Not engineering related.

And it's my second post since my hiatus!

Found this funny and had to share:

so I was with my friend bryan the other night in a bar
well he got really drunk and said he was gonna puke
so i helped him walk to the toilet
all the stalls were occupied
bryan is a rugby player... so a big guy
so he fucking KICKS one of the stall doors open
and there's this guy in there taking a shit
and bryan throws up ALL OVER HIM
then (this is genius) bryan thinks 'oh shit... if i were taking a shit and someone came in and was sick all over me, i'd want to fuck him up... so i'd better hit him first'
so he fucking SMACKS this guy in the face
and runs away
imagine being that guy... WORST NIGHT OUT EVER


Now something kinda engineering based...
Friend: are you familiar with how sessions work in php?
Friend: well basically you can store variables in sessions
Ed: yes
Friend: like $login = matt
Ed: yes
Friend: then u can retrieve it later
Ed: and $password=password
Friend: yea
Ed: but that's not a good idea
Ed: hahahaha
Friend: right
Friend: so, one of the guys was doing the login, and he gets an error "html headers already sent" or something or other. which means something was printed to the screen already so you can't do a redirect
Friend: so I told him, you have to put the redirect before anything is printed to the screen
Friend: make sense?
Ed: yes
Friend: so, he goes back to the top of the page and puts something like if(isset($_session['login']) { redirect } meaning if the session variable for login is set do the redirect
Friend: which is correct!
Friend: BUT
Friend: the processing that sets the session variable was in the code below that...
Friend: so he asks me 2 hrs later why it wont redirect...
Ed: wow.
Friend: and I just stood up and walked away from my computer without saying anything
Ed: HAHAHAHHAHAHA
Ed: oh god....
Friend: If I smoked, I would have went to take a smoke

hi.

Decided to write in this after a few year hiatus.


But I have nothing to say.


I have a new job. I can't say where. It's Secret. literally.

Linked Data

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/tim_berners_lee_on_the_next_web.html

Ted Berners Lee did a great presentation on Linked Data. It's basically about how if the web is so interconnected now and if we all did our part to add to that data that is all interconnected, we would have this great "grass roots" revolution. It sounds like he trying to bring the next information age. It's really a great idea.

A great idea. But it begs me to ask, "Who will moderate it?"


Take a good look at that picture. I love the idea that each person can add to the just the smallest part of the web and it can generate huge amounts of "real" usable data. But I wonder about the immature teenagers that will go about doing these kinds of things. It really spoils my view on this idea.

Wikipedia has moderators that go around and check for these kinds of things and will erase it if necessary but who will moderate the entire web? Or do we micro-manage and each "public" site has it's own moderators that will look for this immature postings?

Sadly, I'm only an entry level software engineer that has no job and will graduate this semester amidst the worst economy in years. But things like this interest me and I love to work on it.

Found this in Jeff Atwood's old blogs....

Next week, millions of college students and young professionals will head home for the Thanksgiving holidays. We’ll sit with our families in warm, candle-lit dining rooms eating stuffed turkey, reminiscing over old photographs, preparing holiday shopping lists and … Please. Let’s be frank. We are going home to fix our parents' computers.

the conversation I had today...

So a office mate of mine was at a meeting where my name turned up. Apparently another co worker needed to talk to me and so my office mate told me so. I went to go find the co worker that needed to talk to me, only to find out that he was talking about someone else. That conversation went a little like this.

Me: "Oh hey, you wanted to talk to me about a project?"
Co-worker: "uhhhh....."
Me: "Something about a project, my office mate told me you wanted to talk to me?"
Co-worker: "OH! that's another Ed, when I said that this demo was so easy EVEN Ed could understand it. I didn't mean you. I meant our marketing guy Ed." *laughs* "I need to straighten this up with your office mate."

So we walk over to my office and straighten everything out and have a good laugh. Somewhat at my expense.

Me: "That was actually really funny."
Office mate: "It's a good thing he wasn't talking about you."
Me: "Nah it's cool. If you can't laugh at yourself who can you laugh at?"
Office mate: "Ugly people."
Me: "wow..."
Other Office mate: "Isn't that why they were born?"
Me: "wow that topped the first one."


And so we come to the realization that ugly people are there for you to laugh at.
I'm going to burn in hell. But hey I'll have my office mates to keep me company!


Also, up on our whiteboard:

"office mate".name = "Aaron"; //aaron is not his real name
If (time == 12:00)
LunchBreak();
Else If (FAIL)
BackToWork();
Else If (hoursWorked == 8)
GoHome();
Else
YouFailAtLife();


I love my internship.

Death of a great man.

George Carlin passed away this past sunday. He was one of my favorite entertainers. A great man and a sad loss for humanity. If you haven't heard of him, look up "seven dirty words you can't say on TV." Great stuff.

I love you google... but wtf?

Dear Google,
.... no I'm not going to start my blog this way....


So I had to help my GF out tonight. She was working on a Powerpoint presentation and my help started out with trying to describe how a silicon chip was made. I had to explain just the part where they cut the wafer and transfer the dye to the lead wires. That was excruciating enough.

When she finally finished her Powerpoint, she needed to send it to her professor but the email attachment limit was 10 mb on hotmail. She couldn't send it, so I told her to get a Gmail account because the attachment limit was higher, I think. I'm still not sure...

I really don't mind waiting or helping her at all, actually my beef is with Google. I'm currently uploading this file and I expected to see some kind of progress bar displayed on the screen but all I get is this infuriating circle pie chart thing that keeps rotating without giving me any information of whether or not I'm close or far, or even uploading at all. I still have to check back every minute or so to see if it is complete.

Isn't there ANY way to let the user know if the upload is still in progress and just how far along they are? I haven't read any of Jeff Atwood's blog in a while so I went through 6 of them. SIX! 6 blogs later, and I'm still waiting for this upload to finish so I can send out a simply email with a link to this Powerpoint file. Is a small progress bar so hard to ask for? I'm still checking by the way.

I know this whole rant is really insignificant and something that probably never crossed the minds of the developers at Google but isn't this what we've come to expect from them? To think of the things that we would never think of? They have programs like sketchIt that is pretty much parallel to AutoCAD. Google. AutoCAD? I would have never thought they would make something like that... couldn't they have at least let me know how much longer my upload will take? But then again, I just felt like ranting.

She also ran into the same problem on hotmail but closed the window after a while because she thought the window or something crazy crashed...

By the way, I'm still checking that rotating pie chart of hell.