I had mentioned before how after we fired that programmer a few weeks ago I had been assigned to finish up the project he was working on. Unfortunately for me this involved mostly reverse engineering his work, since he apparently didn’t believe in useful comments let alone design documentation. I have been cranking on this for quite awhile now, and all along feeling worse and worse about this guy’s design (or at least what I was figuring out about it).
My boss, Pedro, had given me a few restrictions to my work too… I had to try very hard to keep all the modifications local to the Javascript code (so we didn’t have to ship a new version to users), which sucks because A) I don’t like Javascript, B) It is really slow, especially when walking the DOM, and 3) Javascript is really hard to debug. I worked on this for quite awhile before I called abort on it and told him that I really needed to make binary modifications in order for it to work right. So I worked on that for a few days, presuming that since we now moved into “new point release” land that we would simply hold this feature until the next release (which will probably be before Spring Semester). Apparently he disagreed, which I found out yesterday… We talked about this whole thing with the rest of the engineering team in yesterday’s meeting… Pedro finally asked everyone who thought we should try to make what we have work versus starting over again, and all of us voted for redesigning (or arguably, designing it the first time) from scratch. I respect him for being willing to listen to us, and for being willing to throw out work that cost him a lot of money (both in our former employee and my salvage time).
I really love my job, even when I am working on something shitty…. :)
I went down to Harvard Sq. today and bought shoes (mine are yellow on blue), The Goonies on DVD, and a few CDs (including the Coil “Love’s Secret Domain” reissue).
It’s beautiful outside, so I am gonna go enjoy it.
Today started out very rough for me, which pretty much put a damper on the whole day… I decided to try and alleviate via sleep and distraction. I picked up Hannibal and a replacement for the copy of Blue Velvet that disappeared a few months ago… Watched Hannibal with Adam, Rory, and Frances, and Matt eventually joined in halfway through the film…
I drew for the first time in ages today…. I have had many images in my head, some that stand alone, others are associated with the few aborted stories I have started in the past few years.. I have been itching to get them down before I forget them, but before I can do that I need to suck less at drawing… I did some figure sketching tonight, but they turned into morose, depressing form…. Part of it is probably a function of my shitty artistic capability, but I have been staring at them trying to figure them out… Are they simply random lines, or is there something more… I don’t know… Perhaps I will cruise by the art store tomorrow and get a sketch pad and some pencils, etc.
Had alot of fun tonight over at WZBC (Boston College Radio) with Jon and Jessica… I got a flavor for what it is to be a DJ, which is cool, and I might consider trying to get a show when things calm down a bit at work (Jon seems to think I wouldn’t have a problem getting a show).
phyber asked me to call her after I got back, but I think I am gonna let her sleep, cuz she was telling me how tired she was all day, and it doesn’t look like she actually got to bed until after midnight… We will let her sleep. :P
Those of you using Mozilla or Netscape 6 may be interested in this document. It describes how to eliminate/restrict/control annoying JavaScript features (like pop-ups, changing the status bar, resizing the window, etc). I just put the kibosh on popups from x10 and amazon.com, and only allowed “same site” popups for others.
They are releasing a new DVD called The Matrix: Revisited, which apparently doesn’t include the film The Matrix, but instead is all behind the scenes and such. Interesting idea, but I don’t know how it is going to pan out in sales…
I was playing Need for Speed: High Stakes last night with my new wheel, and I can’t believe I ever played this without Force Feedback before… The road feel is amazing… You can feel the transition from wet pavement, to dry pavement under a bridge, then back out to wet pavement… You can react to the traction of the car… I am speechless. :)
