Current mood: accomplished
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers

Well here we are again. After that last spat of time off while the company I am working for was busy negotiatin contracts with the Dept. of Rev. I had 7 weeks off work. It was nice because I got TONS of stuff done that I desperately needed to finish. However, at the same time I now have 2 months with only minimal pay.

To make up the difference I just landed a retail holiday night job at the local Circuit City here in Burnsville. So it looks like I’ll be working 80-90 hour per week for the next two months since I fly to Manila for 2 weeks and on to Bangkok for 3 more weeks after that right at the start of the new year.

I’ve also got a series of operations to have done between now and then! So needless to say I’m going to be, *Just a little* busy!!! *Understatement of the Century*

Well now to the topic at hand, last week I was contacted by a career agent that I posted my resume on a long time ago. (Like 2 years ago, just after college graduation)

The job

Current mood: angry
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers

I’m not sure what it is, but something must be wrong with me this week! Seems everything just falls appart all at once. I just hate it when that happens esspecially after dumping so much money into everything nice and new!

I go to get one of those new halogen light bulbs that are supposed to last for ever! I start to screw it into the light socket and bang, it’s dead before I can even get it tested.

That by itself didn’t make me mad, I’m just like, ok next…

So I’ve been working on this computer for around 14 months getting my personal stuff organized and converted to digital formats like mp3 audio, mpeg4 video with VBR audio, and scanning all of the artwork that I’ve made since I was a little kid. Including converting all my Audio tapes to wave files, editing them into individual tracks, remastering them by removing the background hiss so they will again be close to CD quality, then compressing it to mp3 audio.

With all this junk on my hard drive now and fully organized it’s time to back it all up to make sure that all my hard work is not pointless, that I will always have access to these materials from the earlier part of my life in a tight compact electronic format. It means burning all this data onto Dual Layer DVD’s since that’s the best format to use these days for long term storage and large volume backups of digital data.

I’ve burned about 12 of these DVD’s with just mp3’s at 8 gigs each. Actually it was only 4 DVD’s but I burn 3 copies of each after learning the hard way that 1 backup or even 2 backups isn’t always enough to make certain that the data is fully recoverable after several years have gone by. Well today I started to burn the last DVD and it failed to verify. Keep in mind that it takes about an hour and 10 minutes to burn each DVD and then verify all the data on that DVD to make sure it’s not corrupted. So that’s one hour of time in the toilet. So I figure it must just be the physical disk wasn’t any good so I start another one the same thing, another coaster, and another coaster and another coaster. After about 9 of these I’m really starting to get irritated because only one of them actually worked. Keep in mind that these disks also cost money, about $100 for 50 of them.

So finally I really got mad and I decided to stop trying this with Nero and use the built in Windows burner, trouble with that is that the built in Windows disk writer doesn’t support very large format disk burning like DVD’s. Someone at Microsoft…as usual only had enough foresight to program Windows such that it would only burn CD’s of a comparable storage capacity of around 700mb, not 8 gigs! So when I went to actually write the DVD, windows gives a pop-up that says please insert a valid CD for the burning to proceed. The disk you have entered is not a valid format. Even though it has a capacity of 8 gigs, not 700mb.

Yet another example of just how stupid Microsoft is!

So I grabbed another software package, I think it’s called ImgBurn, I built the ISO with Nero, and I’m trying to burn the image file with this other software my friend suggested that I use. It’s working so far, but then again Nero got this far too. It’s the verification that it fails on.

After further examination with the built in windows burner software it was consistantly failing when I would try to drag and drop some of the individual folders over to the drive for burning for no apparent reason at all. The error messages are never very imformative, even for a software engineer. If some of these guys who actually write software would write informative error messages the world would be so much more productive! Now the guys who write GNU tend to do it correctly, why can’t the guys who write GNU software work for Microsoft and teach them how it’s done?!

So this is what I have to say about Nero….

Nero-Shmero

and I would like to add MicroSUCK!….you don’t suck….you blow!

Cheers

Seth

Current mood: complacent

Wow!!! I don’t know what to say, but just WOW!!!!

The last 5 months have been totally crazy! After 6 months of no job and building my new computer and organizing all my CD’s and DVD’s onto the new Dual Layer DVD

Current mood: accomplished
Category: Jobs, Work, Careers

If you’ve been reading any of my blogs you know how rough of a time I’ve been having the last 2 years. All this time I’ve been dreaming of what I would do for a professional online portfolio if I ever had the chance to make one. Well here it is, I’ve finally *started* to work on it. I’m really proud of it so far and its just starting to come together. The site itself is up to about 200mb and I’ve got about 3gigs planned for it, maybe more. So there will be scads of example work and projects that I’ve been involved with, plus gords of personal photos stories, adventures, and other pieces of history from my life.

You can watch it take shape over the months here:

http://SethEden.com

I’m working to switch servers and hopefully soon I’ll have the site at a stronger level. There is LOTS of stuff to post! And plenty of new graphics to develop for the site. So it may look simple now but please just be patient, it all takes time.

On a more pressing note, I did finally get the major initial portions of my FabLab project done at FabCon today! I’ve been making so much progress lately that I’m having a hard time getting my boss to keep up with my requests for meetings, and development support. I finally had to just ask for a digital camera so I could go out and take photos of some of the panels for texture mapping on the virtual wall panel objects. We have a sample wall out by the parking lot. So I’ll probably go take photos of that tomarrow, and work to build a larger library of materials in my application.

My program also needs a great deal of testing, I’ve done all the testing I can do within a normal development life cycle. At this point it needs to be tested

The last of my hair
Current mood: sad

Right then,

So I was working on my latest program at my new job. I called it Fab-Lab, a Lab for doing graphics for a company called Fab-Con. It’s actually just a play on words, because they have another custom application called Fab-CAD that works with AutoCAD.

Anyways, I’ve been having this problem the last few days, and it’s my own fault, partly because of how I decided to design the software. The program outlines these pre-fabricated wall panels in a building drawing, and builds a roof segment. Well I decided to break the process into classes and class objects to make use of powerful Object Oriented Programming Techniques, like Class Inheritance, and encapsulation, and cool things like that, that you generally only truely learn about if you take a proper college course on the subject.