that 1337 hax should be very well documented (whereas ours was lacking any documentation… oops). Also, we generally had bad quality/missing documentation in our kernel. Not surprising, given how we mostly did the documentation in the last 2 days.

Today was our pen-based computing presentation, which marks the end of the pen-based class and also of our adventure game mapping tool project. That went pretty well… we managed to implement all desired features and Carl and Edmund got saving/scrolling working at the last minute. Woo.

Also, today was our P4 late day. We went into it rather confused on why free was causing page faults left and right and wondering if it was a kernel issue. After about 5 hours of debugging (in addition to the debugging yesterday), as I read through the code because I was completely stumped, I discovered the lines:
file_desc* fd_struct;
...
fd_struct = (file_desc*)malloc(sizeof(fd_struct));
...
Oops.
So yeah, the end of OS projects (and our ~7 hour debug issue) and of the semester of workdeath was a stupid typo bug. Whee.

Overall, it’s been a good semester. I think I’ve decided on a job (the one I kinda decided I wanted since the beginning), and I’ll send out the acceptance letter tomorrow (along side my last rejection letter).

Updates

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I suppose I should update this, since I haven’t in a while and stuff has happened since Thanksgiving.

An Endeca interview happened. No offer, as expected. I suppose that’s just as well. Boston was mostly uneventful.

Some rejection letters happened… rejected three of the five offers I had. Two left to ponder over.

A P4 happened. I wrote the entire lab in about an hour. We’ve just now started debugging it, but it really shouldn’t take too long.

A work happened. I have a huge project for my final 3 days of work. I’m not going to get it anywhere near complete. I swear, my coworkers have way too much faith in me.

Also, complaints:
No one’s been available for portraits, and I haven’t shot any portraits in a semester… starting to feel this intense urge to shoot potraits again. People always seem to be too busy for me. I’m more torn than I thought I would be on my job offers, and one of them has an absolutely-final already-pushed-back-2-weeks-despite-corporate-policy deadline of tomorrow. I haven’t been doing well at ITG. I haven’t been fulfilling my commitments in Pen-based Computing (my group probably thinks I’m the world’s biggest slacker). Went out to try and shoot landscapes of the fresh snow, and that didn’t really work out either. The scroll wheel on my mouse is starting to go… I’m going to have to get used to using scrollbars again. Feeling incredibly inferior at photography after seeing some of the stuff submitted to the yearbook this year by people far more talented than I. No one is ever interested in my card games or anything.
Blah.

On top of everything, I’m almost certainly leaving Pittsburgh forever in under 2 weeks, and that’s really starting to sink in. I’m not ready to go out on my own.

Snow piccar, because why the hell not: