I hate arguing

If you met me, you'd think otherwise because I can turn it into a heated debate quite easily. I don't mind arguing about possible outcomes or story interpretations. I hate arguing about programming to be honest. Nowadays, I just don't care. Three times in this project ... I knew better and I've decided against my better judgment.

I know interviews and people butt heads in order to prove their worth. I won't do it anymore. I lay out the facts. I'll counter every point and say what I think. However, after that point. I leave the decision to the superiors.

I guess it's the way I play politics now. I was burned at Infusion too much for challenging things. I'll tell you what now. Some people can only learn through reward and punishment. I'll step to the side and let you take down a live server if I think you can learn from it.

Christmas Sucks

Like I've said before. My life doesn't suck. The kid in Africa that has a worm burrowing into his eyeball taking away his sight. That guy's life sucks. Mine is just fine.

It does, however, have some unfortunate circumstances. I cannot describe to you the amount of snow that had stopped my trip back to London. It was no more than an inch and a half. That amount wouldn't even frazzle Pearson. I did wind up cancelling my trip. Thanks to Air Canada's incompetence in announcing their flights and also in their lacking of capacity to deal with this situation. I was on the phone for six hours before I finally reached someone. I spent the first 4 waiting for someone to answer. Then he put me up for another 2 ... then he hung up on me. That ... is a little unacceptable. When I finally got through they said they'd get me home Christmas midnight. Roman (roommate) said he found another flight for me. He found out that the flight had jumped up in price from 400 GBP to 3000 GBP. Talk about these opportunistic douchebags taking advantage of a situation like this eh?

So anyways, that was after being on hold for a total of 8 hours. I decided not to go through another hour of waiting to book another flight. It cost around 700 GBP for a one-way flight to Toronto.

Now this sounds stupid since I'm a grown man, but I was pretty much in tears when my flight was cancelled. I have a lot of friends that I wanted to see. I already missed the little soiree we had with at least 15 of my close friends. Granted, I could have paid for an overpriced ticket and just shortened my stay. I just ... couldn't do it anymore. I was exhausted. I was sick of things getting cancelled. I also had to go to the airport to pick up my luggage because I left it there. It was absolutely grueling going to the airport and back in the state I was in.

Now why doesn't life suck?

I gave York a phone call. He spend the next few days with me. It's ... it's strange having a friend have your back like that. Even when you're in another country in different circumstances. York still has my back. Like James, Alex, and Tony ... York's been a good friend of mine for a long time. We spent good time together. Did a little bit of snowboarding (I got kicked off ... gayness) and took in the winter festivities.

When I got back ... the power went out in my place on Christmas Eve night. Now ... I could take that as being shitty. But I was forced to give Hong a call. Another friendship that's been rekindled after 15 years. I stayed at their house for Christmas. I really can't thank them enough.

I didn't spend this Christmas with the friends that I wanted to spend it with. I did want to spend them with highschool and university friends. On the other hand, I did spend it with some lifelong friends ... some friends that I absolutely cannot imagine being more thankful for.

Happy Holidays.

Take A Penny

Just came back from a long trip around Europe with Salman and Q. It's been a fun albeit exhausting journey.

I'm having trouble continuing the current work I'm doing.

Worthless.

Elusive Dreaming

So I had my first lucid dream this morning. Not more than four hours ago.

I was chatting online with a friend Kim when I said I should take a cat nap.

I felt my body go numb. My laptop was playing music and my roommate came in to check if I was awake. I had to force each of my limbs to move. It was a massive struggle just to move anything. I eventually woke up and someone was at the door. It was the landlord to pick up the mail he asked for yesterday. I stared outside the balcony and then realized this was all a dream.

It felt pretty real though. So for fun, I was like, if I can fall asleep in the next few seconds ... let's see what happens ... I fall asleep and I'm staring outside the balcony. Then I wake up again.

I try one more time. I'm back in my flat. I'm staring outside the balcony. I want to fly. So I run, I can't feel my feet hit the floor, but I do know that I'm moving. I jump. Then I'm floating. I feel a bit scared and I can feel myself fall. I look up so I don't "kill" myself and wake up. I land. Then I run to the centre city of London. I don't recognize a damn thing. I wanted to see what type of girls my dream state would come up with. I approach one or two people. When I reach out to touch them I feel my pillow on my head and the blanket over my body. I stop because I realize that it's going to wake me up. So I stop. I run around the city in circles. Then girl who was following me disappears. I slowly wake up again.

Then I proceed to tell Kim what happened.

Project Execution

When I first begun hobby coding; I quickly learned that creating a solid project is hard to do.

I learned this in my second year of programming when I was writing a VB--racing game. The core of the game and the level-editor were complete. I had about three weeks before I had to hand it in. I thought it'd only take a day or two to create the 'save' functionality. It took about two weeks. This was when I was taking other courses too like Calculus and Algeo ... not purely programming :P.

I think that when I begun doing contracting I realized the issue with scope creep. Most of the time it had to do with UX issues. With me not being a UX guy it was pretty hard to make these types of changes.

...

Now to the professional world of programming. Not much has fucking changed. Multiple the end users and the levels of bureaucracy and you have the professional world.

I find myself having a shorter temper for unprofessionalism. The company I work for prides itself on being able deliver in a short amount of time. That means stressing developers and UX designers at times. I'm not a big fan of this type of development style. It's a bit ridiculous. They're wondering about putting us into training. But they don't know what we know. So what are we going to be training on? Most of the training sessions have been big wastes of my time. Scratch that. Every single training session has been. They pride themselves on being able to do this. They have nothing to be proud of. If you don't know anything about it; then you're going to be bombarded with information at a high-pace. If you know the topic, you realize that they're not going granular enough. You need a decenta mount of hands-on training to get people to hit the ground running right.

So my coworkers aren't trained in the domain. I simply can't code because I'm waiting for the architect. The architect can't give me specs because they haven't finished BA-ing. Great. So I'm behind and they're trying to pressure us. So I have no requirements. Not even vague requirements. I have no requirements. I have a freaked out project manager. I can't do any work. I'm so sick of hearing from my architect that I can't do it.

This is not the way to produce quality code. This is also a fixed-price project. So guess what, the project end date is already set. There are no specifications. So this means they want us to work long hours.

What. The. Fuck.

Last Three Weeks

Tommy asked me to blog about my exploits. I prefer not to, but I will list some things I've done in the last three weeks.

• Drinking in Camden where a Scottish guy was trying to rape me
• Took a tour of London. Got a pic of myself with the statue of Charles Darwin!!
• Barbeque with my friends in Deptford. Met a pretty hot chick there *cross fingers*
• House party in Central London. Met a pretty cute chick there *cross fingers*
• Having another BBQ today

Not to mention after work drinks at least once a week.

Not that I don't love Toronto, but that was normally my itinerary for the year. Anyways, gotta get some shit for the BBQ. Peace.

Oh yeah, I pushed out a release and it's fucking going down in UAT like a bitch.

Mac Gripe

So I found an image of a map I wanted online. I needed to print it out to a JPG and get it in my ereader.

Great, print screen in a mac is a bitch ... and ... what the hell do you use to save the image?