🏷️ work

A letter to an editor:
I doubt this will make it through the email filter. I am sorry about all the inappropriate words in this email but we are trying to create an inappropriate word list.

We cannot find a list of obvious words turns out in the forums we only block "shit" and "fuck". Del suggested the words which used to be banned from broadcast television.

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker and Tits.

I have a feeling there are many more words that are going to be inappropriate for this site as it is sponsored by a corporation and aimed at kids but I am uncomfortable being in charge of producing the list.

We probably will want to block not just swear words but also harassing terms like slut, fag and nigger, etc. Perhaps once it is complete it should become a policy. Please forward me a list of other words we want blocked out when you can get to it.

Also how to you want them blocked out. Replaced as stars? Or do you want them replaced on a word/phrase specific basis. E.g. "holy shit" becomes "holy cow" and "fuck" becomes "darn", etc as "holy ****" might as well just say "holy shit." If we want them replaced as specific terms then I need the replacement terms in the list.

How does this website have the right to sell my picture. I guess I probably signed away the rights when they did the Buffalo new article a couple years ago?



Do you ever have postpartum depression with a project you didn't really like at first but then you worked on it feverishly and it became an obsession.

I have been working on this large scale employee evaluation system since the beginning of time it seems. Mostly, because I had to consistently wait for things to be ready and because i am not the owner of the data.

Anyways, it was so boring at first. I really hated the project and then slowly as it grew it became kind of fun. Now that the project is wrapping up I am having a hard time being done with it, because I keep feeling like I could polish it up some more.

I am sure they will find things that need to be done with it once it "hits the shelves" tomorrow so I am not that worried.

The next project up is porting (e:strip) over to roswell software. That should be a much bigger project. The fun part is I only have about 3 weeks to do it!!!! What is up with project management here?

Ona nother note, apparently @terry is most fertile.

NOT taking a bath may improve a man's fertility - even though it might not endear him to his partner.

Wow, I just wrote this huge journal but when I plugged in my mouse , my laptop short circuited and restarted. I think I was at the point where I was angry about the prospects of retiring in a cubicle.

The only sentence that survived was:

It is a huge waste of my abilities to have me make a CD-ROM which sells christmas cards. I just don't get it. It is like hiring an auto engineer to change your oil.

It is probably better I did not publish it.

---

I started eating jaw breakers because they are the only candy I cannot chew through when I am stressed out.


We ate at Gin Gin's in Chinatown on sheridan. I am fascinated at how the once oh so white KenTon is getting all multi-culti. Someone told me this story once about a suburb of Toronto that was the same way. They were saying that the city became trendy again and the canadians moved out of that suburb and back to the city. Then the suburb became like the ethnic hub.



Something about a blog in chinese.


e:eknot drank bubble tea. He agreed, shooting the bubbles out the straw was fun


I ate chopped squid. It tasted really good. I refuse to eat normal meat like chicken where I am not sure what the meat really is. You just can't fake squid.


The candy machine was full of nasty candy that had been there for years it looked like. Now, there was a sign that said it was out of order, but for how long. Why not just haul the machines away.




They have a regular american menu with the typical american chinese crap like sweet and sour chicken, but then they have a right to left chinese menu with the good stuff.







That area is definately becoming chinese. Remember when it was just kind of white trash with Ames.


Wow, these guys are poptastic

I hated this one. It is an employee evaluation system. I wish it would be over soon so that I can do more fun things. It's actually rather complicated.

Today I worked on porting the old ovariancancer.com site over to my surebert CMS. It was fun to use illustrator again to create a Gilda Radner. I miss it a lot since switching to linux. Not that inkscape and the others aren't great but they just are no illustrator. Probably because I am used to it.

I am working on this employee evaluation web application at work. It is my least favorite project since I have been here because I do not have control over the database ;( I mean it has some fun parts but a lot of it is trying to figure out what these 26, 3-4 page paper forms intended in the first place.

I don't like that no one normalized any of the data on the paper forms. Lots of the stuff on the forms is redundant or doesn't make sense anymore when the system is moved to an online one.

I really think it would have been much better if someone in Human Resources had written these forms from the perspective that they are no longer on paper.

Examine the following instructions:

Select the rating which most accurately describes the employee's performance on each factor, and check the appropriate box. If the employee's performance is not exactly described by one of the definitions under a factor, select from all ratings, the one which best describes the employee's performance.

In this case the user is only provided with 5 check boxes (Outstanding->Needs Improvement) on both the paper and electronic form versions. So "select the rating" and "check the appropriate box" are kind of redundant. Then sentence two basically re-iterates sentence one.

Yesterday was my one year anniversary at Roswell. It is amazing that the year went by so quickly. I still love working here even though sometimes it makes me crazy how many different directions I end up going in. Actually, maybe that is why I like it. It is much more dynamic than teaching was and there are consistently new more complicated problems for us to solve, instead of me teaching people to solve the same basic problems over and over again as I was doing at Canisius.

What is even more astounding is that I got promotion that I was totally not expecting. I am now a systems analyst/senior programmer for the web team. Thanks Nick Barone, I owe you for directing me here that one day in class and to my boss Del for promoting me.

Everything is going so great right now that I keep expecting to get hit by a car. Hope to see everyone at the party this saturday.

Paul is very busy. Very busy indeed. He is upgrading right now. Upgrading to the new PHP 5.2 which has a bunch of benefits that I will not bother explaining. Maybe the server will get all crazy tonight.

Yesterday, my boss and I, were waiting at the ATM when a guy went by with jugs marked radioactive, hm. I wanted to get a pic but by the tie my phone loaded the camera app it would have been over. I really need to buy a camera with the money from this side project I did for my boss. I am so sick of not being able to point and shoot even if the camera has the advantage. Once I have that and my new fancy heater you will see more of me on my journal.

On the work front I am busier than ever but I still like the job a lot. A project I projected would take 2-3 months ended up being delayed by other people for months until this month and now it is due on Nov 28th. I have no idea if this is realistic or not. I have made a lot of progress but today the database adminstrator locked out my password by accident when refreshing the test database with data from the production database this morning. Then when that was worked out my user did not have permission granted to view my custom tables, then the tables had triggers which went haywire after the upgrade from the production database.

I really believe that in this case having to work with a database administrator has only made the process a hundred times slower. Every time I want to make a change I have to run it by administrator and then they make the change to the tables that I need for the application, argh.

Sidenote: I have a hard time giving up any control over the development process.

Luckily, most of the database building is over. Now it is really time to work on the data. Basically, the system is made to allow for online evaluation of thousands of employees which is a complicated multi-tiered process. A person's supervisor initiates the review of an employee. This would be easy if the system that records who is who's supervisor was accurate but hundred of people have supervisors other than who is their actual supervisor which makes things more complicated. There are also a multitude of unions which negotiate the questions that are used to evaluate the employees. This means that normalizing the questions on the forms is generally impossible because the questions themselves have been negotiated by the unions.

To make matters more complicated many of the questions are questions to. e.g. the question and the answer are both blank and are dependant on the individual user position and are filled out by the supervisor at the time of review.

Once the supervisor is done reviewing the employee, the review is passed onto the reviewer, which is generally the supervisor of the supervisor but is also often not the case. They can add comments, then the employee gets to respond. Then the head of HR and then finally it is over.

I actually have it pretty under control. The only problem is the shear volume of the questions would are still being inputted.

P.S. It feels so freaking good to not be in school anymore!

It is virtually impossible to deal with microsoft products. It is so ridiculous that IE 7 gets rid of IE 6. IN order to switch back and forth you either have to run a virtual machine, hack your registry all crazy or keep installing and uninstalling IE 6/7.



It seems so crazy that 80% of people supposedly have IE 6 but I can no longer test in IE 6 because I have IE 7. But I have to start testing in IE 7 because we all know that nothing will play well with it.

Once I decide to go IE 7 with estrip there will be no more support for IE 6 because I have no way of testing it unless someone wants to donate an IE 6 machine to me.

They didn't fix the security bug where I can read peoples clipboards . I even wrote to microsoft about it as did many others. It basically is disabled in IE 7 out of the box but if you upgrade from 6 it is still there. And how many people will upgrade from 6 and not have this fixed. Just about everyone.

Check yourself before you wreck yourself



Major IE 7 & and PHP Served from IIS 6 Incompatibility.

I had the most horrible day with IE 7. I really feel like microsoft just likes to see me waste my time. I should write them a letter about how I had to take a break from curing cancer to deal with defects in their browser.

Turns out that IE 7 cannot handle pages with the wrong Content-Length very well. If the content-length header exceeds the real content-length it gets especially messed up.

This is fucking insane. I discovered that session enabled PHP pages served with windows server IIS 6 to IE 7 do not refresh properly when there is javascript in the head of the document. They show up fine on first load but then show up blank intermittently on refresh. Here is the full overview with examples

When serving PHP from Apache I did not have this problem because apache always seems to report the correct Content-Length with the script.

Maybe I am actually living the american dream minus the kids and white picket fence. I was so poor before. Now I am eligable for social security insurance according to the government, although I have my doubts about it being there when I retire. The letter came with a handy list of how much I have paid into the system. Or at least how much income was taxed.

@hodown - remember 1995. I think that explains a lot about the amount of money I had. I am quite surprised because I was actually working that whole year. So it makes me wonder if someone didn't actually report my taxes. Maybe I was working under the table?



I went to go buy a book on Ajax design patterns and javascript at the bookstore but realized tehre is nothing left to know really. I deliberately make choices to do things the way I do, I recognize all the possibilities and I am sure that I have thoroughly covered the issue.

There are so many books on blogging at the bookstore now. What exactly is a whole book about blogging even about. It seems like a person would be better off reading other blogs to get an idea about blogging rather than a book about blogging. I am sure there is even an idiots guide to blogging.