Stream of consciousness IX

It seems to come in cycles of three or four years. I’ve been deeply worried about junior high, high school, and college. Now, it’s almost time to get a job.

It’s hard to think about the possibility that I’ll be a member of the workforce a year from now. Well, more likely, I’ll just be eligible to be in the workforce. With any mention of the job market these days come mentions of doom and quite possibly also gloom, so I guess I’ll be lucky to get a job so soon after graduating.

First I have to think about getting an internship. It’s not required as part of my major, but anyone who has any common sense does it. It makes you an experienced potential worker, and Companies Like It™ when you have experience.

If left to my own devices, I wouldn’t even bother trying to get an internship because I love my job and I feel like it’s given me the kind of experience I want and need. I’m a webmaster for a department of the university.

(A webmaster, to the uninitiated, is someone who’s in charge of a web site. I thought this was common knowledge, but I’ve had the word thrown back at me in an awestruck way so many times that I have to assume this isn’t the case. Also, I’m not the webmaster for the university’s entire web site, as some people misremember. Egads, that would be awful.)

(And maybe “thrown back” isn’t the best phrase, but imagine this: “Wow… a web master.”)

Anyway, I’ve been poked and prodded into looking for internships to supplement my job, and my first opportunity came last week when there was a so-called “swap meet” on campus. It was an informal gathering for companies looking for internships to meet potential interns looking for companies. Most of the companies didn’t interest me; I would want to work for a company that I feel does interesting work.

I narrowed it down to only a few, and I didn’t get quite the response I had hoped for. I have an open invitation to undertake a “mini-internship” at a company that the bus barely reaches. (On the other hand, the company makes a cool product, and that’s something I could potentially get excited about. I’ll have to see if it’s worth it.)

By the way, people from that company: if you’re reading this, thanks for visiting, and I hope you like the design. (I sold myself short, perhaps, when I told them that I didn’t have an eye for design. But I want to make sure I’m honest and I don’t get in over my head with regards to something I can’t do.)

Anyway, with this internship and any others I might possibly undertake, I would be working on web-related stuff. I’ve discovered in the almost two years that I’ve been working my current job (if my boss is reading this, October 6 is my anniversary) that it’s what I like to do, and by golly—I think it’s what I want to spend the rest of my life with.

In the meantime, I’ll have to battle for internships with my classmates who have bigger resumes and suits that fit them. And I’ll have to take rejection a little better. (Talking to a company at the “swap meet” was like trying to talk to a girl, if not having a girlfriend meant you would be homeless and starving.)

On that note, I’m out. Here’s hoping something serendipitously comes my way or I get a suit that fits.

I don’t watch the show Glee, but I am interested in copyright, so I found this article to be thought-provoking: Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club. (Via waxy.org)

Intermission

Aaaand we’re back. I’ll continue talking about my adventures with Kate soon (probably interspersed with other posts), but it’s been a long time since I’ve talked about anything else, so I thought I’d fill you in. (Funny how that happens, isn’t it? I get lazy for a few days, and then I’m finally ready to write something but I’m just too dang busy to do it.)

The first day of classes was August 23. This semester has been pretty good so far. My classes aren’t too bad. I’m taking four classes, as usual, and my course load actually seems lighter than it was over the second half of the summer, when I took two classes.

As for socializing, I’ve been spending a lot of time with my friend Andrea, which is good because I didn’t see her very much for a while. I’ve also been getting to know my new roommates, whom I’ll talk about more later. And, of course, I’ve been hanging out with Andy, who’s still one of my roommates.

I entered the football ticket lottery this year, and I won, so I have tickets to all of the home games. I really should have entered the lottery in years past, but I just never felt like doing it. It’s a great way to make money: just go to the games you want to go to and sell the rest of your tickets to other people to make an overall profit.

I didn’t go to last week’s game, which was the season opener against Miami (Ohio) (I believe “Ohio” is supposed to be whispered; read it again and see if it sounds better.) I sold my ticket instead. But I plan to go to this week’s game against USF with my sister and a bunch of her friends. It should be fun. I haven’t been to any football games since I was a freshman (this was my last one), and since it’s my final year, I feel like I need to get some more of those experiences in.

Last week, I wrote a letter to the editor of the Alligator about a column titled “Christian Philosophies Shaped America.” They ran my letter yesterday, and you can read it online as well (but probably not for long since their links die after a certain amount of time.) This is my third letter that the Alligator has printed; the previous ones were from October and February.

One link today: Google Scribe, an apparently new toy that offers autocomplete suggestions for everything you type. (Via Andy Biao of waxy.org, who suggests, “for fun, try typing any word and hit enter repeatedly.”)

Bloggers: a comparison

I’m Kirsten, from All About Me – And Then Some, and Jordon is super busy right now so he asked me to help keep his blog alive, so here I am. Today I wanted to do a comparison because I didn’t know what else to blog about on someone else’s personal blog.

Jordon: blogs about stuff
Kirsten: blogs about herself – and then some

Jordon: living the collegiate life
Kirsten: living in a cubicle

Jordon: lives in balmy Florida
Kirsten: lives in blistering Las Vegas

Jordon: is 21 and doesn’t look like he has any wrinkles or gray hairs
Kirsten: has been 29 for seven years now and while she’s avoided wrinkles so far, the gray hairs are creeping in

Jordon: knows html
Kirsten: knows html, more or less

Jordon: knows php
Kirsten: knows php when she sees it but doesn’t quite know what to do with it

Jordon: is a coding maniac
Kirsten: sucks at all kinds of coding

Jordon: knows what algorithms are
Kirsten: barely has any rhythm

Jordon: listens to The Beetles
Kirsten: listens to angsty chick music

Jordon: will graduate college with a 4-year degree and some career direction
Kirsten: graduated with a 2-year degree in liberal arts and still has no direction

Jordon: went to Europe and was able to meet all sorts of people because of years of dedicated, self-motivated Esperanto studies
Kirsten: went to Europe and was not able to speak to anyone despite 6 years of French studies

Jordon: puts interesting links at the end of nearly every post
Kirsten: stayed up way too late and couldn’t find anything link worthy, so is encouraging everyone to go to wikipedia and just keep clicking on “Random Article” until something interesting comes along

The fresh prints

Since I got my new digital camera, I’ve been astounded by the sheer hugeness (and clarity) of the images it produces. They just scream to be printed. So after my friend Natasha’s visit, during which I took hundreds of pictures, I figured she might like to have some prints to remember her trip by.

It’s a quaint idea—having photos on paper? Ha! I’ve used digital cameras exclusively since 2002, and you know how printers are. So I’ve long been content to just gaze at my photos on a screen, but now I’ve figured that having my favorites on nice Kodak paper wouldn’t be a bad idea—think of it as a paper backup. And you can’t pin lots of thin, tiny screens onto your wall (yet).

(Aside: When I was packing up all the stuff in my room a few weeks ago, I found my old cameras with film still in them. My mom got the rolls developed, and I’m looking forward to seeing the pictures [and also my mom and dad at the new house, which they started moving into on Monday].)

There are oodles ‘n’ kaboodles of web sites that send you prints of photos that you upload, so it was hard to pick out one. But I had heard good things about HP’s Snapfish, so I decided to give it a spin.

Uploading the photos was easy enough. Snapfish offers a choice of uploading the photos at full size or scaling them down to medium size and then uploading those versions. They recommend the latter for all but the largest prints, probably because it saves a great deal of time. I was concerned that the quality of the prints would suffer, but I decided to go with their recommendation. Uploading over 100 photos didn’t take long at all.

I got 20 free 4×6 prints for signing up, and I was able to get free shipping (something they normally charge a lot for) with a coupon code I found on RetailMeNot. So I ended up paying $10.44 for 136 prints (about 7.7¢ per print).

The photos arrived in a small box that contained two envelopes (like the kind you would get from having your photos developed at the drug store, except without a slot for the negatives). The first thing I noticed about the prints was that the paper was kind of thin—not super thin, but they seemed thinner than the old film prints I would get from the drug store (unless my memory is failing me). It was Kodak paper, though.

The color reproduction was pretty faithful to my monitor. I’m not an expert on colors, but a particularly colorful part of one photo seemed to be oversaturated. I don’t think this would be a problem in general, though. As for the image quality, it was great. I looked as closely as I could, and I couldn’t see any JPEG artifacts from the resizing. In fact, I discovered that my 14-megapixel camera produces much clearer snapshots than my old (cheap) film cameras (with cheap film) did.

All in all, I would recommend Snapfish if you can use the coupon code for free shipping. Even without it, it seems to be a pretty good deal. Sometimes you just need that paper backup.

A relevant link: Photographer Steve McCurry talks about shooting on the last roll of Kodachrome film ever produced. (Via J-Walk Blog)

Because once just isn’t enough

Big things are happening. My parents moved today; I no longer have a residence in Deerfield Beach, the city I’ve lived in my whole life. (Well, I haven’t really lived there for a while since I’m in college, but now it’s official.) They’ll be moving in to our new house on Monday (I think) and in the meantime are staying with my grandparents.

But here in this little college apartment I’ve come to call home, big things are happening too. Although I’m buried under a pile of homework and work and housework (or at least the threat of impending housework), I’d like to stick my head in briefly to say: Kate is coming back.

I met her last summer when I was in Europe, and in January, she paid me a visit that I detailed in 5 posts: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.

She’ll be leaving Russia this weekend and will spend a week meandering from Miami to Gainesville. Then she’ll be meeting up with me, and we’ll spend a few days in St. Augustine and Jacksonville. Then we’ll be back in the Gainesville area, where we’ll visit my parents at the new house. After that, we hope to make it down to Key West for a few days, and then Kate will have to be in Miami to catch her flight home.

It’s incredibly kind of her to travel halfway around the world twice in less than a year to visit me, and I’ll make sure she enjoys her visit.

In the meantime, I have all this work to catch up on.

Just one link today: An interactive chart showing The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook.

Seven links

I don’t usually participate in these memes, but I thought I’d take the 7 Link Challenge (thanks, Kirsten). These answers aren’t necessarily authoritative since I’ve written over a thousand posts and can’t be bothered to go back and look at all of them except in special circumstances.

1. Your first post: The World of Stuff Opens, April 6, 2003.
2. A post you enjoyed writing the most: [sic]. You could say I started writing this one in junior high, when I would keep track of my teachers’ many slips of the tongue. In the post, I listed some of my favorites.
3. A post which had a great discussion: Tough one. We usually don’t have those around here. The discussion on Brain Damage went on for a while, though.
4. A post on someone else’s blog that you wish you’d written: That would have to be The Ultimate “0.999… = 1″ Guide over at Greatplay.net.
5. Your most helpful post: My Sony DSC-H55 Digital Camera Review seems to have helped a fair number of people so far.
6. A post with a title that you are proud of: Man, what post title am I not proud of? Half the time they’re clever as hell. Sometimes I think of them ages in advance. I was going through some old titles, and this one made me chuckle: A Turtle (And Also the Meaning of Life).
7. A post you wish more people had read: Any post with no comments. Seriously, I think if my every post generated a huge discussion, it would compel me to write more often. Not that I don’t write a lot, but I used to write more often than I do now. One post I like that seemed to go under everyone’s radar was By the Way… It brings back a lot of memories for me.

I guess this post should be called “Nine Links” because here are TWO MORE LINKS!!

Here are some Useless Fliers. (Via waxy.org)

Here’s a pretty extensive article about the guy Nintendo named Mario after.

Get carded

As you may know, my parents have sold our house, and last weekend, I went there for the last time. When I wasn’t attending the Red Bull Flugtag, I was in my room, going through all my things and deciding whether to pack them, sell them, or throw them out. One of the things I came across was a brochure called “Legal Guide for New Adults,” produced by the state bar association. It consisted mainly of questions and answers such as (paraphrased):

Q: Why is the drinking age 21 and not 18?

A: The Florida Legislature has the power to set the drinking age, and that’s what they’ve decided is appropriate.

In other words, the classic because-we-said-so argument with which we are all familiar. (For the real answer, read about the National Minimum Drinking Age Act of 1984. The history of alcohol purchase age limits by state is also interesting.)

Anyway, Tuesday was my 21st birthday. After I wrote my birthday blog post, I continued studying until the exam (except for a brief study break at Taco Bell). I was gradually joined with other people in my class, and we all sort of ended up commiserating. That’s always fun. The exam itself was pretty challenging, but I don’t think it was harder than the last one, which I got a pretty good grade on, all things considered.

By the time I was done with my exam, it was already 9:30. Andy picked me up, and we went to Gainesville Ale House on Archer Road. Andrea met us there. I picked the place because it was one of the only restaurants in town I’d ever been to that was open after 11 PM (the others being the Original Pizza Palace and Chili’s). Plus, there would be a wide variety of alcoholic drinks to choose from if I so desired.

I so desired. I needed to unwind after that exam. After much deliberation, I decided to get a whiskey and soda (Jack and Pepsi, to be exact). I almost thought the waitress wasn’t going to card me, but she did. To eat, of course, I got a burger. Since this establishment was half-bar, they had a trivia contest going on, with the questions and answers being announced over the speakers. The three of us put our heads together and got most of the questions right, although we didn’t actually participate.

Andrea had the audacity to ask the waitress whether I would get a free desert. She said I could get a free slice of ice cream cake and brought one out. The three of us enjoyed it together. Andy covered my part of the check since he owed me money (it’s a good thing he remembered because I didn’t). Then, Andy and I went back to our apartment, where Andy had decorated the living room with balloons and other birthday decorations as a surprise. We threw the balloons around for a little while. After midnight had passed, I started working on homework.

I report my music listening habits to last.fm because I enjoy seeing the statistics. Here are some more statistics for last.fm users: The Obscurometer tells you how obscure your musical tastes are compared to others’. Apparently, my obscurity level is 30.1%, and my musical tastes are more obscure than 27.9% of all users.

This article does a great job of explaining how The RIAA and MPAA Have Failed to Understand a Cultural Shift. Everyone who doesn’t understand why the RIAA and MPAA’s tactics are wrong should read it.

How the classes are going

Two summers ago, I stayed home and hung out with friends. Last summer, I went to Europe. But if I want to graduate in Spring 2011 while taking a relatively light course load along the way (which I do), then I have to take a summer semester (which I am doing now).

Here at old Florida, there are three summer semesters. Summer A is six weeks long. Summer B, which follows Summer A, is also six weeks long. Summer C spans both Summer A and Summer B. I took Intro to Public Speaking during Summer A, and during Summer C, I’m taking Operating Systems and Finance. Summer A has ended, so the latter two classes are the ones I have left.

Summer course offerings are more limited than during the Spring or Fall semesters, so for my computer science major, I had no choice but to take Operating Systems with one of the department’s more infamous professors. He claims that the average score on his exams is 60%, which includes 20% extra credit. He also gives lots of homework, and he’s just assigned the term project.

The flipside, as I’ve been told by my friends who have survived his classes, is that you learn a lot from him. And I seem to be doing just that. I didn’t think I would do very well on the first exam, but I got a 77 (which I first misread as 11, my mind precluding the possibility of such a “high” grade). The next exam is on Tuesday night, which also happens to be my birthday. I hope the exam makes it a good one.

The other class I’m taking right now is for my business administration minor. It’s Finance (properly, Business Finance), and it’s one of the classes that the business college has done a great job with. They record the lectures and post them online, so there’s no need to actually attend class. Instead, I download the lectures and watch them at my leisure. The quizzes are also online (but the exams, alas, are not).

I chose to be a business minor because it would give me valuable skills (and because my major requires me to take a minor, but never mind), and this class hasn’t disappointed me. I’ve learned, among other things, the importance of saving for retirement. Plus, I’ve been doing very well in the class. The way things are going, I could end up with an A. Yay.

I was actually very worried that I wouldn’t do well in either of these classes (Finance is said to be the hardest class in the business minor), but I’ve been busting my hump for them, and it shows. I just hope I can keep up the good work.

I’ve been linking to a lot of infographics lately, some good, some not so good. Here’s a parody of pointless infographics. (Via waxy.org)

Another one of those montages of clips from movies and TV shows: We’ve Got Company! I first saw this before watching Avatar and groaned upon hearing the line in the movie. (Via The Presurfer)

Stupid Fight compares the spelling and grammar of celebrity Twitterers’ fans to see whose are dumber. (Via waxy.org)

The sensational student-semester

In the spring, I took a class called Introduction to Software Engineering. The main assignment over the course of the semester was a group project to design, create, and present a software application. Sound like fun?

The class had four discussion sections, which made it only natural that each discussion section should correspond to a group. The groups were about evenly distributed, each one having 16 or 17 people. In my group, we spent several weeks hashing out ideas for what kind of program to make.

I would talk about the ongoing project to my friend Mark, who had taken the class previously. When he first heard about it, he was shocked. “Seventeen people? That’s going to be way too many. You need two or three people.” Or, you know, something like that. I’m not a journalist, jeez.

I wasn’t really sure what he meant. I figured that with a lot of work, two or three people could complete a project on the scale of what we were doing, but with more people on the team, it would be easier for everyone.

Our group eventually decided on an instant messaging application for Android phones. The app would be designed specifically for our fellow UF students; each user would see a map of the campus with their buddies’ current locations marked. Users would also be able to create and invite their friends to events, which would also be shown on the map. The name of the program: ChompChat. The alligator-themed wordplay is inescapable around here.

We basically split ourselves into two teams: the client team, which would make the actual ChompChat application, and the server team, which would be responsible for handling interactions between users. After a while, the server team got something that worked, and the client team got something that worked. The hard part was getting them to work together.

Some of our other assignments for the class involved reading Fred Brooks’ The Mythical Man-Month, a classic text of software engineering. The titular essay explains that people and time aren’t interchangeable. As more people join a project, proportionally less work gets done because the new members have to learn the ropes and each member has to communicate with more people to figure out what’s going on. It’s summed up as Brooks’ law:

Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.

In the meantime, I had a hard time finding a place for myself in the project. We were using Google Wave to communicate (we had several big Google fans in the group), and not everyone was in on every wave. We had our own Trac installation set up for us, but no one ever filed any tickets.

I got most of my information from our weekly class meetings, and even then, I couldn’t help but bounce around from subteam to subteam, looking for something to do as the strong-willed and more technically able actually did most of the work. It got to the point where I decided to hold off from the development lest Brooks’ law come into play. Other members of the group agreed that this was a good idea.

When it came time for the groups to present their software projects, we had just gotten the client and the server to communicate with each other. Chatting and creating events worked, but geolocation and the other features we had originally dreamed up for ChompChat were absent. I felt as though the ghost of Fred Brooks were there in the room, laughing to himself. Actually, I didn’t because he’s still alive. But whatever.

Fred Brooks was right. Mark was right. And everyone else came around. Toward the end of the semester, the professor took a poll of the class, and almost everybody agreed that the groups should have been smaller. Too bad it took so much manpower to figure that out.

Statistics reveal America’s “beer belly,” where bars outnumber grocery stores. (Via The Consumerist)

This might be fun if you like math: an inverse graphing calculator that produces the corresponding equation for a curve that you draw. (Via J-Walk Blog)

This 1995 Newsweek article reads like satire in 2010: “The Internet? Bah!” A Newsweek blogger provides a modern commentary and manages to get a word from the author.

Summer bummer

My break between the spring and summer semesters is history. I did some stuff, took it easy, and then figured I would write about it once I got back to school. Well, I haven’t had time. I’ve just got a little bit of time here to squeeze in a quick post.

So, Thursday was my friend Nick’s much-anticipated 21st birthday. He and our friend TJ started out by shooting some golf, but they called it a day early because it was so hot out. After that, they picked me up, and we had lunch at Clamsters, a neighborhood place.

Next, we went to The Home Depot. Yeah, that’s right. Let me explain.

The last time I was around, my friends had caught wind of the Red Bull Flugtag, which would be coming to Miami in July. My understanding is that it’s a contest where various groups build flying contraptions that may or may not be airworthy but are always fun to watch. In Miami, this would involve shoving your craft over the edge of a dock, with a pilot inside, and seeing how far it goes.

So, my friends decided to enter the contest. Since each group is apparently supposed to have a theme, they planned to dress up as the members of Kiss and have their airplane thing look like a guitar. (I can’t help but think that Role Models may have been an influence.) But anyway, to everyone’s surprise, including their own, they were accepted into the contest. So they’ve been getting ready to build their giant guitar thing.

So, after considering various types of lumber, we went to see their friend Jonnie as he moved out of his dorm room at FAU. Then the guys signed some Flugtag paperwork, we moved Jonnie’s stuff into Nick’s house, Nick’s cousin Mike had his long hair cut short, and we had dinner with Nick, who was now old enough to drink. To top off the day, we went to Bru’s Room, a local bar/restaurant, so Nick and the other over-21s could have some more drinks.

The next evening, Nick had a party, and there were a lot of people there. And the day after that was Sunday, so I had to go back and get ready for another exciting semester. I’ll fill you in on that later.

By all accounts, Google Chrome is fast. Here’s a pretty cool video (that you may have already seen making the rounds on the Internet) showing just how fast it can be. Be sure to watch the making-of video as well. (Via waxy.org)