Category Archives: GDC4S

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?

Work day 12

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Chris mapped out our route to West Virginia here. I was wrong… it’s almost 40 miles. I walked almost 40 miles. Crazy.

Work has been busier lately. I have a task to go through and document all subclasses of a certain class. This involves walking through the code to see the structure of U-Forms that it creates and identifying the important attributes of such. I’m a little over halfway done right now, so yay.

Kelly Clarkson’s new CD comes out on June 26. I’m trying to decide between preordering the physical CD on Amazon ($9.99) and preordering it from iTunes ($11.99, but comes with 4 bonus songs).
I’m definetly leaning toward buying it from iTunes. The 4 extra songs are tempting, and if I was to buy the CD, I would end up ripping it to iTunes at the same bitrate anyway. Also, I can’t really hear the difference between CD and iTunes qualities, so it wouldn’t be a huge difference.

Downloaded Jordin Sparks’ new single, “This Is My Now” today from iTunes. It’s really, really good.
Yay for a bunch of awesome new music coming out.

Went to Keith’s apartment today to play Puerto Rico. He has a really nice place… really big.

Had a moment earlier today (some of you probably saw it) where I got upset about things that I can’t change, and have mostly accepted now anyway, so it’s not a big deal.
Also, some people are awesome and make me feel cared for and happy.

Also, brrraaaiiinnnnssss!

Work, day 9 (also, the worst afternoon ever)

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This day starts out at around 7:45 while waiting for the bus to work. As I’m getting on the bus, I notice I’ve somehow broken my little zipper pouch thing that I keep my CMU ID, flash drive, and coins in. I figure it’ll be okay until I get home.

There are two busses (that I know of) that will get me home from South Side… the 59U and the 54C.

Toward the end of the day, I decide to leave work early to come home and sleep or something.
I look at the bus schedules and leave work over an hour early, 20 minutes before the 54C bus is supposed to come. The 54C stop is about a 10 minute walk from work.
I get to the stop about 12 minutes before the bus is supposed to come, and see the bus just pulling away from the stop. There’s no way I’m going to catch it there, so I decide to run across the Birmingham bridge to catch it on the other side, since traffic across the bridge is slow.

As I get to the other side, I realize that the walkway connects to a road two levels below where the bus turns off (the Downtown side of the bridge has 2 seperate street levels), and there’s no visible way for me to get up to where I need to be, much less in time, so I’m about to walk back across. Then, a 61C passes me. I figure I can take a 61 back home, so I walk toward the stop on that side of the bridge.
As I’m walking toward the stop, a 61A and a 61B pass me. I wait at the stop for about 10 minutes before figuring I’d be better off at the South Side stop, waiting for a 54C, so I go to walk back across the bridge.

As I’m walking back across the bridge, a 54C and a 59U pass me. This sucks. Then it starts to rain, and the bridge is the only place with nowhere for me to run for cover. Then another 54C passes me.

I finally get back to the South Side and head back to the stop (just as it stops raining), and I just miss another 54C (yes, there were 4 in an hour… that makes no sense, given they’re supposed to come every 40 minutes or so). Grrrr.
As I’m waiting at the stop, I see a 59U turn onto the bridge. I wait almost 20 minutes for the next 54C to come.

Finally, I’m on a 54C turning onto Craig when it starts raining. I get off, and the rain picks up really badly. I run back to Fairfax.
As I near Fairfax, I grab my keys and open the door. Once I’m inside, I realize that I lost over $1 of quarters I had in the pouch thing (attached to my keys).
-_-

So yeah. The worst part is it’s totally my fault. If I had waited at the stop after the first one passed, I would have been waiting less than 5 minutes for a bus, and would have gotten home an hour early. Instead, I spent over 2 hours getting home, and got home around the same time as I usually do. Blarrrrr.

Work today was interesting. I’m not sure how much I’m allowed to talk about, but I get to use java.awt.Robot, which is awesome. I’m actually getting into programming now too, so whee.

-_-
I hate the world.
*sighs*

Tomorrow is walking to West Virginia. At least that should be good.

Work, day 6 (and Student Wars, and masks)

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Student Wars: Loose Ends has been finished and uploaded for your viewing/playing pleasure. There are probably a lot of typos, so please be kind.

Also, there are now people masks in Junk, including a Tom mask (happy, Tyler?).

Work today went decently. I finally got admin rights, and so was able to do all the installs needed to actually do my job. Huzzah! I set up and tested some peer code review programs, and hopefully they won’t break horribly. So yeah.

Wheee!

Edit:People wearing the masks!

Me as 8.

Greg as Zach.

8 as 8… backwards.

Work, day 5

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I really should update this more often…

Work on Friday was good. I got my first task done, and the higher-ups seemed mostly happy with the results, so huzzah!
Work today wasn’t nearly as exciting. My advisor peoples and/or boss are in all-day classes until Thursday, and I still don’t have admin access to my machine. This combination means I don’t really have much to do except read the documentation for various code review software packages that they want me to set up and test (which I can’t do until I have admin to my computer). Bleh. Tomorrow will likely be the same, unless I can somehow expedite the admin process.

Student Wars Loose Ends is 13 cards away from completion. I’ll probably finish it tomorrow evening if I feel up to it.

There was an electrical fire in front of Joe Mamas when we went for all-you-can-eat pasta.