on a better note

i've just been informed that someone important wants to interview me for work in a location i'm interested in working in. this is very comforting. exciting, even ^_^

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i was super tired this morning. the presentation made in class was interesting, although it went on for far too long. note: the straitening is NOT appropriate to be read out loud when you're treading on the-end-of-the-class time... that's a "please check this out before class" kind of a poem.

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squinting kindle issue: pulling out a netbook on a crowded bus is not at all comfortable. my kindle, however, travels perfectly. the only problem is that if the course material hasn't been scanned decently (90% of what we get) then i either have to read it in its full-page tiny-font view, or zoom in and move the screen every half a line (which is a silly thing to do on a kindle).

do i blame the kindle for not allowing me finer control over the zoom? or the lecturers for giving us such crappy scans?

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the cafeteria noodles are back, and i was hungry enough that the portion was appropriate.

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during the night i'd received an email (and a missed call, but i ignored that) reporting a problem with our systems. i let it go as soon as i discovered that the data was okay because i needed to go to bed, but the reporting most certainly and urgently needed fixing. it turned out that count(*) is the only way to count duplicate / null valued rows: i'd switched to counting specific columns because the overhead of using "*" is meaningful.

*sigh*

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i spent the afternoon on a new system function, and this one's a real head-breaker. i came home "early" because i have a seminar paper due tomorrow morning and i haven't touched it yet. this is not the first time i've mentioned this paper, but it's the last time i'll be doing so without immediately doing something about it :P

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the 40 hour sweet spot: well, i'm sure the article's main suggestion is entirely valid, that working more than 40 hours per week isn't good. i wonder, though, especially in the tech industry, if working that much is optimal. at least, working that much long term, there's nothing wrong with a highly motivated burst every now and again.

the divorce rate metric is classy :/