As some of you may recall, once upon a time I started a blog called “schoolblog” based on my progression through the educational system. It was a tiny little side project, and really, it stayed that way all along. Now, or more specifically, yesterday, that process came to its conclusion at the U of A convocation ceremonies.

So, I’m done.

And, as has been increasingly obvious, so is this blog, at least as it currently exists. I don’t seem to have the impulse to write, and if the comment rate is any indication, what little I do write is not spurring conversations either. Given these two strikes, I cannot see myself having anything to say for a while.

I’m not getting rid of the domain, so it might come back at some future date, but in the meantime…

Good night.

I’m done.

This fills me with both apprehension and joy; the latter is for obvious reasons, the former is because the desire to get into school and the drive to finish it have been a major part of my life for the last decade. Who and/or what will I be, now that this goal has been achieved?

Time will tell.

I’m not exaggerating when I say I have few clear memories of my life before leaving Grande Prairie. It’s not much of a stretch for me to claim that I only really ever became a whole person once the last vestiges of that place were stripped from me and I stepped out into the world anew. This isn’t to say I’m the best at the social interaction thing as it is. I can see from my relationships now that I still carry some of the baggage of what was, easily, the worst way I can imagine anyone having to grow up barring famine or warfare.

Thanks to the all-powerful Facebook, it so happens that I’m reliving some of the … less pleasant parts of my life so far, albeit with only one clear memory to act as an avatar of all of the unpleasantness.

This might sound funny, if you weren’t the one to whom it happened, and moreover the one that doesn’t really remember anyone caring or anything like that, and on at least some levels I find it funny myself.

This one time, at swim club…

Heh. No, wrong tone… too pop-culture.

It’s pretty simple, really. I wasn’t friends, to speak of, with any of the Piranhas. I was shy, awkward, and had the most amazing crush on at least two of them, which only exacerbated any and all awkwardness I had (and I had a lot of it). I was, then as now, stubborn, and ill-disposed to let insults pass, and during one heated argument in the shower with one Michael O’Connor, the bugger actually pissed on me.

That experience sums up my life up to college in a nutshell.

I’ve managed to do little or nothing interesting for the past week, basically phoning it in in class, and doing some of the work that just … needs doing, at work. All told, not a bad week, but not one loaded with amusing anecdotes or anything.

I’m supposed to go over to a friend’s place for a beer after work tonight, if that counts as exciting.

Other than that, I’ve now tried a sort of mead, although not a purist’s sort, and it was good.

See? Exciting!

Oh, the bliss of having weekends again; of being able to read guilt-free. Of playing games, of having days that end at 5 pm some of the time, even if not all of the time.

Oh, and the ~$20,000/year raise (as of monday) doesn’t hurt. Did I mention they hired me?

There are times, however, that merit a vigorous negative response.

I’m taking two project courses in school this semester; Cmput 414, which is a graphics and multimedia course with a heavy algorithmic programming component, and Cmput 401, a software engineering course and the focus of this rant.

Software Engineering is, according to Wikipedia, “is the application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software.” Among other things, it requires the application of good design practices to the development of code, and following beneficial design standards.

So, I have to ask, why is it that people taking this fucking course cannot do something as basic as grok that it is fundamentally bad practice to add public methods to hidden implementing classes instead of using the goddamned design?! I spent three days nailing down, and countless hours tuning up, the data model for our project application, only to have one of my fellow team members simply come along and, instead of reading the goddamned documentation, which I provided as a first step, add new hooks into the mechanism, just to get at the information in a way that is not only wrong, but disables some nice and (I thought) needed functionality.

I have spent the last hour looking over his code, marveling at the glorious unification of layers that, according to good design practices, should ever remain separate — the intermingling of UI code and logic that I’d already written elsewhere, better was a real high point for me.

Gods.

I cannot wait to get back to full time work with people who know more than I do, so that instead of raging at the pathetic efforts of people whose skills are not even up to the level of an academic programmer, I can instead find faults with my own approaches, be told that I’m doing it wrong, and learn how to do it better.

I want this school year to be over.

Only one month to go. Perhaps I’ll get to see a couple of episodes of Die Nasty this year, yet.

It’ll be grand.

I’ve got just about everything taken care of, on this end; I’ve finished (as far as I’m going to) my paper for Cmput 401, I’ve got most of the written assignment for 414 finished, and a deferral on my 3000-word essay to a week after I get back.

On the work front, I’ve been putting in a bit of time off the books because I wanted to get some coding done, which wasn’t happening with all of the container management stuff I was doing. Oh, it pays the bills, but struggling with IBM’s toolset was one of the least fun things I’ve ever had the … pleasure … of doing.

So, that’s it.

I’m taking one of the few real vacations I’ve had in my life, since leaving home. Oh, I’ve been unemployed, and I’ve been off for a few days here and there, but this type of thing is rare, and I’m looking forward to the opportunity to travel with Char; we’ve never done this together. Wish us luck!

Here’s a capsule summary of the last couple of weeks:

School. Work.

Really, that’s all.

I’ve been trying to exercise a bit more lately, which is probably a good idea. Char’s heavy into the yoga, and she’s had me join her a couple of times, which I have found relatively pleasant, and should probably get into more consistently. I’ve also actually used the gym that comes with our apartment, which is revolutionary in itself, and even more, I’ve actually worked up a sweat by choice. Will wonders never cease?

Uhm…

Well, nothing else.

How are all of you?

Yeah, I’m still here.

I’ve been working on school a lot, and work — I’m pretty stressed these days, and my time is at a premium, so I haven’t been writing as often as I want to. I’ll try to remedy that, but this won’t be the post that does

To all of my assorted friends, book time while you can!

The former has been an introduction to the general concepts of LDAP; I’ve had to get at least a bit familiar with it in order to put together a critical piece of functionality for our client. The latter, well, I took the hard part of the project, as is my wont, and it’s been nifty, getting it all working.

So, there’s that.

Plus papers..

Plus presentations…

Plus finals, upcoming…

Mind you, none of this is on the scale of Simon’s workload. Congrats on the thesis presentation!

My life is pretty easy this weekend, despite the lingering aftereffects of a nasty cold that I’ve had all week that has left me with headaches, poor sleep, and a sense that the world is passing me by in a grey haze. I got some housework done, although not too much. I’m lazy, after all.

In school-related news, I’m working on a Perl CGI app for an assignment. It means that I get to write code in what is effectively a write-only language — Perl is legendarily difficult to read — and generally do a bunch of web-hackery in an old-fashioned sort of tool. I’m more of a Java fan, myself, but this does the trick, I guess.

I didn’t get to go jumping today, because the fog outside combined with a sense that I needed to get some laundry done to keep me home.

I want to build something, damn it — I want to have a project to put together that has a defined scope, a real purpose, and is small enough that I can make a realisitic start to it. I had idle dreams of remaking a game, but I’m not that hardcore, and can’t be arsed to become that hardcore. My other project ran up against limitations in the known information about the iTunes library format. All of which leave me with a periodic need to have an itch to scratch.

Grr.