Portfolio Website Launched |
06/27/2009 14:53:13 MST (GMT-7)
I'm the kind of guy who writes more code at home than at work. Therefore I have a slew of personal projects which are more impressive than my work projects.
I'm the kind of guy who has an idea for a website and launches it that same day. Therefore I have alot of half-written websites that I need to motivate myself to finish.
I'm the kind of guy who lives in the world of computers, both online and offline. Therefore it makes sense to have a website I can show people and put my name on it.
I don't show many people this blog, because I tend to be honest and direct. Over the years I've learned that people don't appreciate it when I'm honest and direct. That's why my online presence has generally been under aliases.
I've been leaning toward using my name online in some places. For example, this blog has my name in the Copyright in the footer and META. However, most of the people who know me online know me as Slackmaster K.
No longer. I've launched a portfolio website which I will use as my base of operations as my official online presence. It contains information about projects I've worked on, redacted code samples, and my résumé, which I shall endeavor to keep up to date. To that end, I provide linkage and Googlejuice:
Kevin Connolly - Senior .NET Developer - Portfolio
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| Filed under: Development, Geek Appeal |
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Comcast Gives me a Better Deal |
06/27/2009 14:40:10 MST (GMT-7)
When I moved into my own place six months ago, I terminated my Video services with Comcast and went to a Broadband-only plan. I selected the 6MBps service, but have clocked it at 32. Since then, Comcast has been sending me all kinds of flyers and other ads trying to get me to turn the service back on. They average two ads in the mail per week. I have simply thrown them away, as I have no use for TV service in this data-centric world of the Internet.
Last week, they actually called me with an offer I liked. For 12 months and with no obligation, they could bump my service up from 6MBps to 12MBps and include basic Cable TV, at a total rate that was less than I was already paying. Now that got my attention.
The cable guy just left. He simply had to remove the video filter; the bandwidth provisioning is being done from the central office.
Yesterday I clocked my bandwidth at Speedtest.net at 20MBps. Today it returns 24MBps. Not sure whether the 12MBps provisioning has actually gone through yet, but I continue to be happy with my service as I'm getting twice the bandwidth I pay for.
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| Filed under: Geek Appeal |
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The Perfect Desk |
06/23/2009 23:04:27 MST (GMT-7)
I've long had a passive interest in acquiring the perfect desk. I've gone through two iterations thus far: $30 folding tables and $200 glass desks. I haven't really put a whole lot of work into looking, but I have come up with a design for what I'm looking for.
Keep in mind this Perfect Desk is perfect in the context of Perfect, but specifically for me. Of course I have very unusual requirements in a desk if I'm going to call it perfect. Mostly I need pivot space and lots of surface area. Some shelving helps for things like DVD spindles, parts I may swap in or out, my camera, etc.
Of course the central area is reserved for computer I/O and whatever active work is going on right now. The side counter area is neccessary for pizza boxes and the like. Plus, with the desk extending behind the user, it's easy to find a place for the rear speakers.
The image looks like a unibody countertop, but for portability's sake (I will move again someday), I'd want it split into quarters.
The desk measures ten feet squared and features a cicular pivotal area with a slice removed to get in and out. It's perfect if you can dedicate a small bedroom or half a living room to it - And I happen to have a whole living room with nothing to put in it but my computer desk.
So unless someone out there is willing to build this for me for a few hundred bucks, I guess I'll start looking into surpluss cubicle parts (Preferrably a countertop that doesn't need to fit onto the side of a cubicle wall), or a used reception desk.
Of course, because I may be looking into Monitor arm desk mounts, I'd need a desk with a few inches of overhang in the back and which doesn't have a cubicle wall sticking up over the desk surface. That kinda narrows my choices.
But oh well. That's what the perfect desk would look like. Here's a downloadable Rhino 3D 2.0 Model of it. That's my two cents.
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| Filed under: General |
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Don't Point that Finger at Me |
06/19/2009 20:49:27 MST (GMT-7)
I recently had an argument with someone (at work, I think) over the merits of college education over practical experience. The opposing party argued that if you don't go to college, you clearly lack ambition and technical skill.
I've been over this topic time and time again with people who hold degrees, so I had a counterargument on hot standby. I thought this experience amusing, so I'll try to summarize it as best I can.
- Them: Your laid-back attitude conveys a lack of ambition. It's probably why you never went to college and you'll never get into management. Further, your lack of formal education prompts me to question your technical aptitude for the type and scale of software we build here.
- Me: I disagree. Getting where I am today involved hard work and a very specialized skill set. Furthermore, real-world experience is a much more effective educator than classroom study.
- Them: I find it difficult to believe you posess the life experience to exclaim such a remark from an informed perspective. Truly, you'll get nowhere in life without a degree. I find it of high probability that you'll be doing your current job for the rest of your life.
- Me: If management is to be the aspiration of young America, let them go to college. In the meantime, we offshore highly skilled labor to the third world, and we resultantly have begun to devolve into a nation of mere managers.
Surely skilled, domestic, technical people are becoming increasingly rare. I'm sure at your college you learned the theories behind certain technologies and have a solid grasp of buzzwords like Encapsulation and Polymorphism. Then, over time, you began to understand what the buzzwords mean. I, on the other hand, learned the underlying concepts and their implications first, and didn't bother to look up the buzzwords until I started working with you manager types.
You got your CIS Degree in the early 90's, where you learned C++ and a bunch of other technologies we don't even use here. You then adapted your knowledge and learned C# hands-on. Which did you have a better grasp of after four years? I propose it is the latter. You've spent four years working in C# and learning it hands-on, versus four years of classroom study which only involved C++ part time. I simply skipped the first step and went directly to the hands-on experience. Always yield to the Hands-on Imperative!
Further, I propose that you have retained an inappropriately high level of your antiquated experience, such as obsolete coding conventions and minimal use of the Framework.
You set easy-to-reach goals. Then, when you met them, you set new ones that were easy after you acquired some skills. This loop repeats until you retire or die. I simply set my final goals directly:
- Be a professional Software Developer
- Make good money
- Drive a nice car
- Live on my own
- Have nice things
As a result, I maneuvered through my life with these goals always in mind. Now, at about half your age, I have met every one of these goals. I have no wish to move into management, as it would take me away from what I love -- The code. Managers work much more closely with other people and use the computer only as a tool. Programmers, on the other hand, tightly couple their minds with the way the computer works. We embrace the computer with all of its quirks, and when the computer produces an error, we see it as an excuse to fix something.
You see the computer as a tool. I see it as a life. This is what I know; this is what I love. So no, I don't want to move into management. I like coding just fine. I have everything I want in life - Including exactly the kind of job I always wanted.
And another thing - Positions and interviews are significantly weighted toward the college-educated. If there is one available, he will very often get the position over someone with similar experience and no degree. There are 500,000 people in this city, so it's a fair bet there are always some college-educated types available.
These are exactly the types I had to beat -- to defeat -- to get a job like this in today's job market.
So don't you talk to me about ambition and technical skill. I have exactly the same job as you, except that I have 'Senior' in my title and make $10K more. How does that CIS degree feel now?
He gave me a look of disgust and promptly walked away.
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| Filed under: Development, Geek Appeal, Humor, Rants, Software, Work |
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Real Life Consequences to being a Programmer |
06/15/2009 02:30:49 MST (GMT-7)
As a lifelong programmer and overall computer geek, I've acquired a number of nontrivial habits, ticks, etc. which appear to many people as odd or otherwise unusual. Of course, being the status quo for me, I think nothing of them.
Resultantly, conversations and interpersonal workflows are complicated therein. Some examples include:
- I consider powers of 2 to be round numbers, even more so than powers of 10. Especially when the exponent is itself a power of 2. Examples include 8, 64, 256, 16777216, and 2147483648.
- I blame bad design when I try to search a paper document and have to grep it manually.
- I punctuate literally as opposed to grammatically. For example, She said the changes were "elevated". is perfectly acceptable, whereas She said the changes were "elevated." is wrong because the period is not part of the literal quote. See also my post on Quotational Punctuation - Grammatical vs Programatic Correctness.
- I answer questions exactly as they are asked. When asked if I have the time, in reference to what time of day it is, I answer yes. Obviously I have the time, I'm wearing a watch!
- I optimize real-life workflows. For example, I spent three hours one night measuring the time it takes to travel to work and back along different routes. I ended up reducing my daily commute from 20 minutes to 13.
- I nest parentheses literally, in order of evaluation, when meanings are nested (Even when writing in plaintext (Especially on blog posts and Emails (like so))).
- When reading a recipé that calls for a pinch of something, I look for a footnote that defines the term pinch.
- I want to refactor the government, traffic lights, and the layout of the city.
- I expect to see intellisense and autocomplete in Outlook, etc. I once thought I could write a function to drive to work and simply call it when I get into the car.
- I once tried to attach a debugger to a human
- I often use "==" when I mean '='.
- I sometimes transliterate "Continue" to mean "Cancel current iteration and start over on the next item".
- I find myself replacing double quotes with single quotes when quoting a single character and vice-versa for multibyte strings.
- When people with accents use words that don't exist, I correct them or look up the meaning (i.e. worshed/washed, y'all/you, etc).
- I use words like contiguous, nontrivial, and parameterize
in nontechnical conversation and think nothing of it.
- I expect ctrl-shift-s to save all open documents in any app that supports multiple MDI children or tabbed browsing, to include conversations with multiple people in real life.
- I organize my frequently-used clean clothes into piles instead of stacks/drawers because it's more efficient and less time consuming.
- When presented with a repetitive task, I don't mind until I realize I can't foreach it.
- I've become incredibly impatient when dealing with poorly-optimized encounters, such as people and grocery stores. I regularly find myself wondering why a person doesn't simply expose a webmethod to return the result of a query.
- I ask concise, boolean questions and wonder why I can't get a simple yes/no answer.
- I often find myself using the wrong level of abstraction in conversation, and somehow I think I can correct the problem by changing the variable scope.
- I find myself wishing some people came with a -q (quiet mode) command-line parameter, and other times that they had a -v (verbose) parameter. I've actually come very close to asking them "/? ?".
- I look for logic in everything I do - consequently, I am largely devoid of religion (although since I consider logic to be the basis of reality, I could consider logic itself to be a 'higher power' I suppose).
- I see that my bank lists the dates of transactions and not the times; and they are retrieved out of order. I blame it on a poor data flow, assuming it must be a batch-driven mainframe process. These people need to hire me.
- I hit ctrl-S every few minutes, even when browsing the web or playing a game
- When blogging or writing an E-mail, when I get writer's block, I hit ctrl-space expecting the IDE to tell me what I was going to do next.
- I expect the owning object of everyday occurences to expose a public event I can subscribe to and write a handler for so it doesn't throw an action or Exception up to the UI. After all, everyday actions and events should be handled behind the scenes.
- Someone once explained a real-life problem to me. I wanted to mark it as "Reject to QA / CND".
- When I perform a unit of work, I write a unit test in my mind, explaining the expected outcome and the asserts to fail the test case.
- When counting sheep, I optimize by parallelizing the operation by increasing the bus width (bitness) exponentially (i.e. 2 sheep at a time, then 4, then 8). When I get to a power of 2 I don't know, I have to do the math in my head, thus having a counterintuitive effect. Inevitably, I always conclude there should be a gate in the fence.
- Whenever I use the word "this", I find myself trying to determine the most derived object in scope to determine upon what class the operation will be performed.
- I find real-life conversations to be nonsensical in their singlethreadedness. When a conversation moves onto a tangent and I still had points I wanted to make on the previous thread, I want to iterate through them like an XmlDocument. This is why I end up doing most of my conversations via Email.
- I once started writing an XML comment for a method I exposed, so people would understand how to call it. I think the method regarded laundry.
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| Filed under: Development, Fun, Geek Appeal, Humor, Rants |
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Server Maintenance - Blog Down |
06/04/2009 16:24:46 MST (GMT-7)
The blog will be down for an unknown time period this weekend (6/6-6/7) whilst I upgrade it to my free copy of Windows Server 2008.
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| Filed under: Geek Appeal, Site-Related |
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Microsoft Accidentally Gives me a TechNet Subscription |
06/03/2009 16:36:32 MST (GMT-7)
Last night, the guy who runs my computer group (CSWUG) sent out a link wherein Microsoft was offering free TechNet subscriptions. I immediately signed up and began exploiting my Subscriber benefits. I downloaded 7 things I didn't have and saved about 30 product keys. The downloads (about 9GB) finished sometime last night.
Today I went to access my TechNet Subscriber portal and was taken aback as the subscription had been revoked. It was as such with several others I know who had found the link, and the original link to sign up was offline.
Therefore I conclude that Microsoft didn't intend to make that offer and immediately launched critical damage control to resolve the situation.
Nothing I saw indicated it was a promotion or a temporary offer, let alone one that lasted under 16 hours. All I noticed was that I was "buying" a "subscription pilot" and the price was $0.00.
I read the EULA and other agreements; they looked like standard legalese when you sign up for an online subscription to a service. Therefore as best I can tell, my access was perfectly legitimate - It's just gone now.
But I still have my downloads and product keys.
So I was hoping to install Windows Server 2008 R2 on my server when it's released in late 2009 or early 2010; I guess that's not happening now. Fortunately I did get a key to Windows Server 2008 (The Server version of Windows Vista); and I have an ISO I downloaded from Microsoft as a free gift for participating in the Windows Vista Beta program. So I guess I'll just install that. At least I get to do it now and don't have to wait for it to be released :)
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| Filed under: Beta, Fun, Geek Appeal, Humor, Networking, Software |
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Chicken |
05/24/2009 21:39:58 MST (GMT-7)
Must watch whole video. I've not laughed so hard in some time.
Best. Powerpoint. Ever.
[ via ]
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| Filed under: Humor |
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VS2010 and .NET 4.0 Beta 1: Come and Get it |
05/22/2009 23:46:17 MST (GMT-7)
Visual Studio 2010 has gone into beta. The free, legal, public download is here. Get the .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 here.
Why should you care? this video explains it nicely, as presented by the lead architect of the C# programming language. One of my role models.
I'll be geeking out with that this weekend.
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| Filed under: Beta, Development, Geek Appeal |
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Safety Wire |
05/22/2009 23:44:36 MST (GMT-7)
Went to Dad's warehouse and helped him set up some shelves and metal hanging apparatuses of some kind. I affixed them using an old Safety Wire technique I got from the Air Force. They make special Safety Wire Pliers for this purpose, which I didn't have, and couldn't find at Home Depot. When a tool store has never heard of a tool, you know it's obscure. So I ordered one from Amazon and will bring it up there on my next trip.
I haven't logged onto my old Amazon account in years and forgot my credentials, so I created a new account. Man, do they make it a pain just to complete a simple online transaction. You can't just enter your shipping and billing info and click submit like everyone else in the free world; no, you have to register your credit card, billing info, shipping addresses, and your Zodiac sign. It's like Amazon has their own 12-step program.
So anyway, the point there was that the job is much more neat and uniform with these special pliers. I did some sloppy work, but it was relatively good for only having normal pliers, which were not designed to twist wire in a perfect spiral. And I questioned the Air Force for teaching me how to do it manually :)
It's supposed to look more or less like this:
Except they messed up in two ways:
- The ends of the strand should be folded over 180 degrees to prevent injury
- On the topmost bolt, and the bottom-right bolt, they did not fasten the safety wire in such a way that it tightens when pulled. The purpose is that the bolts prevent their bretheren from loosening when they undergo significant vibration and shock. But I suppose Dad's shelving system won't be seeing Mach 3 any time soon.
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| Filed under: General, Instructional, Military |
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