hard-working lazies

fantastic what effort some people are willing to put in to get out of doing something productive. of course all the php developers didn't experience problems with the api's i'm wrapping. they don't know about this "reading documentation" thing - they know about piecing together objects from var_dumping them.

brilliant. genius. i wonder if they generally hit the bottle before working...

i don't think anything interesting / good happened this morning. i did open my calculus book, and that's been keeping me entertained in short bursts.

lunch was awesome - our team went out and we stuffed ourselves on really good food. i don't know what a pundak is.

i slept well on the way back to base, and after a few minutes napping on my desk, i woke up and got productive. i ate on base on the way to work, had a far easier conversation with the bus girl from yesterday (i began by lying through my teeth, and it worked), and walked in to a meeting with our manager. he's chilling with me, if not with the situation.

nql helped me (using the above technique) to solve last night's riddle, and i spent the night playing and tweaking and learning all sorts of cute php tricks. the system itself is kinda annoying, but i'm not stressing if i'm not supposed to know what the hell i'm doing.

as i got on the bus, i heard the bus driver telling the guy sitting next to him that he'd been hesitating about stopping for me. fucker.

i walked home, put in my alice in chains - unplugged dvd, and got through more calculus. now i'm ready for bed, and the last day of a frustrating and stressful week.

drawing back the curtains

i walked out of work yesterday extremely upset. i'm not sure if i'm more annoyed at the provider for their shit or at myself for not catching on before. i was also brooding on not having found a chance to organize something for the kid: some friend i am :(

my mood wasn't improved by just missing the bus, and having to wait 45 minutes in the freezing cold for the next one. i was going through a brief few hours of being able to breathe over the sinusitis, but my cough was just making its debut. at least i had thumping trance to keep my brain a little more stable.

i shuffled my way in to cafeneto on a complete downer - i couldn't decide if i wanted to be alone or not. i began writing out a birthday message for the kid, and was most of the way through when sunshine sat down with me and asked what was wrong.
she helped me out, correcting the three mistakes i'd made (of which i'm quite proud, it was a long piece), and we had a bit of a general chat. she had duties, so i did get that time to myself, but she'd already made my day.
when she sat with me before i left, it was pretty much in non-awkward silence. and she told me to call her.

i gotta be honest - it's been a very long time since i've felt this way about a girl i know well enough by now to have gotten over the initial enthusiasm. i'm kind of wary about how she feels about me - i spoke to her earlier and phone conversations always make me uncomfortable, but the way she made me feel yesterday was worth any disappointment i may or may not suffer. i say may not because i assume indifference as a defense mechanism.

i walked home with a balloon and serious cheese-cake, but the kid was already asleep. i showered and went to bed, and woke up early to clean up the apartment a bit and to wake the kid with the aforementioned goodies. i felt rather odd singing happy birthday in a croaky voice with his shag giggling hysterically. maybe it was the fact that i was still in pyjamas. maybe i shouldn't admit to wearing pj's for manliness' sake, but it's frikkin' FREEZING.

i got to base before him, so i had time to transcribe the message to better quality paper, larger and better than pocket-sized squares. we celebrated two girls being promoted, which got silly at the end when brother bear and i settled on playing table hockey with bottle-tops. daddy-o wasn't impressed. i finally managed to get my degree signed for, and was informed that the fastest i can get it dealt with is by going personally to the induction base - so that's where i'm starting tomorrow.

i spent a large part of the day jumping from person to person to figure out how to get set up for daddy-o's presentation tomorrow... we won't be set up, because i only received the documentation (in hebrew) in the afternoon and it took me ages to figure out that it's too much work for a few hours and it requires somebody on hand to explain half of what's going on. it's yet another personal system that didn't have an end-user in mind :S

the bus to work was comfortably empty, but by the time i walked in to my office my nose had been bleeding for half the day and i had a headache. i had a quick and to-the-point chat with nql, who's agreed with me that the php stuff i've been doing isn't our job and is too pointless to waste more time on, and then i turned to cleaning up the project i finished last night.

that done, i informed the boss that i wasn't feeling good and wasn't going to stay on more than a couple of hours. i then turned my hand to that other project. the one i began in april last year. the one that until tonight has made me twitchy just *thinking* about opening.

i changed tack, and marked it for deletion, creating a new version in its place. two hours later we had a perfectly working version - all it took was for our provider to finally include the functions we requested more than half a year ago. we're even ignoring the fact that the functions' fingerprints / footprints / whatever they're called are completely not homogenous. the damn things worked and any changes that may be called for will be minor ones. with triple backups and "special care" stamped all over them.

i waited quite a while for the bus, although not as much as last night, and got home to write this, charge my ipod, shower, be irritated as hell about the state of our digs (the kid and i were on the verge of inviting people over for a housewarming, but there's no way we're ready for one), rewrite my cv and go to bed.

i'm missing a key, apparently

[a picture of the F17 key]

i spent a good 5 minutes trying to figure that shit out. i eventually gave up and just used the replace function.

WARNING: this is one of them boring posts. i realize that most of mine are, but it's my diary so suck it up. i just wish i didn't have so much to write :S

at 4.45am i received sms's from nql informing me that my newly completely image producer was giving trouble. i went back to sleep, and called him around 8am to learn that no, sadly, he hadn't bothered to read the documentation.

i was all proud of myself: i managed to handle muesli and coffee on the way to the bus this morning (that's two large cups, one requiring the use of a spoon). unfortunately, we missed the bus by a few minutes, so we only arrived on base at 9... at least nobody seems to mind me much :P

i have to find a copy of my degree to register it with the army, but i have no idea where it is since all the moving began last year. that's really, really annoying.

i finally got hold of someone that nystire's been on my case for a week about; to discover that i had absolutely no reason to talk to her. that was a bit irritating too. at least it was a relatively friendly conversation.

i spent most of the day learning about enterprise java beans. it took until the evening to get somewhere useful with them, but i've learned a lot. like, if the bean container area isn't visible, it's inactive: anything sent is queued up. if it's made visible suddenly everything happens, which makes a bit of a mess.
solution: zero the height and width. that's a stupid solution if i ever heard of one.

i saw the bull for about two minutes before lunch, and he's informed me that things have moved up a level. as grateful as i am, i can't help wondering how many levels the game has.

while tackling an annoying issue while testing, daddy-o walked in and made a request. the application i'm building to test with is intended as a surprise for him, it's something he requested ages ago, so i couldn't tell him why i was too busy. we spent half an hour figuring out exactly what he wanted, another fifteen minutes arguing details with brother bear, and then i sat down to an interesting little security debate with the kid: during this the kid hit upon a far superior solution to the problem we were supposed to be addressing, and we then further argued over whether or not we should ask daddy-o before implementing it.

a lot of the time the developer has a better idea of what the client requires in terms of implementation, but every now and again there are non-obvious reasons to use a sub-optimal solution. eventually i walked into his office and asked him, with the kid standing by: he apologetically informed us of the reason for the sub-optimal, and the kid had to concede ;)

the bus to work sucked - klapvoet and too many people. i sat chatting with a guy from our previous section halfway there, and the rest i had to fend for myself. walking into four hours of hell work, i had a talk with the boss who has decided that the protocol i've laid down is good as is, but has informed me that i'm being moved to full-time web development.

i dislike web development, most especially because it covers most of my cv and is possibly the most worthless experience i have (worse than casual sales for incredible connection? worse than driving for mr. delivery? i think so). having to sit through nql's explanations, though, when he's virtually impossible to understand in english or hebrew and has a really odd way of demonstrating things, and is a bit of an idiot (although his knowledge of php functions and linux tools is impressive) really agitated me.

and in the middle of all that he began explaining how we'd have to go through a large portion of code in order to figure out what we'll need... if that's not a case for "start frikkin' documenting!" then i don't know what is.

aside from an hour's supper break (i just needed to space out), i worked the entire time and was not enjoying myself.

i got home, changed, and went with spot to the cafeneto: sunshine got the first real smile from me all day :)

i had a 15 minute chat with my mother, just to update her on the proceedings that aren't really, and had to get all this shit out before showering and going to bed. i've switched to the new blogger, i'm hoping it really will be more stable.

i finally remembered to post a photo of the trophy i organized for the bull. [whose image has since disappeared]