|
|
I finally had all my wisdom teeth pulled last Friday. Yak!
I had been postponing it for years for fear of the pain. Then this year I started to feel a nagging pain around my jaws. The stupid wisdom teeth somehow decided to grow up so fast as if they were trying to break the soil and see the sun. So I finally made up my mind about having all of them taken out. Once decided, I didn’t let my mom persuade me away with her scary tactic: “That’s pulling bones out of your mouth. You are going to lose a lot of blood. And not to mention the pain afterwards! I wouldn’t do it in a hundred years if I were you.” Yup, she still has all hers till this day; her mom’s scary tactic worked on her.
It was a point of no return for me. So I just went in, had the surgery done with general anesthesia (I so don’t want to know what happened during the surgery, especially hearing the drilling or sawing noise). I think I actually did wake up very briefly to hear some machine/motor turning on; it sounded like the doctor was going to saw… But it might as well been my silly dream. I was woken up an hour later. The doctor asked me if I would like to keep my teeth. Oh hell no I said. (My mom expressed a slight sadness that I didn’t keep them, ‘cuz they are part of my body after all, she said. That sounded almost like those ancient Chinese who kept their entire life’s clipped finger nails and toe nails in a red envelope. Creepy.)
So, it’s done. I didn’t feel too much pain afterwards luckily. I didn’t even need to take the prescribed pain killer. I just couldn’t chew very well with the back teeth. I am still eating soft food the 4th day after the surgery, which is driving me nuts at home, especially being surrounded with beef jerky, yummy unopened Valentine’s day chocolate, dried Lychee, nuts, chocolate cookies, and greasy Chinese food. Ahhh! It’s killing me!
Last month I started to learn and use C# for work. Everybody on the team is new to .NET. But in a Scrum environment, we have much to deliver with very little time (or no time in this case) for training. So I picked up a book or two and dived right into it…
At first I was so excited about Visual Studio 2005’s design view for all our UI need. Comparing to Java, I used to hand code every bit of UI code in a third-party SDK that’s a subset of AWT. We had to write tons of inner classes for event handling. C#’s delegate makes things sooo easy.. It’s like a dream. =)
Then when I started to work on the code, I found Visual Studio 2005’s refactoring support to be terrible comparing to Eclipse or IntelliJ. It’s a pain to move code around, or trying to change signature of a method. I won’t know what’s wrong until I compile. How I miss Eclipse & IntelliJ’s real-time error detection…
Then I found ReSharper. That’s like a heaven-sent gift! I spread the good news about it to my teammates and one of them commented “I don’t know how I have coded without it!” =) Great job in run-time error detection and tons of refactoring. I loved it, can’t live without it now.
On a different matter, I agree with one of my coworkers that just because you did it once, you become the dedicate person to do it in the future. She became our graphics person, though her title is User Experience Lead. I somehow become our team’s UI person just because I showed some interest in doing Ajax a while back, and devoted one week on trying to fix some UI bugs on the all-dreaded-Javascript code.
But I am starting to love this role. Everybody on our team likes to do hardcore Java, all the server side, database, web services, multi-threaded, multi-platform/multi-server support stuff. Nobody cared about doing UI before I came on board I guess. And now I get to work on stuff that pleases one’s eyes, easy to use, functional, intuitive, and, did I mention sort of pretty? Ha! It’s actually quite fun. But sometimes I do miss all my desire to do architecture and design work, as well as coding and debugging like a “real programmer”.
Can’t do both I guess.
Actually, it didn’t happen today. It was something that I found maybe a week ago, some oddity I thought, or maybe I was just being ignorant.
One of the tasks I have been doing for my project is to make a web site XHTML strict compliant. Well, the site was designed ages ago when it was probably still HTML 3.2 time. There used to have no DTD and the browsers rendered the site just fine. Now by just adding that one line of DTD declaring all pages to the XHMTL strict, we are doomed. None of the pages could be validated. *sigh.
Among everything we had attributes that are no longer supported in HTML 4.01, such as “target” attribute in <a href> tag, and attribute “name” in <form> tag. But almost all forms use “name” attribute! And inline+external JavaScripts depend on that!! Oh lord…
Luckily help is always somewhere online if one is willing to dig and dig and dig. I followed this tutorial by Kevin Yank to resolve all <a target> issues. Apparently that solution was out there for ages; I just didn’t know. =) That was nice and easy. <form name> issue was resolved by substituting “name” to “id”. I just had to remember all references to it in JavaScript.
One that that tripped me was the <tfoot> tag. The pages had a lot of data presented in tables. <tfoot> was introduced when we separated CSS from all pages. But browser validation always complains about it. It looked right to me. =\ I dig deeper into the World Wide Web begging for some clue. Eventually I found out that <tfoot> has to be declared before <tbody>. So the order should be <table><thead></thead><tfoot></tfoot><tbody></tbody></table>. What dah? It still doesn’t make sense to me. But oh well, as long as it validates…
It’s been damn hot around here the past two weeks; everyday over 90 degrees out there, and I have to walk at least 5-7 minutes one way to get to my car at a surface parking lot for work. I don’t usually sweat much. In fact, 80 degree is my perfect temperature. Yet now I am alway sweating from walking and walking and walking.. Damn the weather.
Company parking lot is huge. Not as big as Disneyland or Magic Mountain parking lot, but pretty big as a surface parking lot. It’s as big as some shopping malls, except longer aisles, with no trees and no shades, and constant construction going on right next to it. The noice and, dust clearly does not add any pleasure in parking there.
As if that is not enough, the parking lot is always 90% full by 9am every work day. That can explain part of the reasons why I need to walk so far. But with such a huge lot, you would expect big spaces? NO! Most of them are compact spots that a mini van or truck can easily step on both sides of the lines. My solara has huge doors unfortunately, which makes parking at tight spots even more painful… If it’s difficult for me to get out, you know the space is tight…
I think I will just blame the weather…
Sorry if you were looking for the photo gallery or the forums but they simply disappeared in the thin air!
You are not imagining things, I am sure. I am in the middle of moving web hosting company so there’s a lot more things for me to be done still. Be patient and check back from time to time. I promise the contents will be back soon!
Cheers!
While I was reading a few friends’ blogs, I found a common theme from their recent posts: they missed their UCI college years.
I tried to look back to my own, too. But I could not find what they saw in mine. I saw myself falling, getting up, growing up, and changing. But I don’t particularly miss any times. There were good times, and bad times. It was my life at that time, pretty much the same as my life right now; good times, bad times.
I tried to miss the time when I was alone, more selfish, more care free. Funny how I could not remember when it was like that the last time.
I don’t think I am starting to lose memory; the process had begun long ago. I just didn’t know it happening.
Count down to 3 days till the last day in Adcom. =)
I’ve been busy with all the transition and cross-training. Meetings after meetings. I have never met with so many people so frequently in such a short period of time, ever. I sometimes think, why can’t they just chill? What’s the big rush? I was handed the projects long ago with minimal instruction, I am sure everybody can figure those things out.
I guess it is their mentality that I know a lot a lot made me valuable. Otherwise I am just as easily replacable as a student programmer. What I learned the most from participating in a project was the business process, user habit, outstanding problems, and user concerns, not the technical side. Technical stuff is easy to train and pick up anyways.
It is a little scary to think that I am going to toss away all my valuable business knowledge of the projects I have been involved in for years, and start something brand new and unknown. Scary…
For those who have not heard the rumor, the official word was in. I am going to be starting at a new company on April 17th!
I was expecting the last two weeks at the current job to be chill, but whoever told me that I just want to choke him/her! Well, just unexpectedly busy meeting rather than working on transitioning. Suddenly everybody wants a piece on my calendar, and suddenly I have all these stuff to finish before I leave. I thought transition means, I start handing the job to somebody else and I should stop agressively working on it. At least in one case here, hell no.  I am still actively developing/testing on one project and installing for another. *sigh. I don’t have enough time to document the projects to be hand over.
Err.. Frustrated. I am only getting by thinking that soon I will be out of here.
I am supposed to be a pscych major? Yeah?
|
You scored as Psychology. You should be a Psychology major!
| Psychology |
|
100% |
| Mathematics |
|
92% |
| Engineering |
|
83% |
| Theater |
|
83% |
| Biology |
|
75% |
| Dance |
|
67% |
| Philosophy |
|
58% |
| Chemistry |
|
50% |
| Art |
|
42% |
| English |
|
33% |
| Journalism |
|
33% |
| Linguistics |
|
33% |
| Sociology |
|
33% |
| Anthropology |
|
17% |
What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3)
created with QuizFarm.com |
Err.. I do fasinate about how the mind works “sometimes”, when my own mind is not troubling or causing too much stress.. But I’d rather choose math major. ;p That is closer to my heart..
|
Links
|
