two months, really?

July 24th, 2010 Eric 1 comment

I would like to say that a lot has happened in the two months since my last post, and while I can say that thing have been great, not a whole lot has changed.

Things are still going well at work.  I’m getting new responsibilities all the time (which I love), and I’m really starting to get into the groove of things. I’m still enjoying my project and all the cool little side projects I get to do.  A good friend from MSU who worked with me at Jackson moved to Chicago recently, so that’s a bit of a bummer.

Still loving my new phone, which totally rocks.

Had central air installed at my place by the awesome Jim Horn (I hope that’s the right url), which is seriously nice.

I’m sure there’s more stuff in there, but I’m bored of writing this post already. oke bye.

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to the powers that be

May 25th, 2010 Eric No comments

please bring a Chick-fil-A to Michigan.  Seriously, Michigan would be much better if there were Chick-fil-A’s everywhere.  Then, the slickdeals free spicy chicken sandwich on Friday would not have gone to waste for me.  I have many other requests, but this one is important…

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YouTube made a mistake

May 9th, 2010 Eric No comments

As I’m sure you can guess, YouTube decided not to hire me.  While it does make the moving away decision much easier (and everyone that wants us to stay here much happier), I still think that YouTube made a mistake on me.

I found out Monday April 26th, and the following morning I wrote out a 1200+ word post explaining why I thought I was a good fit (yeah, I definitely didn’t post that).  While that might have made me feel a bit better, I’m sure that I’m the only person it would have helped.

Having had quite a bit of time to think about it, I still think that I would have fit well.  I have been a web developer for almost a decade (their main interface is a website), I know programming in Adobe Flash really well (hello?), and I’m all about Python (the language their backend is written in).  My only thought is that the interview process doesn’t do me justice.

Oh well, maybe I’m meant to stay in Lansing…

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it might be worth it to give this a chance…

March 17th, 2010 Eric No comments

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super awesomeness

March 10th, 2010 Eric No comments

A few weeks ago I bought a one pound bag of RedVines from Meijer.  Sadly, the ‘vines were ridiculously hard.

So, I sent a message on the RedVines site telling them what happened, and asking if their recipe had changed.

A day or so later, I received an email saying that they had not, in fact, changed their recipe.  The hardness was due to conditions during shipping that they were working on fixing.  They apologized for the bad experience and informed me that they were sending me a replacement product that would arrive in a couple of weeks.

Today I received said replacement product…

American Licorice Company wins 2 awards in my mind:

  1. The new licorice does in fact have perfect “hardness”
  2. Instead of replacing the one pound bag that I purchased, they sent me 3 one pound bags

Serious win.

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scrubs: yes, it’s a show

February 21st, 2010 Eric 4 comments

I’m not exactly sure what season I first started watching Scrubs in, but I’m going to guess somewhere around 1 or 2.

The first episode I watched I hated.

I’m sure it had something to do with the mood that I was in, because it wasn’t but a matter of weeks (or months) before I walked in on a marathon of Scrubs watching at the old Klan bachelor pad and fell in love.  Since that fateful moment, I have followed the show with bated breath.

I was definitely sad when I heard that the show was ending, and while the final episode was supremely awesome, I was even more sad after watching it.

Then came along what I will henceforth call the “bonus” season, which was aptly titled Scrubs med school.

This bonus season was definitely not as good as regular Scrubs, but I have been perfectly fine with that.  The bonus served a much greater and more important purpose than continuing the legacy of Scrubs.  It served to dull the pain of the end of 8 great years.

As the bonus season progressed the loss of the familiar faces, and my particular loss of interest, helped to ease me in to a world where JD and Turk would never again share their guy love in my living room.

This bonus season, while nothing in comparison to the real thing, has made me okay with the end.  For that fact alone, I consider it a success.

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the death of blogs

February 4th, 2010 Eric 1 comment

Kristie and I were talking about this recently, and we are both in agreement.  Blogs, at least in our circle of friends, are going the way of the dinosaurs.  Now, I’m not talking about the blog format in general.  There are plenty of sites using the blog format that are headed in the opposite direction.  I’m talking specifically about personal blogs.

I’m just as guilty as anyone; my last post was almost 3 months ago and it was for a class.

The culprit: micro-blogging.  Twitter and Facebook updates are the new blog.  It makes sense though.  Who wants to spend their time writing out posts when they can just as easily (and more often more easily) make a tiny update.

Just a thought…

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code producing code

November 14th, 2009 Eric 1 comment

This week at work I learned about ICEfaces, as well as my managers dislike of it.  I’m not sure what it is that I dislike about writing code that in turn writes code, but that is definitely the case with ICEfaces.  There’s just something that feels inefficient about some program interpreting my code and then generating more code from that.  I know that is what a compiler does, but that’s the whole purpose of compilers.  That is not the case for many code producing mechanisms.

Regardless of how I feel about such a thing, it was nice to get some more insight in to what is actually being used in the corporate world.  Most of my web development experience has been in PHP and with apache.  In fact, I didn’t even realize that many people even used Java for web development.  I just assumed that most web development was done in either PHP or .NET.

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testing 1,2,3

November 7th, 2009 Eric No comments

I now understand why writing functional tests or unit test for code is so important.  I have taken a course that included some test-driven development and assignments that required unit tests.  Intellectually I have understood the value of these tests, but I never really saw the full benefits of writing tests (although I’m sure I still don’t fully understand).

This week at work one of my big tasks was to write tests for a library that had been written previously and is now being used in a system my team is developing.  In writing these tests, I have been able to learn several things about the library:

  1. How the code works, and what it is supposed to do
  2. The database that the code was written for is not the same one we are using
  3. The library was missing several key functions

If I hadn’t written test for this library, I would still have been in the dark about how it was doing what it was doing (even though I had written a web service that called all the library functions).  I definitely wouldn’t have realized that it was missing features, and I definitely wouldn’t have known why it wouldn’t have worked with our current database.  So, I saved myself and my team plenty of head scratching by writing tests.  Who would have thought test would save time?

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it’s coming down

November 4th, 2009 Eric No comments

I’m lucky that I even have time to post this, because I’m swimming in a sea of work where the bottom is several feet out of reach.

From work deadlines to school deadlines and even further to job hunting,  I just plain have a lot of stuff I have to get done in a short amount of time.  I’m not gonna lie, I’m kinda freakin’ out.

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