Category Archives: Life

Colorado day 2

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After a delicious buffet lunch today, we drove past the condos where I was born. My mom pointed out the window to the bathroom where I was actually born, and I could actually remember a lot of the area.
Then we drove past the house we lived in before moving to Arizona, and I remembered even more of the area. The tool shed/house thing my dad built in the back yard (during which time all three of us caught Strep Throat from digging in the soil so much) is still there and the house still looks very nice (it’s the same color; hasn’t been repainted). I have fond memories of that house and of the little structure… half of it was my clubhouse that my dad built to my specifications (including a door that was split in the middle so I could open just the top and sell stuff from it).
Finally, we drove down the appropriately named Roller Coaster Road to see the piece of land we still own here. It hasn’t changed at all since we were there last, though it’s been 11 years. It looks like some people have been sporatically camping in the area though. Oh well.

Tonight I hopefully get to see Carolyn, who I haven’t seen in many, many years. I’m also meeting Keith in a little while, and I haven’t seen him in 11 years… so wheee. Yay for the wonderfulness that is the internet (and, I suppose, Facebook).

I head home tomorrow. I think, for the first time since getting here, I’m not totally looking forward to it.

Colorado day 1 (and Harry Potter)

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Bought the last Harry Potter book today… had it read in about 4 hours.
I must say, I am quite impressed in the way she managed to tie together all the vague points from the first 6 books and make everything suddenly clear toward the end. I also like how we’re left in the dark as to everything until stuff happens (and oh god, the ending is amazing)… I think an omnipotent view (or more insight into other goings-on, especially Dumbledore’s plan) would have ruined things. Very well played.

So yeah, I won’t post any spoilers because people are probably still reading it, but I will say that one prediction I read in a certain someone’s LJ was dead-on… and I suppose I should have expected it, but really didn’t.

As for Colorado, it’s been mostly uneventful. I had a 2.5 hour layover in Chicago that sucked, but whatever. Wheeeee.
I guess I’ll post pictures eventually or something.

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.

Work day 16

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Ever have one of those days where everything goes wrong and nothing you do turns out right?

Got to work this morning to an email that a UI bug fix that I had done last week had some problems and opened up some new issues. My mentor/unofficial-boss-person Seth (who is awesome and helpful, BTW) listed a bunch of things that he had found wrong with very simple testing. I hadn’t tested my fix nearly rigorously or thoroughly enough. Blah. That meant that the other fixes I had done were probably similarly broken and sucking.
In any case, I worked on that issue for a bit and wasn’t really able to fix some of the stuff and ended up opening some more bug reports for various things wrong with the interface (which, thankfully, weren’t due to my fix). UI work was annoying, and I couldn’t get things to work right, and I got frustrated, and gaah.

Then I moved some of my earlier fixes from last week into a new task branch, because I had been performing them against CORE, and bug fixes here are done on branches and then integrated back into CORE. I felt stupid again for not having branched off in the first place, especially because there were very explicit, very well-written instructions for doing so that I had been explicitly pointed to prior to my starting bug fixes. This took a while and I felt stupid.

Then I had to do a ton of fixing because I had combined 3 separate bug fixes into the single task branch, which is bad (I hadn’t wanted to go through the files and separate the ones associated with each bug, but Seth told me to split them up into their appropriate branches, so I went through and did that.

Then we discovered I had been branching off of MAIN rather than CORE because I had copied the branch instructions from the company wiki and hadn’t realized I was using the wrong one. I had to then go back and rework 9 task branches worth of files, modifying each branch and then resyncing each file (and integrating the changes in CORE that hadn’t been present in MAIN) in each of the branches. I felt so stupid. I mean, sure this is my first time really using a revision control system, but I really feel like I should have picked things up quicker, or at least realized I was doing something wrong when some changes I had commited to CORE earlier weren’t being picked up in my branches.
So yeah, that took a bunch of time that was wasted.

Also, I never did manage to fix the blocking-calls-in-Swing-thread bug that I’d been looking at for most of yesterday. I ended up opening another bug (which ended up being a duplicate of an existing bug because my searching skills fail and I am dumb) for it and didn’t do anything else with it.

Then, after some more tinkering with the UI and still not being able to get it to be correct (although I did manage to fix some errors such as being able to delete the last workspace in the list), I gave up on that and started on documenting some other classes (complementary to the documentation I did last week). I emailed Seth to make sure I was documenting things right, and it took 6 emails because I was being dumb again and apparently have to have things explained to me over and over and over…

So yeah, I feel like I annoyed Seth with my mishaps and ignorance and stupidity… and I feel like my technical skills are severely lacking… and I feel like I pick things up way, way too slowly (I’ve been working now for 4 weeks… spent 2 weeks with the codebase… why am I still having so many problems?)… and like my programming skills are sub-par… and generally that everyone in the company is so much smarter and more efficiet than I am and I’m just a terrible employee.
*sighs*
Goddamn it.

…
On the plus side of everything, non-work is going extremely well and makes me happy beyond words.
But gah, why am I so stupid?

Walking to West Virginia

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Mission success!
Almost 37 miles walked between 7 AM and 1 AM… we were limping and hurting by the time we got done, but god damn, we walked to West Virginia (from Oakland, Pittsburgh)! :D

Greg will likely be posting a long, detailed description of the trip eventually, and I’ll link that when it’s done, but until then, I guess I can put out a few key points.
Also, I will be posting pictures from the trip soon (likely within a couple hours; I just need to batch them).
Greg has a map of the route we took (kinda… we took a trail for most of the middle instead) here.

The day started a little before 7 AM (around 6:50) when Greg, 8, Chris, Zack, and I left Newell-Simon, heading toward the South Side. I made the trip across the Birmingham again (see previous entry) and everyone was feeling good most of the morning.
Eventually, we hit a trail that was pure bliss to walk on. It used to be railroad tracks that had been converted, so the gradient at any one part was never more than 1%, and the gravelly dirt was nice to walk on.
We were able to make McDonald (the town) for lunch around 3, and continued on the trail from there to Burgesstown. By that point, everyone was hurting a lot, but still feeling relatively good about things.
On the last 2 mile stretch before Burgesstown, I broke down and really, really felt like I needed to stop, despite being about 7 miles away from the border. Now I know how you felt last year, being forced to stop so close from your goal. In any case, after a lengthy ~45 minute stop, I was able to walk again, and if anything, felt better than I had for most of the trip.
The next 4-5 miles were okay, except Chris started to have a lot of pain. How she managed to keep going, I don’t know. We stopped for about 20 minutes before the final leg, which was almost 3 miles. At this point, both Chris and 8 were having problems (and the rest of us were pretty bad off). How they managed to force themselves another 3 miles, I don’t know, and I’m really amazed at how strong they are.
During the final 1 mile stretch, I was basically completely sick of the trip, and seriously felt like giving up then (one mile from the border… I would have killed myself later if I had though, because we’d already come almost 36 miles). Greg was amazing and supportive and got me through the last stretch. The last 3 miles took almost 2 hours, but we made it and stumbled across the border into West Virginia at about 12:52. The amazing Mark Tomczak picked us up and drove us home. It put things into perspective when it takes less than 45 minutes for a car to undo the entire day’s worth of work. Wheee machines?

Overall, I’d say it was a very, very rewarding experience, and I would do it again, but I will never do it again (if that makes any sense).
You guys are amazing! Congrats on the (very) impressive accomplishment. After all, it’s not everyone who can say they walked 37 miles from Pittsburgh to West Virginia! :D

Edit: Actually it was almost 40 miles. Route here.