I Should Have Been a Firefighter

Ecological Engineering

The other day after church, Jennifer and I had lunch with her parents. Jennifer’s mother asked me about the classes I’m taking in chemistry and mathematics, and what I plan on pursuing in graduate school. "What, exactly, is an ecological engineer?" she asked me.
Well, according to the website for the website for the International Ecological [...]

Dribblings

The other night I went to go hang out with Evilpheemy, which I don’t do as often as I wish I could. Sadly, we both have lives, which sometimes gets in the way of these things. We went and ate sushi along with his three-month-old daughter, who was amazingly well-behaved throughout the meal, and then [...]

Old Trappings

I haven’t done any field research in a couple of weeks. From what I can gather, the graduate student who’s doing this project just wanted the data for the first week after the first storm event of the season, and that’s what we got. And this past week she was on a business trip in [...]

The Hardest Cut

Jennifer dared me to participate in National Novel Writing Month, and, so, of course I signed up. Producing fifty thousand words in thirty days? What the heck? I dug out some notes on an old novel that I was planning on writing about three years ago and began to outline, but at the last minute [...]

Muddy

I’ve been feeling a remarkable lack of personal devastation at being laid off. While I was calmly packing up my desk and even humming while doing so, my co-worker — former co-worker, now — was obviously much more distressed about my lay off than I was. True, my salary is now gone, but since Jennifer [...]

Dot-Bombed

"Were you expecting it?" is the first question that people keep asking me. "Are you okay?" is always the second.

Well, yeah, I guess I did. Revenue had been dropping like a lead weight for months. Contracts with major supporters weren’t getting renewed. And new contracts were just not pulling in as much [...]

Factoring

The self-teaching guide for pre-calculus that I purchased assures me, "Factoring is fun!" (italics in the original).

Factoring, in case you slept through your high school math classes just like I did, is the process of reducing a polynomial into its more basic components. For example, the polynomial

6x²y+21xy+8x+28

can be reduced [...]

At Square One. Still.

Back on March 7, I referred to a project I’d taken on at work: re-engineering a large piece of open-source software, Phorum, which is written in a hypertext processing language called PHP (a scripting language similar to ASP or Cold Fusion), to operate against our in-house database schema. Phorum typically comes with its own database [...]

No More Yielding than a Dream

And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream…
–"A Midsummer Night’s Dream", Act V Scene 1

I know that I really ought to be concentrating on one thing at a time, but there are far too many things that I want to do. A partial list:

Learn Linux (so [...]

Two More Weeks

Sometimes, I go through periods where I’ll write an entry for this journal just about every day. At other times, a week or two will go by without me writing a thing. I think at this point I’ve gone for more than two weeks. I hope that I haven’t lost my one or two regular [...]

The Death Throes of a Palm Pilot

Yesterday, I managed to crash my Palm Pilot. Not just any minor crash, where some minor bits of data are lost but all can be restored by pressing the "reset" button on the back and synchronizing with your desktop computer; no, I managed to get it to the point where it flashed the dangerous message: [...]

The Little Engine

The alternate ending to the story of the Little Engine that Could is far more realistic, you know. That’s the ending where the little engine chugs his way halfway up the hill, only to find that the combined weight of all of the cars that are attached to its rear is way too heavy. The [...]

The Falling Axe

Current Location: York, England

I couldn’t help myself.

In spite of my best efforts to not think about work or career while on this trip, I went ahead and did it any way. I brought up AOL Instant Messenger and contacted a couple of co-workers, and found out that while I’ve been gone, [...]

Pretenders

For the past couple of months, I’ve been focusing most of my time at work on developing a single product: a reengineering of a popular and wide-spread PHP program to work against an entirely different database schema than what it was originally designed for. It’s been an interesting project: at times quite rewarding but more [...]

Primitive Man, Primitive Code

This is the scene:
The database lives at the top of a tall hill surrounded by a moat filled with monsters and dragons. As you climb the hill you fight off soldiers armed with crossbows, swords, and tight security packages. The database is inside a castle, and any attempt to breach the castle wall is met [...]