I love coming up with good solutions to weird problems. I guess that is what keeps me employed as well. :)
Almost quitting time…
work
I need some privacy
There are too many people in the same area here at work. It is hard enough to work with other engineers talking behind you, but then add in a bunch of marketing guys and it gets very distracting.
Fortunately, the smooth, soothing sounds of Elvis Costello can help me ignore this jibba-jabba
Original Document
I got my first “Report Card”, which is Graham-Family-Speak for “Pay Check”. It is about what I expected to get for one check, maybe a wee bit lower. I may have to re-evaluate my withholding situation after I do some math.
It is too damn hot in the place, so I am bugging out in 15 minutes. Adam and Rory are coming over for dinner after work today. It is nice having furniture now; people can come over and have a place to sit. :)
:)
Hehehe… Adam was just yelling at someone on the phone…. that’s funny.
Ok, enough of this….
They really need to fix the air conditioning in here, because this is getting obnoxious….
New Tool, Weezer, and Autechre CDs come out tomorrow, and I am excited about all of the above… It also helps that it is payday. :)
Hot Dogs!
There are many benefits from working across the street from Fenway Park, and one of them is having your office directly above the Best Sausage Company.
NSPR is Neat
Ok, I was here until around 7pm last night, which was a terrible choice, because there are home games at Fenway all this week… It was hell trying to walk the block between work and the Kenmore station against the baseball sidewalk traffic… I came into work later today planning to leave some time after 7:30p.. Hopefully the commute will be a bit simpler then, but who knows…
NSPR is pretty interesting, even if I am only using a limited subset of its functionality. I am working on modifying a load test client for one of our server packages. Originally, the test client compressed the data using Zlib, then sent it out over an SSL client… This put a lot of strain on our servers, and to see if there would be a benefit in using one of the hardware SSL accelerators out there, we decided to remove SSL from the client/server. Unfortunately, SSL and Compression were tied together pretty tightly in the test client, so I am rewriting quite a bit. One of the cool things about the I/O part of NSPR is that it allows you to add layers to the sockets, so I am adding a compression layer, and later I will remove the compression from the old SSL layer. Then we will be able to add the 2 layers in any combination with any other layers we dream up in the process.
Work is good
I am here at work, learning the Netscape Portable Runtime (NSPR), which seems pretty cool. I need to extend their socket routines, compressing the data that gets sent across the sockets… Using zlib, that shouldn’t be too hard.
OH NO!
Beginning of one thing, end of another….
My first day was fairly cool yesterday, but it was spent mostly trying to build the tree (which I finally successfully completed) and filling out paperwork (which I haven’t quite finished yet). I did the ride home, and started some laundry after I got there.
As I was leaving the laundromat, my mother called me to inform me that my Grandma had passed away. While I am none too happy about this, I have to say that if I had to go, I would want it to be chilling on the couch in my own home, under my own care, on a beautiful spring day, with the windows open, watching some television. She passed away peacefully and on her own terms, which is all she ever asked for. I am happy it worked out the way she wanted.
I am not going to be able to go home for the funeral, mostly because it is my first few days of work, and I am broke, but I can’t say that I am unhappy about that. I hate funerals (i can’t imagine that anyone enjoys them), but more importantly, I hate the idea of funerals (and as far as I can tell, my grandma did as well)…. My grandmother’s passing leaves a void in my life, but I don’t believe that mourning is in order…. She lived happily, died happily and in peace… Needless to say, it was a long night last night….