Watt's Up Musings of an original geek

September 11, 2004

Off to class

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 12:48 pm

After a quick breakfast and capturing the event on my new camera, the ladies (houseguest and hostess, teacher and student, Merry and Kathy) were off to class for the day.

Now what to do, what to do.
Updated: Cleaned out the garage, cut up scrap wood from various projects into small pieces so it now ready to toss, saw movie “Maria Full of Grace”.

Writing is done, now what?

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 2:05 am

OK, for the time being, the writing at work is done. It’s a 92 page document. Whew! I’ll let it sit for a few days before I reread and edit it.

Our house guest arrived and we went to dinner at a new BBQ restaurant named Mann’s on Research. Converstation was excellent, dinner was good, but I’m full. The rest of the weekend I’ll make myself scarce, but since they’ll be out of the house it’s more like they’ll be scarce.

Dunno what I’ll do tomorrow. Nothing planned, so boredom will set in early. Gotta get some sort of hobby.

September 9, 2004

Writing all day

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 2:10 am

I have been writing all day at work. I am working on updating our project’s design document. Prior to development we had written this document with what we planned to do. Now that we’re done we have to update it to the reality of what we actually did. Since yesterday I’ve broken the current document into a master document and many subdocuments each of which is a chapter (something I’ve only just learned how to do with MicroSoft Word and its outline format). Yesterday and today I’ve worked on the Introduction and the Portal, the web application, chapters. Another member of my group is working on his chapter for the work he did. I sat all day typing and reading and writing. My butt was sore from sitting so long. Now there are still several more chapters to do, and I don’t relish sitting there all day tomorrow and the next. But I will persist.

September 6, 2004

Still doing jobs

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 8:59 pm

Even though it is Labor Day, and it’s my day off, I’ve got to do a few things. So befitting of the day’s name, I’ve got to labor. For example, I just mowed the lawn. Next Kathy and I are going carpet shopping (again, another thing for the house before our guest arrives). Hopefully after that I’ll take a break and either read or see a movie. So some of the day can be called a day off of work. And remember today was the Congress Avenue Mile, so maybe only a fraction of the day was spent laboring. I really can’t complain.

September 5, 2004

House guest coming

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 2:11 pm

We have a houseguest coming next week so we’re in the final frenzied days preparing for her arrival. Because of her we’ve gotten new couches, reupholstered a chair, bought decorations, and done a myriad of other things. This includes a mental list of jobs in my boss’ head. The current list of jobs is not long, but there’s a list. The boss tells me what jobs are mine on the list, and I go do them. Yesterday I was to clean out the caulk in the downstairs shower, because it was a bit mildewy, and redo it. So I use a knife and scraper to remove all the old caulk, down to the grout. Then I bought white silicon caulk and redid it. Now it looks swell, white, clean, pretty, but will our guest ever know. It’s not my place to stay. I just do what the boss says, and it keeps me active and busy and not bored, which recently has been in a problem of mine. Today the job is the cleaning the kitchen floor. OK, later…

September 4, 2004

New toy arrived

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 2:32 am

My recent posts have been without images because I didn’t have a camera. However, my new Canon A310 Digital Camera arrived today. It came with a 32MB Compact Flash card, and I’m still awaiting a 256MB Lexar Compact Flash card. Now I have a new toy to play with. So I don’t have an excuse not to include pictures. Pictures to follow when appropriate.

September 3, 2004

Rusty with an accent

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 1:29 am

My current computer programming language of choice is Java. This has changed over the years. I’ve been working with Java for about 8 years. Prior to that I worked with C++ for about 5 years. As a sojourn in the middle of the Java years I worked with the C language, but my emphasis remained Java. This was unusual, because most people go from C to C++, whereas I did the reverse. But it was required by the job and I adapted. Today at work I had to develop a small C program to recreate a problem we were having. Writing it was tough, because I was rusty. It’s been years since I’ve written in C. So it took me a while, but I got it done. Yet after completing it I had a bug. I had written some of it as if I were writing Java, which was wrong. I’ve done this before, and I’ve also read programs by other people that have “an accent”. What I mean is that the author’s primary language is something other than the one that the program is written in, and it clearly shows that. For example, in C you must declare all variables first, that is, before you use them. Whereas in Java you can declare them inline as you need them. So if you read a Java program where all the variables are declared first, you can easily see the “C” accent.

September 2, 2004

The project at work is ending

Filed under: Uncategorized — admin @ 2:52 am

I’ve been working on a Grid Computing project at work for the past few months. The team developed a web application portal with HTML, Servlets and JSPs, grid information repository based on relational database schema and tables, grid services using Globus Toolkit, special drivers for automated provisioning, and a Storage Area Network (SAN) with 2.3TB of disk storage running on a 14 node blade computing environment. In July we went into system test, and have busily been fixing problems since then. Many had to do with using, integrating, installing or configuring five or more software products together. Recently we’ve begun to do performance testing. Over this time I’ve been fixing bugs, and making adjustments to make the system easier to use, and cleaning up little uglies that turn up. There have been times where I’ve had to rewrite something to adjust to the demands of the system. Now I’m nearing the end. I’m beginning to defer doing things, because the return-on-investment is just not worth it. IOW, I can see the light at the end of this project’s tunnel, and it’s time to call it done. I’m sad that it’s coming to an end. I like the camaraderie of everyone working together, and I especially like the challenges of solving the problems that have come up.

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