Well, it has been a month now that I've been working at this job. Here, we use Ruby, yet another language I had to pick up on the fly. Initially, I was quite bothered by its simplicity. In my experience it had been that the languages (MATLAB) that tried to simplify things for the developer ended up being too limited in functionality, and too inflexible to customize. On the other hand, there were languages, like C# which were so complicated and convoluted (probably intentionally implemented in...
Written on July 2, 2010
We'd like to think that money wasn't a part of many things. It takes the aura out of many otherwise noteworthy events and accomplishments. I was just thinking about this last night as I was on my way home from work, where I had previously spent a couple hours working on a school project. I had lost track of time, and by the time I was ready to wrap things up it was past 9:30, and the security officer had already made her rounds to turn off most of the lights. I wondered whether the majority of...
Written on June 26, 2010
It was told me some time ago, in the training, that a disposition is a tricky matter. It is something that eventually frustrates my growth in life, despite it being my friend, and something useful to me growing up. This was something which I always kept in the back of my head, because while I did not understand it, there was something about it which made me pay attention to it. Yesterday, while I was eating dinner, I considered why some things bothered me. Why was I so extreme in certain matters?...
Written on June 17, 2010
It has been half a year since I've been back from California. During this time, I have gone from bumming at home to working full-time and schooling part-time. This has caused ripples to go forth, affecting all aspects of my life. Specifically, while I still try to keep a time with the Lord in the morning, I have felt it slipping. I just don't spend as much time before the Lord, when compared to the few months before, when a lot more of my time was spent in prayer. I think this is the effect of...
Written on June 17, 2010
This week passed by like the wind. By the end of the week, I had shown up for my first day of work, got oriented, and got thrown into a whole new environment. Balancing my schedule proved to still need a little work, as I was so overextended that I became sick from Wednesday until Thursday night. I may have had a fever, because I felt cold (in the middle of summer, in Texas). In addition, my stomach didn't feel too good. Hopefully things will get better as I gradually work out my schedule. I'm...
Written on June 6, 2010
It was in 6th grade. I was at my first Science Fair, and in general, my first public speaking experience. For the first time, I had to talk to strangers about what I did. While I had prepared with my dad, who knew much more than me, after the preparation, I really did not know much, save for a few lines I was told to say. The whole project was a mystery to me. Combined with my natural fear of public speaking, it was pretty obvious to me that I bombed my presentation with just about everyone....
Written on May 30, 2010
It was either in 4th or 5th grade, that for a short period of time, I was given my own room. During the year that I was by myself, I felt something I never felt before or since. Eventually, my brother wanted to go back to the old arrangement of sharing a room with me. I was ok with it, so that was the end of the short time I was alone. When I moved back to my home about a week ago, I chose this same room which I had not been in for a couple years. That night, as I lay on my bed, I looked up...
Written on May 30, 2010
For the past week, I have finally moved to my new home. This was actually my old house. In fact, most of the stuff were left here, when I went away to California for a while. So, it was more like moving back home, which was strangely unfamiliar. I've been living out of a suitcase for too long, where my belongings consisted of my basic necessities and books. Now, it feels strange to be able to settle down and unpack, and to be able to get acquainted with so many things I had left behind. One...
Written on May 30, 2010
Today marks yet the next step in my arduous job search - a job offer. Yes sir, after 3 long months (a summer break's worth of time), a company has made an offer to hire me. These months were a time of trial, I must say, but of a very different kind than what most people would imagine. While most people like to rest and enjoy life, I enjoy working and learning. To be at home with nothing to do is harder than to spend my time putting in a good day's worth of work. These months were also a time...
Written on May 15, 2010
There have been times during my interviews when I have been asked where I hope to be in 20 years. This has always been one of the more challenging questions for me for a variety of reasons, of which I will enumerate two.First of all, though I am still young, and not that experienced, I do know enough to know that I really don't know that much. It is a pretty big world out there. Nobody knows what the future will bring. When these two factors are brought together, an endless number of possibilities...
Written on May 7, 2010
Yesterday, I was just going about my day when I looked over, and saw my brother playing Warcraft on his computer. This is Warcraft 1 we're talking about, not World of Warcraft, or even Warcraft 3. I didn't know it was even possible to play these games anymore. But, since I was proven wrong to my face, I decided to look into getting these games. Of course, the major question I had was whether it was legal to even get these games? Obviously, most of the games I had played in the past are no longer...
Written on April 26, 2010
Today marks yet another landmark in my programming experience. I spent today developing my very first WPF program, which basically houses a web URL, and allows resizing in order to test the rendering of the web page on different screen resolutions. I must say, I am quite happy with it. It was a great learning experience. I learned a lot. First, I learned that when you apply head knowledge, sometimes there are some gaps that you never knew were there. I had to spend some time filling in the...
Written on April 12, 2010
I finally finished this book today, after more than a month of steady progress. In terms of getting myself acquainted with WPF, this book does an excellent job, especially with including basic details for beginners like me. However, the content is sometimes a little bit messy, with regards to organization. My thinking is that, due to the large, readable fonts, the pretty pictures and code fragments, and the helpful boxes, some compromises had to be made, and some of the content had to be rearranged,...
Written on April 10, 2010
Today, I was working away at WPF (nearing the end of WPF Unleashed), as usual, when I suddenly remembered some of the old funny videos I watched before. A search on the internet showed that while one particular video survives on Youtube, the site (endword.com) that I had first saw the funny Mentos Commercial about two guys playing card games, is no longer there. What triggered the shock was that I did find a post about it, dated in 2004. It has been 6 years. Half a decade has passed, and to me,...
Written on April 7, 2010
Sometimes, the things we learn as children are the most helpful in life. One jingle which made me chuckle goes like this:What do you do when you friend says let's do something you know you really shouldn't.That's the time to walk away and part company.Part company, part company, That's the time to walk away and part company. It goes to the tune of a old folk song or something.
Written on April 5, 2010
Yesterday, I had a realization concerning procrastination. It makes easy things into impossible things. On the flip side, persistence makes things that are impossible into things easy to accomplish. The New Testament of the Bible is a rather thick portion of the book, composing about one-fourth of it. 90 days ago, many in the church were given a schedule, which, if followed, meant that 90 days later, the entire New Testament would be read. The portions were not very long; only 2-3 chapters a...
Written on April 5, 2010
Work on this site has been steady. Now, most of the sections are working. Only two sections are still only floating around in my mind, waiting to be coded: Hobbies and Friends (guestbook). The features of this site thus far: Journal entries - where I post general information about me, like this post right nowEnjoyment entries - where I post my enjoyment in the word of GodHobbies - random bits of information (mostly hardware, software, anime-related) which may be useful if you are interested in...
Updated on April 1, 2010
I have added a picture gallery of my pictures from the past 2 years. This is yet another addition to the list of capabilities featured by this site. Yet again, it uses Flash and Javascript.
Written on March 30, 2010
Who would have thought that compatibility would be such a big hurdle. So, having developed this site exclusively in Firefox and Chrome, I recently found out that it did not work at all in Internet Explorer. This was quite a problem, as IE is still pretty popular, and who knows what important people may be visiting this site, only to find that it doesn't display anything at all. Therefore, I have now added IE8 compatibility. It also seemed to work, for the most part, on IE7. But, for the best...
Written on March 29, 2010
Most of my epiphanies come to me in the shower. Don't ask me why, because I don't know. During one of these times, I remembered a story one of my professors told once:In India, it is very crowded. People squeeze against each other just walking down the street. When it comes time to get on the buses, it is a fight between the people outside trying to get in, and the people inside, who are trying to keep more people from getting into the already overcrowded bus. A very interesting phenomenon then...
Written on March 27, 2010