🏷️ work

You may notice it is dark in this pic. Well, the electricity is all dead at work. I was in the middle of writing up what I did to a bunch of projects when it died. I feel bad for the guy next to me who was in the middle of programming.



It' scary to watch a lot of electrical things die at once. I wonder if my computer will be affected? Is this how the end of the world will begin.

From the sound of people talking, a bunch of people lost stuff. My question is, do we get to go home with no electricity?

It was funny to see how many people were concerned the elevators not working when there are stairs.

For some reason everyone else has left their cubicles for the hall. Maybe because they don't have internet access like I do.

Word is the water is off as well. The bathrooms are solid dark with no windows so everyone is chatting about the drama of what it like to use the bathroom in the dark with no water.

Luckily, it was noted, we have a hand sanitizer despener of the wall.

Then we had a technology free meeting with pen and paper. Fieldtrip time.

In the end I got to go home to work. Ironically, I hate being home an dworking. I would rather be anywhere else that is less distracting. Not to mention I have to walk back tonight because I have no way of reachign e:trry to tell him no to pick me up.

At first I loved it. I was like this is so great and then I started to realize why I hated it before. If everything was programmed or everything was made with the UI it would be fine but the fact that some stuff can get changed in the UI and then its not obvious in the programming is annoying. Right now I have a movie clip that unfortunately got scaled in an unfavorable way. It is really annoying me.

Don't worry these are not real patient's skin, but pictures off of google.





I am way happy to be programming for helping to cure cancer rather than for some stupid social networking bullshit. I just realized that yesterday. I have all kinds of plans now on what cool stuff I can make.

Mitch,
After careful consideration, I have decided not to pursue another career right now as I really enjoy my job at Roswell. I appologize for taking so long to get back to you.

Thank you for your time.

Best of luck,
Paul Visco

This is like the tenth job offer this month but it is so hard to want to leave the benefits of being a state employee with long term job security.

The top of my semi-outdated ( I have made so much new stuff) says:

I am looking for a challenging full-time PHP/SQL/XML/JS/AJAX web programming/design job with benefits such as health insurance in my home town of Buffalo, NY. I have an amazing web development job in Buffalo, NY. Now I want one that pays me more than $50,000.

I changed it this because I was sick of job offers that were less than what I had going on. I mean who goes in that direction.

Then I got this email today.

Hi Paul,

I came across your resume (Google search on 'buffalo resume "content management"
Perl MySQL')

I am looking for a knowledgeable, creative and self-motivated person in Buffalo with
web/software development and content management system experience that is interested in playing a key role in the development and growth of my company, COMAND Solutions.

The intention is for that person to eventually become the Chief Technology
Officer.

Required Skills:
1. Web Page Development with HTML and JavaScript
2. Programming experience with PHP and Perl
3. SQL (more specifically MySQL)
4. Linux system administration including set up and maintenance of RedHat/Fedora
servers with Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc.
5. Excellent organization and communication

Initial Responsibilities:
1. Develop, implement and maintain client web sites (HTML, JavaScript, PHP, MySQL)
in webCOMAND, our content management system.
2. Manage collection of remote webCOMAND, email and backup servers.
3. Manage and prioritize webCOMAND feature requests and bug reports.

Future Responsibilities:
1. Project management, including project specification, estimates and delegation to
a small team of developers.
2. Find, develop and implement systems to improve and automate company operations.
3. Help develop webCOMAND.

You can learn a little more about COMAND Solutions and webCOMAND at:


From what I see online, it looks like you may be the perfect candidate, except that you seem to already have a job at Roswell Park. However, I think this opportunity may be far more interesting to you and offers a lot more potential, as far as long-term growth. It is also a work from home position, which may or may not be more appealing to you.

Let me know if this is something you might be interested in and we can discuss everything in more detail.

Thank you,
Mitch

Mitch,
I may be interested in your position. I believe you are correct when you said, "it looks like you may be the perfect candidate for the job." I have a lot of experience and capability that I could transfer to that position.

At this point I would like to learn more about the nature of your company and more importantly the long term prospects of what you are proposing. Google returned no results for ("command solutions" buffalo) and webcommand.com appears to just be a list of links by associated by keyword.

While money might lure my interest to a new project, the longterm stability and benefits of my current Programmer/Analyst position at Roswell also have to be factored in.

Hope to hear from your soon.

Thank you for your time,
Paul Visco

I wonder where this will go. I imagine nothing will rip me away from Roswell.

I totally get absorbed in the form maker API I was making at work and forgot to take a break. I am so angry with myself because I promised I wouldn't do that anymore after 5 years of virtually no breaks at Canisius.

This was all my fault I just forgot to go until 6:59. I get out at 7PM. The thing is I always wait for terry till 8. I f his stupid phone wasn't broken I could have just called to say I am walking home, but as I have to wait anyways - I decided I would spend $11 on a fancy dinner at the hotel next door to roswell. Their food is amazing.

The guy next to me if freaking about about how he has some paycut and won't be able to afford the $500 trips to toronto on the weekends. His attorney says this and that. Blah, blah,blah Ans his property value need to be re-evaluated Thank god he has no debt, he says to some woman he is with.

In the end he decided it wuld be okay because his lower salary is still higher than most people in Buffalo.

This is a chicken focaccia sandwich. Nothing about this type of bread says focaccia to me. At least it tastes really, really good.

The last two days I walked to work because @terry had to tak ethe car at 7am. It's probabaly why I got sick but it was a nice glimpse of what it will be like when the warm weather comes and I can walk to work everyday.



According to my coworkers, it is fucking freezing in ur office during the summer. In fact my boss kleeps an extra jacket in his office for the summer. It's a little ridiculous because right now it is about 90 degrees in the office and on one side they have giant tubes that pump cold air in during the winter so we don't overheat too much. There is something to be said for efficiency. It actually freaks me out that the building I am in is where a lot fo the cancer research - sort of the forefront of science - yet they cannot figure out the enviornmental control systems. I know, it's not the same scientisist but it is the same organization.

I hope the new building we are moving to soon, doesn't have the same environmental problems. There is nothing I hate more than being freezing in the summer.

I took this picture and afterwards realized it looked like I was worshipping my phone.


The good news is I found out that my superphone is the only one sprint does not charge for tethering with. Happy tethering to me.

I really need to cut my hair off. I wish it would just warm up before the buzzcut. I cannot believe it just does this naturally. I haven't used a styling product since the 90s. I guess that is self evident.

Today while spending the whole morning cleaning the house I thought to myself, why am I wasting my time doing this. I mean at one point I was cleaning out the fridge and sweeping and I would have been spending my time setting up the server for the move on monday.

I mentioned to @terry that I thought we should pay someone to clean our house. I would be willing to pay someone like $50 for three hours of laundry and dishes. He thinks that makes me a classist asshole.

I think it's way above minimum wage and not everyone wants full timework, say students, so why not contribute to the trickle down effect.

When I was in high school I was a butler for this guy. He paid us around $8/hour to prepare and present his dinner in the evening and wash the dishes. For me it presented an opportunity to make more money than I was making as a cashier at Vicks and frankly, it was much nicer not having to deal with retails and the low level chain of command politics.

I just don't see anything wrong with it.

Recycling was so out of control this time because I found lots of stuff that had to go when I was cleaning the frigerator. There must have been 4 pickle jars and 4 speghetti jars. My hands smell sour in such a gross way now. Next time I am wearing gloves.

Wish me luck with the server. It is going to be so much work. I wish I had another server, database person to work with.

I normally love my job. In fact while working on the blackberry web site today using a real blackberry for once, I thought back to all those journals where I talked about wanting to do mobile development and there I was doing it. It's coming along quite well. I even wrote an excel parser that would take the excel based menus for the week and notify the mobile user what specials were up for the day.

Anyways, so I love that and then at about 6:00PM just before I left for work one of my co-workers asked me to take on one of the projects he is working. The work is for a good cause/site. It's the Ride for Roswell Site

Unfortunately, the kind of work it is, it is the kind of work I hate more than anything in the world. It is a squishy mix of old and new crappy machine generated code to wade through. The machine generated code looks like it comes from a combination of dreamweaver and the on site WYSIWYG system that writes the most mutated code I have ever seen. In fact only a machine with no emotions and not a human could write such disgusting code. capital, lowercase, css, markup, style tag, font tag, argh



The thing is it is not specifically the fault of any programmer but rather the system they used. It has a CMS system that involves a WYSIWYG online text editor which creates the crappy code. Unfortunately, now that they have this WYSIWYG editor they are going to crave it and I got the job with only about 10 days to fix it all up and make a new cms or fix the old one.

For the sake of the future me, I see no point in working in classic ASP and VBscript, the language that was used to write the system in the first place so it will have to be a quick re-write. I wish I could have had a little more advanced time to not just patch it up.

I hope it is not the beginning of a series of horrible fixer uppers or I am going to relocate to California. I hate fixing up mushing human/machine, old/new crap code. That is exactly one of the main reasons I wanted to stop being a professor. It thought I was going to be a developer.

First of all, I got up and shaved today. Shaving makes me feel like a different person each time. I don't shave much so when I do, it's surprising to see myself without the scruff.





Another wonderful day at my new superjob. I ate lunch with @amanda She works there too. I had some chicken breast with gravy and macaroni and cheese thing . Today I began finishing up with the finishing touches on my application. It looks much nicer now thanks to gimp .

The new computer arrived and is being set up for me. Hopefully, I will have it by Friday and then I can start a new application for the blackberries. I really need a flatpanel. The CRT is killing my eyes. WHat is really crazy is that they gave me this pager I am supposed to carry around the rest of my life. I really need something that can be forwarded to my phone as I can't carry around that 80s trash one way pager. It will ruin all my computer nerd street cred.



I really like my co-workers. All of them. This one guy tony who actually had a journal under @enknot a while back is the radest dude. He is one of the few people who I think freaks out about computers as much as me. Sometimes when we talk about web programming I smile so hard my face hurts. Seriously. He smiles that hard too. Maybe we need help, lol.He gave me a ride to Canisius in his phat car. It has heated seats. I want that in my life. But only if the car can be completely electric [inlink]paul,3965[/inlink].

Afterwars, I had my last day at Canisius, yeah! One of my former star students ditched the exam and about half the semester. I wonder what happend. Other than that some of the people had really good or potentially good projects and others had pretty much crap. I love it when people are forced to show crappy projects in front of the room. I hope they feel as annoyed as I feel looking at them. @nicholas gave me a ride home. He and Nina are the cutest couple in the world. Seriously, I don't think I have ever seen a happier couple.

Well, my learn a bunch of new language in a week and make an application with them application is coming along. I had a glimmer of hope that i might start to be able to use PHP 5 at work as my supervisor had me add it to the list of languages in the coding shairng application. I named it r:share. I'll keep my fingers crossed. In the mean time at least I made an application where we can share code and leave notes for each other about the code that we write.



I cannot wait to get the new computer and deisgn software so that I can make prettier stuff and not have to wait ten hours for the computer to think everytime I do something. Also I think the CRT is killing my eyes. The new one should have a flat panel. If not I am going to bring my own in.

My next project besides the treo/blackberry mobile site and this code sharing application might be to make a flash video xml reader. I love flash and xml. This job is fun because everything is always so different and the people are awesome. I makers me kick myself for all the time I waste din the past.

Today I had Beef on Weck with onion rings. It was so super fantastic but I forgot to take a picture. You will just have to believ me how delicious it was.

In other news, surebert was downloaded 120 times so far.