log 517

just finished a 4 hr coding session making the impossible(and impracticle) happen. My layout is a 5:3 frame housing all the contents of the web application. First the guys want the layout so it stretch full 100% width. Hmmm…fine, though uneccesary beause the content is mostly short in width. Then they want it to go 100% vertically. yea…that’s what I’ve been working on. The difficulty is with the inner div scroll bar.  As most of your know, in order to have the scrollbar, the exact height (usually in pixel) must be set!

Simple task? Sure if you are developing for a single browser. Anyway, if you have any design sense or looked around, there’re no wide scaled site layouts that are made to fit 100% width and 100% height. These guys and their 17" laptops. If you do a market research, you are most likely to find that people with monitors that goes high than 1024×768 rarely browse at full screen. Beyond the basic user observation, I also own/use monitors of all sizes from the little 12.1" wide to a 21".   Maybe I will just forgo the inner scroll bar and let the page drag on like most lame ass sites out there design by graphic designer who never made the full conversion to design layout for computer screens and still thinking they are designing poster on an A3.

(don’t get me wrong, my solution works flawlessly as always, I just don’t like how it distorts my original layout)

Found an old photo album today, so…here are some pieces of my childhood.

top left: my 4th grade posse and I (don’t even ask if I remember their names, you know I don’t. In my defense, I only attended that school for a year.)
Top right: my 3th grade posse and I (if I can’t remember stuff about grade 4, you think I would remember grade3?)
Bottom left: Some girl who pose for me while I took her photo.
Bottom right: The balcony view from the appartment where I lived. I miss the sea view. All the places I lived at in hk has a sea view.

Just remembered something I made a couple days ago which tasted great.

I’m one of those wierd people who likes their food taste as it should by its smell. I love the smell of black currant tea, but the problem is that it has no taste. Luckily, I also love drinking Welch’s grape juice. Put two and two together, and you get the best cup of fruit flavoured tea. I’d say it’s better than the green apple tea you get the local bubble tea places, because they usually make them way too sweet. Anyway, this cup of tea is the perfect little something for after dinner.

Today, I ate nothing but fuit. Had a glass of water as breakfast and lunch, then headed out to do my usual grocery shopping. For dinner I had fruit salad and a couple oatmeal cookies. What’s with this weird diet? Just thought I balance things off since I had the chicken &rib combo the night before. Things got rather boring, as some friends are busy…basically, I wasn’t gonna waste a chance to treat myself well, so I bought a good meal with a glass of merlot.  So onward to this coming week, it will be crap loads of assignments, studying for tests,…if I have time I do want to visit the museum. It has nothing to do with anything, just that my plans mid 2008 is to go to Japan and never come back to Canada again, Ifigure I would do as much stupid tourist stuff on my last year. I really hope this sem ends soon, so I can make it a weekly outing.

it’s not really a break. more like a week without classes but the assignments are still there. I know, seneca study breaks suck.

At the very least, I’m free of the dreaded prj assignment for the day. I really wanted to do something, anything. For some odd reason, I really want to get wasted, just manually shut off my brain for half a day. Though a good bottle of wine would be a waste just to get me drunk, rather savour it for its taste.

Anyhow, E didn’t call me yesterday. I thought we were having dinner with K.  Oh well…I had an online meeting at 7, which meant I couldn’t have made it anyway.

This morning, I was pre-occupied with a last min tasks and that lasted till noon. So now I’m finally free.   

EC asked me to go ping pong….though I don’t really feel like doing any sports today. Called A,…no body answered. what to do, what to do….finally a day off and no where to go.

after many many crummy weeks, I’ve finally had a good day.
Weather was warm, did well on the test, finished my assignment dispite the little last min snag, aside from that I felt great this morning even as I got out of bed.

The little snag was just a stupid thing, where the school makes you use a different db connection address when you deploy the app. Fixed that with one hand. (I was walking in the hallway, left hand holding the laptop, typing away with the right.) After the test I headed across the street to get my car. While doing that, a big gust of wind blew my scarf to it’s side as though I was in a movie set. That must have looked really cool from a far. The world is starting to turn my way again. JOY!  ^_^  only thing left to do this week is kick some ass on the DBL test and I will have a few days off(study week). Looking forward to see a good friend who just got back in TO this week.

(still amazing to see that I finish the assignment in around 50 hrs. All hail java with it’s beans and EL, and Jdeveloper which exported things in war file so I don’t have to do the grunt work of putting things in the correct directory. If only I did it with an Oracle back end, I would have finished it earlier. Damn mysql and it’s shittiness. If you are a developer and still haven’t been graced by the PL/SQL greatness, do so, it cuts your app development time by half.)

Oh and the wet snow/rain is starting to melt that half foot of snow my sis piled on my side of the drive way.

4 am. assignment’s done but the stupid server at school is down, so I can’t upload my app. And I’ve just begun to study for today’s test.

little blue box jumped out of the little blue bag and is now in its owner’s hands with a little blue smile. I hope you enjoyed it.

With that said, I’m sorry I’m being a boring guy today…even more boring than usual. Lots of things are on my mind today, mostly unhappy thoughts and all the pending tasks. Simply, I rather be boring than to bring you down releasing all the negativity in my mind. Of all the people I know, I do think you are one whom I feel most comfortable talking to just about anything.

Since I’m on my blog now, spill away:
-The recent and on going work really puts me in a bad mood

-I got my UNX assignment back, 22/24. Apparently I left a pipe in that kepts the script from sending error to stderr. stupid mistake

-in my EJb class, I wasn’t the first to finish the lab which could have gotten me out of the test. The lab was easy, I should have been able to do it in seconds but I went over board and want to write it in the most efficient way possible, which took more thinking time.

-I’m still cheesed about being dis by the old fart(prj prof) who probably doesn’t have the credentails to critique my work.

-my career outlook is looking bright but boring. Remembering people whom I worked with totally just brings it out that much more.

-my love life is non-existent but I don’t seem to care much about it

-last week after the snow, I shoveled my side of the drive way only, because I was hurrying to class. When I got back, my sis shoveled her side but left my side with an extra half foot. It’s a pain trying to get in and out of the garage without scratching the car.

-I got nice clothes in the closet yet not a single event worth/appropirate to wear them to

-not many people can tell but I’m a lot fatter than I used to be.

-The stupid dsl line gets disconnected everytime there’s an incoming call

-my sis is always forwarding the calls home for no good reason

-The router keeps skipping to 10T because it’s over heating.

-The fridge is down. I have to run down to the cold room every morning to get my soy milk, run back up to pour it in a glass and run down again to put it back

-I want my hands on the 328xi but with plans to leave, I can’t put $$ down for stuff like this

-A guy asked me to be his partner in the next EJB assignment but I have no recollection of his name and his face.

-stupid CIBC wants to charge me $40 a year for my dormant account. What the fuck kind of world is this when I have to pay people to keep my money when I’m not using any of their services!

-I’m getting sloppy in trying to stay within the speed limit on my daily commute.

-Every course I’m taking now uses a different programming language(that’s 5 in total). It’s driving me nuts having to keep so many syntax in my head.

…….I very much need a change of scenary.

The method is very much against my moral standards but it’s neccesary thing to do in this world filled with idiots. (assholes who judge your effort by the amount of time you spent on certain tasks)

ALWAYS REPORT YOUR TIME USAGE 2-2.5X OF THE ACTUAL TIME!!!

I know…I don’t like to lie neither, but sometimes fudging the numbers is the only solution.
There only 2 real uses for timesheet:
  1. For upper management people to think they are in control
  2. To charge clients for projects which could have been much cheaper

yes you heard it right. The fridge is officially dead. This greatly effects my grocery list on Sunday. So…everything on my list has to be able to be kept in room temp. There goes the yogurt, meat, soy milk, cheese…  I guess that only leaves bread and juice. On my busiest week of my busiest semester, I will have to take time and get takeout for dinner, how wonderful.   If only people would listen when I tell them the fridge is acting abnormal a month ago.

As for the project, it’s going alright…just a lot of padded work. The group leader likes to add fancy dhtml stuff to the site anytime he feels like it. Don’t get me wrong, I like dhtml but these minor dress up bits should only be done once the site is full functional and at least 80% debugged. Also a lot of the stuff are sourced from some site somewhere, which means there will be hell to document and we don’t have 100% over the functionality unless time is spent on reading/editing the codes. (I’m not much into using codes/library from other developers unless the difficulty is beyond my understanding.) The thing I really want to do now is QA the thing. Just so the stupid prof can’t pick on the little things, like unchecked password length and such. Since we are developing the site with not so conventional tools, the models aren’t that well mapped out. This is because the documentation from last sem was rather skimpy. sigh….eye on the prize Tommy. In 2 years, everything that’s happening now will be just an insignificant grain of sand. You will be happy in your little flat in Japan living it out every day.