Saturday Plans

I'll start with todays activities and then state Saturday's plans.

Today - I covered the software support department by myself today. The two others who normally cover that area went out of town. I only called them twice during the day for questions... I only had three calls, one of which was already expected and planned for.

After work, I went to "Meet The Robinsons". It is a Disney production, all computer animated, and it was very good. The hero goes forward in time to regain his confidence as an inventor and as a result has to fix the time stream because of his actions. It was a standard plot outline, but some of the smaller quirks were hilareous. The singing/mobster frogs were extremely funny, but the T-Rex would have been my favorite if he had been given more screen time. A big spoiler ahead: The main focus of the story, the kid, never finds his mom.

The River Regatta start was this evening, and the movie finished early enough that I could see the last few activities: a fire dancer and Polynesian dancers. It was very enjoyable to sit back and watch and listen. In fact, the picture on this blog is the opening ceremony.

I was going to go to Sea World Saturday, but the Regataa's entertainment tomorrow looks far too fun: Martial Arts/Tai Chi Demo, Yoga Dance, Chinese Acrobats, Para Jumpers, Jazz/Moder Dance, and Belly Dancing - all lined up from 10:00 to 1:00. With all that going on, I'll go to Sea World tomorrow.

Going To *Bed* Early

I had to get the title right. I didn't notice I had mispelled the last post until I was ready to post this one.

Now that I've corrected a vital detail, I'm going to let you in on a non-secret: I'm going home! I bought the airline tickets today and will be heading home near the end of April. I'm going to be seeing my whole family; with the exception of my brother... but don't worry, it just means I'll be able to flip him farther when I see him - or I miss a block and lose a tooth. But no worries, I'm sure my brother would never injure my beautiful teeth. ;-)

Time to read some proverbs and go to b-e-d.

Going To Be Early

I've found a geocache! I signed in the log and now I just need to visit geocaching.com and post my visit. The contents of the container were pretty neat. There was a spool of thread, and odd shaped paper clip, a weird quarter, plastic frog, plastic ring, mechanical pencil, and an Olympic medal (a souvenir). If I'm still down here in a month, I want to go back and put something of my own in it.

Any ideas of what would make a good trademark item? It should be unique, small, under 2 dollars, and memorable - just as a rough guideline. Feel free to ignore any of the guideline, so please suggest something! I can't think of anything.

Three Lessons Learned: GPS Style

Three Lessons To Live By:
1. A GPS is dangerous when driving - I tried to help, but the GPS just couldn't reach the gas pedals.
2. Geocaches are dangerous - right by a restaurant with an open meat freezer. Uhg. Apparently vultures like to hang around that spot.
3. Enter coordinates EXACTLY. Being a mile off isn't fun, especially when walking.

I received my GPS this evening. UPS delivered about 6:00. It's been fun to use so far. Wednesday, I plan to make a good day of it. I'll work extra tomorrow and get off early Tuesday and go bicycling. With a 10 mile route, I think I can get 5 caches. There aren't any major hills to speak of in Florida, so it won't be too hot. (The weather yesterday was in the 80's )

I'm off to be soon. I'll try to read another 30 pages of "The Bourne Identity" before I go to bed. Have a good evening!

Weekend Activities

I've gone to Aikido class twice at this point. I don't think I've been quite this sore since I last did a hard weightlifting session; but instead of biceps or quads, it's my shoulders, hips, gastrocnemius', toes, wrist, elbows, neck..... they were GOOD classes.

Playing tennis didn't help the soreness factor much. At least I put up a better fight against my boss this time. I actually won a sets. It's a little harder on the joints than racquetball I think - but I haven't had much experience for comparison yet.

Geo-caching Preliminary Prep

I have blown through the 100 mark for Wei-Hwa puzzles. Since I have a gmail account, I get to use my Google ID to personalize my homepage. On the homepage, it has a small puzzle, a lot like Sudoku, and during lunch I'll do one or two, if I'm compiling then I will finish one, and during the evening, I'll usually do one or two more. It's taken some time to get this far, but only another 50 more, and I'll have finished the puzzles!

For the big news of the day: I've ordered my GPS! It will be coming to my address down here and then the world will open up! I'm getting a "Magellan Explorist 500 LE North American Handheld Color GPS." I prefer to call it my gps. :-)

And in other minor news: after having the car sitting under a tree with a multitude of birds for 3 weeks, I finally decided to get a car wash. In another three weeks, I'll probably have to do it again, but I won't announce it for you - there can only be so much excitement in a single year!

Bridge to Terabithia

Today's review: Bridge to Terabithia

I found Bridge to Terabithia to be far from what I was expecting. I was expecting a light adventure, with pretty graphics and a happy go lucky storyline. It was far darker than that. To give a brief overview of the dark-side of the movie (minus one big plot device ): the hero's father is extremely poor, shows his love to his youngest daughter all the time but barely a word of thanks for the hero, bullies at school, another father that beats his children, the heroes are unpopular and ignored (usually) by their parents, and bullied at school. It is dark, but the odd thing was, by the end of the show, I had decided that it was a kinda-nice show. Yes it is serious, but you see people overcome their circumstances, and build their own world of joy.

Because I have a big preference for a happy ending, I probably won't see it again when the DVD comes out, but such an ending did show how much the young boy had grown.

Now for the basic plotline which gives away all but one huge plot turn. For those who have read the book, you know the plot already. Mom, you can ask what it is when you call. :-) ..... A boy who is harassed at school becomes friends with a new transfer that no-one wants to be friends with. They go off to play together after school, and they build a tree house which becomes their castle in their imaginary world of Terabithia. They have a few problems getting along (mostly related to the boy's impression of being rejected by his father, which isn't really true), but a tragedy forces the boy to grow up and stand on his own two feet. At the very end, he brings his little sister to the imaginary world to be the princess of Terabithia and future queen.

Next movie review will be "TMNT".

Music and Lyrics

Today's review: Music and Lyrics

I went to see "Music and Lyrics" tonight. It was an assignment given to me by Mom: to go see the movie and to blog about it. I have SO MUCH to do with all my homework. It is rough. :-)

I thought the show was pretty good. Other than the protagonists sleeping together in the middle of the movie, it was pretty clean. Now onto the plot with personal commentary! Hugh Grant is a washed up '80s rock performer. ( The 'POP' band he's acting for was real, and if the movie's examples of their songs are accurate, I'm going to find some other songs and listen to them. They were enjoyable) The current diva of the day loves his music and gives him and 8 others the task (competition) of writing a hit song. He hires a song lyricist but the lady (Drew Barrymore) who waters his plants has a better ear for the lyrics, so Hugh Grant hires the caretaker. They struggle with their personal demons: she lacks confidence and Hugh lacks scruples (get the song out, even if it isn't what is should be). Near the end, Hugh presents the song, the diva ruins the song, Drew refuses to let it happens and gets kicked out, Hugh tries to reason with the diva and Drew.... and the movie ends wonderfully. With Drew confident about her writing ability and Hugh with his composing ability.

The twist at the end isn't a surprise, but I don't want to give everything away.

Smarter This Time

Or not. My boss is planning to ship this coming Tuesday. By Friday night, we fixed all the bugs. The installer is doing what we want, within limits, and we're ready to ship. My boss is testing the installer on several systems and randomly tries to print. Failure. Printing works only on XP. Not on ME or 98. Back to the drawing board. Six hours later (not including Allan's time spent working on the problem ) I figure out that I must be missing an initialization of printing. I create a test to see if this is the case. After taking an hour to code the test, I run it... and it works slightly better - it now prints to one printer. I just need to get it working for the new printer now. Since the test was as simple as I could make it, I need to go back through and go line by line and add in code very carefully. I'm guessing that the coding will proceed at a line ever 2 minutes, which would be an average of one letter every ten seconds. I think the average for software programmers is 20 lines of code per hour.

Does this mean I'm an incredibly fast programmer, to be doing 30 lines of code an hour? No, I've spent (in previous months) two, maybe three weeks, working with this exact same code. My average with the previous time included? 3 lines an hour, maybe 4. A letter every minute. Whew, the rush!!

All the code isn't that slow. Two weeks ago, I used a whole week to create a system manager program in a mere 3300 lines. All but 300 lines of the code was carefully analyzed, changed, moved around, and debugged. Several times, I took a whole hour just sitting back and studying the flow of the program. Understanding the why is 10 times... 100 times more important than knowing the what of the program. I could tell you the "what" of the program 8 months ago. I couldn't have told you the "why". Eight months ago, I couldn't have figure out the program myself if I took two months. Today, that same program took a week.

Oh, one last detail to bring to mind how excruciatingly slow, boring, and frustrating programming can be. My co-worker Dan, spent over a month working to get the installer right. Wednesday, we tossed away that work and started afresh. Could we salvage ANY of the code? No. But by Friday, we had an installer working. That is because Dan didn't give me all the details of HOW the installer works, but WHY the installer does things certain ways.

College taught me how to program, learning the why behind a program is far harder. When I worked at Emerson Process Management as an intern, my boss told me something surprising: They don't expect a new hire to be useful for 6 months. Why? Because it takes them six months to figure out what is going on and to start producing more than than they get paid.

Following the reasoning out, specialists should get paid a lot more.. why? Not because they are better at programming or know the syntax of C++ better than anyone else, but because they figure out the why. At EPM, as part of my project, a guy was hired for 2 1/2 months from Sweden. He could barely speak or read English, yet in those 2 1/2 months, he had a fully integrated Windows application produced. He knew the why behind MFC.

And I'm starting to ramble. I didn't go to Sea World yesterday or today. I'm going to plan for Wednesday... barring more programming problems.

Working Hard... Not Smart?

Ah, the joys of a release. My companies Windows product that I'm working on was scheduled to go out Monday. Everything is testing fine until Friday morning. When we put everything together, the installer explodes, and the Bank Reconciliation programs decide that they prefer a hard crash for every little strcpy. And for the last weekend and Monday and today, we've been working overtime just to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it. Ah, the joys of salaried pay.