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.

All this data entry for the themes upgrade is making me ill. It is really bringing me back to all those mind numbing jobs I had as a teenager. The worst data entry job ever was working for Sorrento cheese.

They had this giant main frame computer and wanted all the data entered into a windows one in excel. I spent weeks sitting in a refrigerated room entering numbers and adresses into the system.

What confuses me looking back on this, is why it wasn't it automated. I mean having the human in between left plenty of room for error. Especially one getting like $9.00/hr.

I had about 15 jobs like that during he summers of high school.    

I smashed my toe the other night on a toolbox in the middle of the kitchen floor in the dark. Yesterday, I could barely walk. Today it feels a little better but its bruised and swollen and I can't move it much.
I hope this isn't the beginning of a lifelong "bad" toe.

It's weird how the chat box has become such a huge feature of the site. Tonight there were so many peeps chatting. Someday I will have to build a more rebust system.

Right now I have spent the last two days entering all remaining messy text data into the database. This is especially important for the theme system. With it in the database I can begin to analyse the relationship between the colors and teach the web site to build themes for me.

In response to Jim's comment on my last journal:

I would like a reasonable upload rate >1mbps with a static IP. The cheapest quote I could get without a two year commitment or an insane installation fee was through adelphia which quoted me at $99/month.

Verizon would be alright if we had a phone line but we don't as we all have cell phones. They refuse to sell me a static IP with a reasonable upload rate without first buying a business phone line which too much extra with the three mobile lines we already have through sprint. The last time I checked they wanted to charge me about $120-30 per month plus taxes and a $100 installation fee along with a contract. Maybe things have changed as that was last semester.

Any other ideas? I tried some other DSL companies that offered to sell DSL without phone service but none of them serviced the area.