Progress report

Well, I take my final in math tommorow, and turn in the last project for english. It’s a nice feeling when you could bomb both of them, and still pass the classes. As I finish out my second semester at comm. college, I figured I should do a “lessons learned” more for myself to reflect on than anything.

So here are my “pearls of wisdom” about community college, so far:

- Don’t take a foreign language until you actually understand proper English first..

- Plan the difficulty of your classes around the time of day, and don’t take a math class that ends 2 hours before you normally go to bed.

- Don’t count on just sailing through a class even if you seem to be doing well with no effort.. It’s like the saying “pride comes before a fall.”

- If you’re wearing a polo shirt, and are >25 y/o, make sure you tell the cafeteria workers that you’re a student so you get your food discount, because you’ll apparently look like an teacher.

- In a math class, make sure you’re “ahead” of the class in the book before you come to school, it’s pretty much impossible to take notes and “learn the material” at the same time during class.

- If the two people in front of you are flirting, choose another seat if possible, because even if the girl isn’t interested, guys take a long time to get the hint, and it will pretty much continue to annoy the hell out of you until one of them drops the class out of shame.

- Never let homework carry over from week to week..

So yeah, that’s about it for now. I’ll be glad once this semester is over.. I’ve got some shit at work to catch up on, and hopefully on the 31st I’ll be visiting O.C. again.

Final thought – it’s not in stone yet, but in 09/10 I might try and get into UCI.. if not there, then possibly CSULB. We’ll see…

11 o’clock news

Diets can be hazardous to your health. We started a weight-loss betting pool at work, and so far I’ve lost 2 pounds in 2 days, but I’m questioning if it’s really worth it. I’ve had a headache all night, and maybe I should have just eaten a candy bar instead of opening my mouth during a meeting today.

Have you ever voiced your opinion about something and immediately been hit with a pang of self-consciousness, and a vision of your future immediately becoming darker even though you’d just spoken something truthful? Probably happened a lot in the first-time Bush cabinet, but it’s a very painful moment, believe me.

See, I grep textfiles all day for a living, which is obviously retarded. So some members of my team and I have banded together to create a solution that would present all the data we have to look at in a slimmed-down, readable web page with a lot of user modifiable filtering on the back-end. The engineering team however, has plans to implement a very expensive, very user-unfriendly, and mysterious solution which would also put everything into a web page.

At the meeting today, our director basically endorsed our approach (since the economy is shit, of course, and our solution would be ‘free’) but engineering just kept trying to sell it. So there I sat feeling tried, hungry, crabby, and harboring months of repressed anger at the current shitty text file spooling scripts they’ve foisted on us, so I made the comment:

“As someone who might actually have to live with your <expensive product> solution, I just want a chance to be able to see it first, and for you guys <engineering> to give OUR solution a fair shake.. and if your solution is better, I’ll gladly evangelize it for you..”

I guess it was really my tone of voice that set it off, but our director rephrased what I said while basically agreeing with me, and the engineering team was pretty much speechless. However, while I got praises from “the working man”/my team members for being honest, the nervous/neurotic/Woody Allen side of me was in sheer terror, since like it or not, the engineering team’s cooperation is essential to my being able to do my job, and if they stop cooperating with me when I’m trying to get ahold of DBAs – it could be like pulling teeth from now on.

We’ll see though. I’d like to think my tone wasn’t accusatory, but the bottom line is that I said it, I meant it, and at this point there really isn’t a point in regretting it.

On a lighter note, I watched “Lenny” tonight.. and I have to say that Lenny Bruce is probably the most underrated comedian of all time, and it’s a shame that no-talent hacks like Dane Cook got by, by aping some of the themes Lenny was all about.

Life after LiveJournal..

I feel like I’m living life on my own terms again.. out from under an oppressive yoke, a bird leaving the nest for the first time, like an abused woman leaving the shelter, an ex-con leaving the half-way house, an American leaving for Canada during 2002 Bush-mania..

Well, you get the idea. ; ) Anyway, after much procrastinating, I’m finally off LJ. It’s only really a milestone in that I’ve been a member of that site since 1999.. the pre-myspace internet. On the other hand, I’m hardly a dedicated blogger, so why even bother switching?

Well, I think two companies giving up on that site is a signal that it might be kind of a sinking ship.. and to sell it to a russian company, whose parent country isn’t known for it’s buisness ethics right now, is a little suspect, to me.

So we’ll see how this site works out. It comes recommended by Rob, who I consider a blog guru, and already I must say it “feels” a lot more progressive.

So yeah, I definitely feel I should document last weekend, so that’ll be my first “real post” and we’ll see how it goes after that…