Today, there was a big job fair at Brandeis, and after being heavily encouraged by several people, I decided to go and see what there was. Boy, am I glad I did! The fair itself was pretty small, and the number of companies I was interested in was even smaller, but I found two that I'm really interested in.

First, I went to the Elysium Digital booth to see Nahum, one of the previous gurus. I don't know the guy, but he seemed pretty cool, and I think we clicked pretty quickly. The company seemed interesting, as well, although I don't know how much I would want to work with lawyer-type people. I mean, some of my extended family are lawyers, but I still don't trust them entirely. On the other hand, Elysium was giving out free Leatherman-type multi-tools. I'm a sucker for free stuff, and that thing looks to be genuinely useful, so I snapped it up. Also, Nahum works there, so they're probably cooler than I'm giving them credit for.

The other company that caught my eye was Tamale Software, at first simply because it has a rather kick-ass name and interesting logo. So clearly, my first question to the woman at the table was about the name's origins, which were equally interesting, but not what I thought. In return, her first question to me was, "That's an awesome shirt. Where did you buy that shirt?" She was referring to my "How to Become a Ninja" shirt, with instructions for how to make a ninja mask out of a black T-shirt. We talked for a long time about ninjas and pirates before ever getting down to the whole job thing, which I liked very much. Tamale makes software for investment companies, which ties in well with my brother's job. They also are getting into Python, which I highly approve of. They also use C# and IronPython, however, which makes me a little uneasy -- I prefer to stay far, far away from any and all Microsoft products. Maybe that's unrealistic, but working in an environment where Windows is unsupported, plain and simple, might have made me a bit spoiled.

At any rate, I didn't have copies of my resume with me, so I gave both companies a link to my website. (Hi, people from Elysium and Tamale! You guys are cool!) Now, I just need to try to update my website and put some more good stuff on there. For reference, this entire website is hand-coded with valid HTML 4.01 and CSS 3. This blog is powered by meep-meep, a custom blog engine I also wrote from scratch in PHP. (I have since decided that PHP is a finicky and troublesome language, and I do not love it anymore.) I rarely ever update my blog, because blogging isn't really my thing, but I have one anyway for the times when I get inspired. (Or, you know, when I know potential employers will be reading it.) If you want to contact me, I have a contact page, because I hate spam.

Aside from the job fair, life is going well. School has long since started, and I'm busier than ever. I made the brilliant decision for signing up for two plays in addition to my two a cappella groups, so my free time is shot all to hell. Proscenium just had their first performance of the semester, and I've never seen a coffeehouse so packed. It was really fun! Life at home is going well: although there have been some minor inter-house issues, my housemates and I haven't killed each other yet, and we've managed to keep the place remarkably clean. Also just had my first UDR event of the year. Berry Patch Night was supposed to be a meet-and-greet for undergrad CS majors, along with an opportunity to work on homework collaboratively and learn from each other. Instead, people came, grabbed the free pizza, and left. Next time, I'll try to make it more structured and hang on to people for longer.

That is all I have to say for now. Signing off, back to work.

I'll be brief, since I've had a lot of personal drama lately, and no one likes reading about other peoples' drama. Where I will be living this summer is in question, but I think it will be resolved soon. Plenty of time with the family lately -- too much time, perhaps. I'll have most of the summer and school year without them, so it'll be fine.

I've discovered that it's very difficult to be motivated to work on other projects when you're working from 9am to 5pm, especially when those projects involve more of what you've been doing at work. I want to work on my blog, my websites, my server, my a cappella arrangement, and all the other stuff I said I would do this summer, but when I get back from work I just want to relax. I'm not even physically tired (it's just sitting at a computer all day) but mentally, I'm just exhausted. I'm still relatively new to computer science in general, and system administration in particular, and there's so much to learn and do. I'm for sure learning more from this job than I did from any of my computer classes. It's a great experience, and I think this is really the perfect job for me right now, but it's making it hard for me to focus on anything else.

In spite of all this, though, I'm going to make an effort. There are one or two sites that I'm basically required to work on, there's a server I promised myself I would get up, and there's an arrangement that I need to at least start by the end of the summer. As soon as I finish this blog post, I'm going to dive into meep-meep and at least get the visible structure of a comment function together. (I won't kid myself that I can get it to work quite yet, but having the structure staring me in the face when I look at this blog will help motivate me to fix it. I hope.) Then, I might put it aside -- or I might not, who knows. One thing at a time.

I'm done! Done with exams, done with projects, done with just about EVERYTHING! I'm half-way through college!

Grades are trickling out slowly: I've got an A and an A- so far, out of three classes. I'm expecting to do pretty well in almost all of my classes. The only one I don't think I'm going to do very well in was taught by the Professor of Doom: tests based on memorization of excruciating detail, twenty years out of date in his field, and unwilling to use technology whatsoever. The subject matter was fascinating, but the teaching was horrible. At least it's over and done with, and I don't have to gripe about it any more.

Meanwhile, turning my focus ahead. I will be living in a house just off-campus with several of my friends. It's gonna be tight with 7 people living in a house built for 5, but they're all friends, and more people means cheaper rent. Plus, I'll be working almost 40 hours a week at the Guru office, and making a fair amount off of that, so I should be fine.

Summer theoretically means lots of free time, but I just can't seem to stop taking on more commitments! First of all, I've got personal projects: learning more programming languages (I'm focusing on Python and Cocoa), setting up a server and wireless network for the house, learning TeX and typesetting my resume, and updating this website to be more interesting. Then I've got my web work for other people: Company B, Proscenium, A Cappella Etc, Archery, and now the Guru website, and amazingly, the website for the entire Computer Science department at Brandeis! (The guy who was working on a redesign just graduated, and I got nominated to take over and finish his job. I'll be learning Drupal in a hurry!) On top of that, I've got work: doing Guru work, and possibly doing one-on-one computer help as I did last summer. (The pay for that sort of thing is incredible: too bad clients are so unreliable and hard to come by.) Also, spending some time on fun: relaxing, spending time with my boyfriend, playing Wii, and learning to cook. Sleeping? And lastly: reducing my ridiculous colon usage.

Hopefully, I'll bring meep-meep to version 1.0 by adding a comment system. Then, I may have to abandon the project, due to time constraints. If it comes to that, I'm OK with it: I have learned a lot about PHP from working on it. I'll probably implement Chyrp instead: I've looked at it, and I'm a big fan. I'll think about all that later, though: for now, I'm heading out.

Just fixed a bug with meep-meep involving server vomit when there were more posts in the blog than to be displayed on the page at once. It turned out to be a result of my switch from variables to constants in the preferences -- I missed switching one of them, and as a result, it wasn't changing to the correct directory, so the cache file got lost. It should be fixed now, though. The only way to tell is to write more blog posts!

Plenty of fun stuff going on lately, mostly involving code and programming. Fun stuff! Let's see, in no particular order:

• Guru job
• Safari vs Firefox
• BranCOG
• Programmer Masculinity project
• Adium icon

Guru: That's my job. I don't know if I ever mentioned it in this blog, but it rocks beyond belief. I get paid (quite well, in fact) to hang out with cool people, mess around with computers under the guidance of said cool people, be in charge of a bunch of shit, and not do a whole lot of actual work. Yes, my boss knows that I don't actually work at work very much, and has told me on multiple occasions to stop asking for more work. "Part of your job is sitting there, waiting for someone to come ask for help," he says. Hey, as long as I can entertain myself, wonderful!

Safari: A much better browser than I originally gave it credit for. As of yesterday, my new default browser, replacing Firefox 2. What caused the change? The 3.1 update, which brought with it a mouthwatering set of developer tools, built right in to the browser natively; an enhanced WebKit, capable of delivering on the promise of CSS3 and HTML5, including font downloading; a Mac-native interface, which has been there from the beginning, but only now am I discovering how slick it is; and blazing-fast rendering speeds. Scrolling a page on even the most cluttered and busy site is now as smooth as warm butter -- oh so nice. I was worried about customizability with Safari, but I'm discovering that it's far more extensible than I thought, via SIMBL. The default keyboard shortcuts were annoying, but I changed them to match the ones I used on Firefox. (To change keyboard shortcuts on Mac applications, just go to System Preferences -> Keyboard & Mouse -> Keyboard Shortcuts. Vastly underused feature of the Mac platform!) Firefox 3 will be coming out soon, and I may move back -- but frankly, WebKit is a better rendering engine than Gecko, and Safari is designed from the ground up to play nice on the Mac, while the Mozilla applications clearly added Mac compatibility much further down the line, and it shows.

BranCOG: The Brandeis Computer Operators Group. The group for students who know how to work computers and make them do useful shit, like making websites. I.E., me. The group was all but defunct, but they announced themselves and started threatening to be interesting, so I climbed on board. I'm one of two guys in charge of the Website-In-A-Can project: we're going to make it easy for student clubs to deploy their own website. I'm working with Max Shay, who I have decided is brilliant. Can't wait to work more with him, and the project itself promises to be fun, interesting, and resume-building.

Programming Masculinity: A project I'm doing for my SOC115A class. I'm researching the masculinity of computer programmers. (Psst! Take my survey!) I've been doing interviews (including one with Max) and learning a bunch of interesting stuff. Apparently, Brandeis computer programmers (or at least, the ones I've talked to) have very different ideas about programmers than I do.

Adium: now has an icon shaped like the Weighted Companion Cube. Glee.

So, I'm at the tail end of February break right now, and feeling a bit down. I haven't updated this site in forever, and while break was a lot of fun, now I'm feeling the work load hovering, ready to fall on me like the sword of Damocles. Dramatic, I know. I don't actually have that much to do: just a psych research paper and a CS problem set. In fact, I'm nearly done with both. Maybe the issue here is that I just like to complain.

Also, I really should work on meep-meep a bit more, at least to implement a comment system and bring it to version 1.0. I feel bad leaving it versionless like this. I'm also worried that a comment system will leave me open to comment spam, though, which is not something I want at all. Do I have to implement Askimet as well? Ugh, too much work...

So, I've been having problems with my wireless in Leopard. Frankly, it was flaky: it would take a long time to connect, and then the connection would occasionally die for no reason. It also didn't seem to like encryption at all: it almost never connected to encrypted networks. So today, I finally looked into the problem.

It seems like a lot of people have had this problem, and thankfully a solution has been found. I don't know why it works, but it appears to be working for me so far.

• Step 1: Restart your computer in Safe Mode. To do this, press and hold the Shift button after your Mac makes the characteristic turn-on chime.
• Step 2: Log in to your user account.
• Step 3: Restart again, this time normally.

I have no idea why this works. Maybe just booting into safe mode repairs Leopard's wireless drivers? It's especially odd because, while I was in Safe Mode, Leopard reported that I didn't even have an AirPort card installed at all. (I got pretty worried at that point.) After the third step, however, it came back, and seems to be working properly.

BumpTop is probably utterly useless, but really cool.

meep-meep's RSS feed is finally valid! Yay!

Also, this is the end of my winter break from Brandeis University. Tomorrow, I'll be heading back to Boston, and I probably won't have much time to work on meep-meep, or write more blog entries. I don't think I'll be gone for good, but it might be a very long time between blog entries.

Well, I went though meep-meep and did a massive upgrade. I moved all of the preferences into a separate file to make them more accessible, and I changed them from variables to constants in order to reduce the server memory load. The lighter and faster, the better!

I'm not putting version numbers on meep-meep at this point, because I don't feel it's worth it. I really dislike it when people just add 0.0.1 to a program with a minor edit, or release it as version 0.1 when it's just a baby, and other strange versioning bits like that. meep-meep will be versionless until I've added a user comment system, at which point I will declare it to be version 1.0, because that's the only feature it's missing to be a competent blogging engine.