Off By One

Good morning.

As some of you may recall, once upon a time I started a blog called “schoolblog” based on my progression through the educational system. It was a tiny little side project, and really, it stayed that way all along. Now, or more specifically, yesterday, that process came to its conclusion at the U of A convocation ceremonies.

So, I’m done.

And, as has been increasingly obvious, so is this blog, at least as it currently exists. I don’t seem to have the impulse to write, and if the comment rate is any indication, what little I do write is not spurring conversations either. Given these two strikes, I cannot see myself having anything to say for a while.

I’m not getting rid of the domain, so it might come back at some future date, but in the meantime…

Good night.

Zero
Nil
Zip
Nada
Null
Void

I’m done.

… days left in my degree.

This fills me with both apprehension and joy; the latter is for obvious reasons, the former is because the desire to get into school and the drive to finish it have been a major part of my life for the last decade. Who and/or what will I be, now that this goal has been achieved?

Time will tell.

It’s funny how subtle things can bring memories… or at least fuzzy, vague recollections, trickling back into the foreground.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I have few clear memories of my life before leaving Grande Prairie. It’s not much of a stretch for me to claim that I only really ever became a whole person once the last vestiges of that place were stripped from me and I stepped out into the world anew. This isn’t to say I’m the best at the social interaction thing as it is. I can see from my relationships now that I still carry some of the baggage of what was, easily, the worst way I can imagine anyone having to grow up barring famine or warfare.

Thanks to the all-powerful Facebook, it so happens that I’m reliving some of the … less pleasant parts of my life so far, albeit with only one clear memory to act as an avatar of all of the unpleasantness.

(continue reading…)

Well, my life is officially boring.

I’ve managed to do little or nothing interesting for the past week, basically phoning it in in class, and doing some of the work that just … needs doing, at work. All told, not a bad week, but not one loaded with amusing anecdotes or anything.

I’m supposed to go over to a friend’s place for a beer after work tonight, if that counts as exciting.

Other than that, I’ve now tried a sort of mead, although not a purist’s sort, and it was good.

See? Exciting!

Sweet zombie Jebus, I’m done!

Oh, the bliss of having weekends again; of being able to read guilt-free. Of playing games, of having days that end at 5 pm some of the time, even if not all of the time.

Oh, and the ~$20,000/year raise (as of monday) doesn’t hurt. Did I mention they hired me?

I am, as Char will no doubt agree, occasionally a bit on the negative side. This isn’t always a good thing; I need to learn to tone down my vitriol in situations in which it does not advance my needs, and in those in which it is not necessary or constructive.

There are times, however, that merit a vigorous negative response.

I’m taking two project courses in school this semester; Cmput 414, which is a graphics and multimedia course with a heavy algorithmic programming component, and Cmput 401, a software engineering course and the focus of this rant.

Software Engineering is, according to Wikipedia, “is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software.” Among other things, it requires the application of good design practices to the development of code, and following beneficial design standards.

So, I have to ask, why is it that people taking this fucking course cannot do something as basic as grok that it is fundamentally bad practice to add public methods to hidden implementing classes instead of using the goddamned design?! I spent three days nailing down, and countless hours tuning up, the data model for our project application, only to have one of my fellow team members simply come along and, instead of reading the goddamned documentation, which I provided as a first step, add new hooks into the mechanism, just to get at the information in a way that is not only wrong, but disables some nice and (I thought) needed functionality.

I have spent the last hour looking over his code, marveling at the glorious unification of layers that, according to good design practices, should ever remain separate — the intermingling of UI code and logic that I’d already written elsewhere, better was a real high point for me.

Gods.

I cannot wait to get back to full time work with people who know more than I do, so that instead of raging at the pathetic efforts of people whose skills are not even up to the level of an academic programmer, I can instead find faults with my own approaches, be told that I’m doing it wrong, and learn how to do it better.

My god, I’m tired.

I want this school year to be over.

This is starting to be a March theme, I think. I get swamped, I get a bit behind, and now all of a sudden, despite my best intentions, I am staring at deadlines I might not meet, with workloads I can barely handle.

Only one month to go. Perhaps I’ll get to see a couple of episodes of Die Nasty this year, yet.

Well, I’ve returned from my Japanese Odyssey, and now I get to spend this whole week swamped with school work, work work, and un-jetlagging.

It’ll be grand.