Warren Shea - World of Warren

Archive for the ‘My Life’ Category

Starting tomorrow – I’m going to be busy

Friday, September 24th, 2010 at 1:33 am

Busier than I’ve been in 5 years. Busier than I was (or should have been) in university.
My life, despite staying at home a lot, was already busy. Developing warrenshea.com, playing games, watching shows, messing around with photography, and even occasionally going out and hanging with friends.

None of that is changing but I’m adding more responsibilities to myself/responsibilities have been given to me.
1. Side Project
2. Math 106
3. Epic Site Project
4. Learn ASP.NET 3.5/4, HTML5, CSS3
5. My job has changed

Granted, hopefully I’ll stop/slow development of warrenshea.com but the above 5, which are all-new starting tomorrow….are going to make my life even busier.
1. Side Project – I discussed this in a previous post. I’m going to start working on it tomorrow and for the foreseeable future. It’s web related and will be interesting. Sorry, can’t disclose any more information other than that.

2. Math 106 – Zena’s taking Math 106 as a side course this term. From my years in CS, it’s exactly like Math 136 (I believe) which is Linear Algebra. Math 135, 1A term, was Classical Algebra where I learned about mod and encryption. Math 136, 1B term, was linear algebra. I’m going to try to (re)learn the content of this course, along with Zena, so that I can help her as well as test myself. I’ve been complaining that I’ve been getting stupider as I get older. This is a chance to re-learn something that I learned 8-9 years ago, which was probably my intellectual prime. Just out of high school, eager to do well in Waterloo. And before my UWaterFail where I gave up on myself. It’s an experiment as well as a 4 month long test for myself. I’m excited to see how I compare to back then. Will I still not be able to figure out the stuff I couldn’t figure out a decade ago? Time will tell…I’ll keep you updated on my experiment findings as time goes on… :)

3. Epic Site Project – I’m decided to, against my nature, make a realistic timeline for this. I have been thinking about how to develop this the last few weeks. I’m getting more into what I want and the next logical step will be to begin some sort of development. I want to get this project off the ground…I’ve been procrastinating this for a year or longer at this point. I have to get serious or this won’t ever get done.

4. Learn ASP.NET 3.5/4, HTML5, CSS3 – I’m also going to try to dedicate some time to this. I have to start learning now/soon or I’ll be catching up on this when HTML6 and CSS4 and ASP.NET 5 come out.

5. My job has changed – though my title has not O_O (yet at least). Starting tomorrow, I officially change the role of my job. I’m going to work with my manager to remove some of the smaller, simpler tasks of mine and begin taking larger projects. This leads to more responsibility, more conceptual thinking, more research, more interacting with the business. Basically, it’s like the role of say, a senior developer…(though I’m not one….yet). I’m venturing into new professional territory so I don’t know how that will change my life. More hours? Late nights? More meetings? Tucking in dress shirt? >_< I don't know, but it's a big change. I often don't do what I don't like to do. I often avoid, take longer time, or delegate stuff I don't like. I don't think I have the option here. The good news is there's less to no grunt work, it's really....possibly a lot of the fun stuff. It's a good thing I quit WoW...like the last 9 months have been a preparation for this, the golden age of warren

/I bet I come home tomorrow and take a nap u_u

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Finding a good partner for a website…

Tuesday, September 21st, 2010 at 6:39 pm

Note: This is an old draft but with a recent development, so I’m going to post my old draft and add to it.

There are several factors that I look for in a web partner:
1. He/she must be interested in developing in the same language as you.
2. He/she must be of relatively equal skill so that you both learn from each other. You may not be equal in terms of development skill but I believe your skills have to compliment your partner’s so that you both have relatively equal value in the relationship.
3. He/she must be have relatively equal passion regarding the topic the website being developed is for.
4. He/she must be have relatively equal motivation to work on the site, otherwise you have a person doing too much and a person doing too little.

What I believe is that, much like a give and take relationship, things must be fair. It does not mean that every task must be fairly or equally shared but as a whole, both people should compliment each others strengths and weaknesses.

Throughout my entire web career, since the middle/end of high school and still ongoing, I’ve been looking for that partner. Given the requirements above, I imagine it might be harder to find a good web partner than finding a significant other! Or maybe I’m not looking in the right places…

In high school, my friend and I wanted to work on a website together. He was sort of into web, much like me. We talked frequently about it but nothing ever happened. I stopped waiting and eventually did my own stuff.
In university and the same thing happened (with another friend). This time, the guy actually had his own web stuff, he migrated his content over to my already existing hosting…and then, never touched the stuff again O_O
Note that both of these are my good friends whom I’m still close with. The first one moved in to something unrelated to web, the second one is currently doing Microsoft SharePoint stuff.

I guess the first guy didn’t have 1, 2, and 4. The second guy didn’t have 3 and 4.

I gotta say, it’s tough. I’m still looking…there have been a few potential candidates recently but nothing seemed to work out. Maybe I didn’t sell that I was looking well enough…

Anyways, I’m posting this because the first guy, from high school, wants a website built. And as of today, I’m going to work with him on it. He’s not interested in the design or development, he will be the relationship between the business and I. I just found it kind of interesting that about a decade after we originally wanted to work together, we finally are. The stakes are higher this time though, it’s not just children playing, we’re both doing this professionally. But I’m honestly really looking forward to working with my friend professionally on something like this. It’s like doing a high school project together…and I know he’s lacking in 1 but he’s got 2, 3 and 4 and in this dynamic, that’s all I want/need. And because he’s a close friend, I’m eager to really do my best and not let him down and I’m sure is opposite is true.

So I officially have a side project now.

I hope things go smoothly…I might ask this guy for a ride but will asking him for requirements work out? He might ask to borrow a game but will his asking when something will be done sour the friendship? While I agree that mixing professional and unprofessional relationships is a bad idea, we’re both aware of our respective working skills (from high school) and I think we both have that working trust in each other. What really sucks is mixing professional and unprofessional relationships when the unprofessional aspect doesn’t measure up to the professional. Going out for drinks with someone and working with someone are always two completely different things.

/4 (LFM): Sheaman: LF1M WEB DESIGNER/DEVELOPER
/4 (LFM): Sheaman: Must develop in PHP/ASP.NET. Know XHTML/CSS2. jQuery/HTML5/CSS3 a plus. Good Group. U Fail = Boot. /roll for loot. Mainspec > Offspec

(that’s my World of Warcraft version of Looking For 1 More)

Posted in All Posts, Development, Friends, My Life, Work | No Comments »

My Saturday is average.

Saturday, September 18th, 2010 at 8:53 pm

I slept last night at around 11pm….It was weird, I came home from a bar and left, my skin very warm and with a headache. Except this time I didn’t drink. -_-; It’s unexplainable! Maybe it’s the bar atmosphere O_O

So last night, I thought it’d be funny if I took some mutual funds papers to bed and fall asleep while reading them. So that when Z found me, she’d think it were funny that I couldn’t stay awake reading it. For some reason, I thought this would be funny…I don’t know why. I was drunk (actually, no I wasn’t…). Anyways, I fell asleep, as planned…and then kept sleeping…until 2pm today. Let me tell you, it was an awesome sleep :D I had at least 4 separate dreams…one was a Futurama episode o_o.

Went out to some dim sum restaurant that Z wanted to go to…had some very good eats. Then walked around Eaton Centre a bit. I got a $30 tripod at Best Buy for a camera that I’m currently borrowing. The lack of a steady hand and a good camera & macro lens go together pretty poorly.

EDIT: Here’s a pic of my new “studio”. Looks good with a tripod…also, taking pictures on the couch didn’t seem to work….too low…my back couldn’t take it.

EDIT: I also got some Mario mints at Best Buy:

I went to the Disney Store and pre-ordered a Blu Ray Beauty and the Beast. Got this pretty lithograph for pre-ordering.

note: this is a picture of MY lithograph, not a picture off the internet…

We also got 2 stuffed animals, a Hamm and a Doug. Zena and I really liked the Hamm (he was very soft!) and the Doug might prove useful later.

The plan is to get some Disney Blu Rays, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdins, The Lion King, etc. Toy Story 3 Blu Ray available from pre-order in early Oct FYI. I personally cannot wait for the Toy Story Blu ray box set trilogy. I was in line at the Disney store, running through Toy Story 3 in my head, especially the ending, and finding myself zoning out into the emotional aspect of it. Hard to describe. Toy Story 3 really was one of the best movies I’ve seen all year, if not the best. I can’t wait to rewatch an HQ version of it.

Zena also purchased Starcraft II for herself. I pray that I don’t start it…

After that, I went to Indigo to look for some CSS books. As I started looking at the selection of books, I felt a big overwhelmed at the number of different books and different topics. HTML5 books, ASP.NET C# 4.0 books…jQuery. I felt uneasy and wanted to go home…to do work. But then I started blogging… :S

You know, I just realized that when I opened and removed the tripod from the box, I completely discarded the instructions. When I buy a Transformer, I’d never look at the instructions on how to transform it. “Instructions are for little girls” I would say. Except I don’t use “little girls”, I say something slightly more vulgar. But aren’t simple instructions the basis of learning fundamentals? Maybe I’m not the type that can instinctively learns from fundamentals, I’m the type and dives in head first and then drowns? or more accurately, dives in head first, learns how to swim enough to get by, but probably not make any records.

I leave you with a Flash plushie I got a couple of months ago. He sports a jagged lightning belt meaning he’s Barry Allen, not Wally West (boourns). He’s still cute though.

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What’s next (for me in web development)?

Thursday, September 16th, 2010 at 5:54 pm

So, the last few days I’ve learned a couple of things
1. My fundamentals suck. I don’t read any books, other than the ASP.NET one that I’m “currently” reading. I never read any html, asp, css, javascript book or anything. Everything I’ve done, everything I’ve learned my entire web career has been self taught or looked up, ie: I look up what I want to do, do it, and learn that “method” and use it elsewhere. For example, if I wanted something to loop, I would look it up.
Learn about for, while, do while. Make my change that needs the loop. And down the road, apply my knowledge to something else.

What this means is
a) I’m strong because I’ve looked a lot of things up.
b) I’m strong because I’m good at thinking outside the box…because I’m able to apply what I know creatively to get something accomplished. And if I can’t think of a solution like that, I look it up and add to my knowledge base.
c) I’m weak at fundamentals. I don’t know the “right way” (by that, I mean, the shortest, most efficient way) to do things because I find creative workarounds to accomplish the same thing. Like when I built a calendar from scratch. A feat in itself but time wasted when I could have used a control or other source code available.
For example: I didn’t know what display: block did. I thought it was just the opposite of display: none. I thought everything was inherently display: block’ed unless you specified display: none, which would hide it. I never learned what display: block was, I just guessed it’s functionality based on some use and the difference between that and display: none.

Conclusion: I will begin my re-education and buy/read some books on: CSS2.
I will learn CSS3 and HTML5 from a book so I get my fundamentals down. From there, I’ll continue learning what/how I currently learn….which brings me to my next point.

2. I’ve often wondered if I should move away from front-end web development and move to back-end. I’m good at both, stronger on front-end (that’s my job). But front-end does get kind boring in the way of “deep” thinking, something I really love. I thought I’d learned enough about front-end to try something more complicated…but because of 1 (above), I realize I’m not as strong as I thought, maybe there’s still room to stay in the front-end side. The thing is, with CSS3 and HTML5, where HTML5 is fundamentally different from HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1, there’s still a lot to learn. I imagine HTML5 will bridge the front-end and back-end development sides…but since I don’t know too much about HTML5, I can’t confirm that statement.

Conclusion: I will continue what I’m doing, both front-end and back-end. I will try to learn CSS3 and HTML5 early and decide whether or not it’s enough to satisfy my “deep” thinking. I will start working on something more complicated to fulfill my back-end need…which brings me to my next point.

3. I’m getting bored with warrenshea.com. Not in terms of blogging, but in terms of updating the site, creating themes, in terms of content/difficulty. I’ve launched 2 themes in the last week, I probably should have staggered myself, but there isn’t/wasn’t any challenge in doing my gmail theme. The idea was fun, the design was okay (like always), but the development was tedious. There are 4 themes I want to do still but currently have no motivation to do any of them. They all include a little “quirk” which would make the development interesting…but not interesting enough.

Conclusion: I think I’ll take a break from warrenshea.com for a bit (again, not the blogging aspect). I’m going to spend more nights re-re-re-re-catching up with ASP.NET….and planning the “EPIC SITE” site I want to build.

I know I write that ever 2 months but THIS TIME I MEAN IT :@

Posted in All Posts, ASP.NET, CSS, Development, JavaScript / Java Frameworks, My Life, New Technologies, Web Developer, XHTML | 2 Comments »

DC Universe Online adware destroys my PC

Tuesday, September 14th, 2010 at 12:28 am

This post was original written last Tuesday (Sept 7, 2010).

So, a couple of days ago, I try to sign up for the BETA for the DC Universe Online MMORPG (I swore never to play another MMO…but I’m too tempted with the superpowers of flight and superspeed…I don’t plan to play it much, just want to experience their powers a little).

There’s a PS3 and PC opt-in, on their official site. I did both. For the PC version, you have to create some Sony account….when I enter in my custom username, I’m hit with an AVG (Free + Awesome Anti Virus software) alert saying some of my files have been infected.

W. T. F.

Anyways, I purge the error and continue with the registration (inputting an on-the-spot random password and one of my spam email accounts)…looks successful (and I think/hope it is).

I do a random restart a couple days later and there’s an error: It can’t find one of the virus-infected files. I’m thinking “good, because I purged it”…but as I find out, there’s still some traces of it in the registry as well as my system32 (which is why the error occurred – the registry was looking for the infected file to start). I stop/kill process run32.dll or whatever…and delete a reincarnating registry entry upon booting my Win7 in safe mode.

Everything looks clean, my registry, my msconfig startup, it looks all good.

This morning, I’m greeted with an error saying files are infected. I remove the files and it crashes my computer (AVG gives you a warning that removing infected, system files causing instability and possibly crash…so I’m not scared). I boot my computer and it can’t find the boot drive. Now I’m scared.

I restart and luckily, I’m able to boot in Safe Mode. I do so and copy my “Users”, “Program Files”, and “Program Data” folders to my external drive…I’m going to have to (and I don’t mind) doing a reinstall. But it sucks cuz I was planning to work from home tonight but it looks like I’ll have to stay in the office to get my stuff done. Boourns. So, because my Win7 is currently in safe mode, I couldn’t check the internet/weather like I usually do in the morning. I walk to work and get rained on. That must be the God that I don’t believe in, pouring salt on my wound. Jerkface.

So my plan is to do a Reinstall of Windows 7…possibly start tonight or whatever.

It’s funny, I’ve probably gone through at least 60 reformats/windows installs throughout my years. When I was younger, I would install Windows 95 and Windows 98 upgrade…and if you connected to the internet, w/o Anti Virus software, you’d get like, viruses….just streaming into your comp. At least that’s how I remember it…so I’d say about 50 of the reformat/reinstalls were 95/98….once I moved to 2000 and XP, it became less of an issue. It was still an issue…because in my process of learning about computers, I’d often change this, download that, try doing other stuff….and it’d often have dire consequences, always resulting in a reformat/reinstall. I’m pretty good now, it rarely happens…I’m also prepared. Like Batman. All my files on are on other partitions/external drives and I do a full backup to DVD(s) every couple years. I have a list for what I need to do in my GMAIL drafts folder. Granted, it needs updating:

Back up
Fonts (c:\windows\fonts\)
Files and Folders (All Users, Program Files, Program Data)
Bookmarks

Restoration
Install Windows
~~Defrag~~
Install AVG – Anti Virus software
~~Install WoW (not in C Drive)~~
~~Defrag~~
Install Steam and Install Counter Strike Source/Plants VS Zombies
Install Warcraft 3
~~Defrag~~
Install Adobe stuff
Get updated Flash Player
Firefox
Chrome
Nero
ATI Drivers
Ultramon (Dual Monitor tool)
~~Vent Client /Server – for WoW~~
WinRar
iTunes
utorrent
Codecs (CCCP)
~~Logitech G11 and SetPoint – custom keyboard/mouse settings for WoW~~
.NET Framework
SQL Management Studio Express
Set up PC/PS3 Media Server

Restore necessary files from
Users, Program Files, Program Data including
My Documents folders
~~WoW Screenshots (saved into c:\program files\world of warcraft\screenshots\~~
FTP information stored within Dreamweaver and FireFTP (Firefox)

Delete backup copies of Users, Program Files, Program Data

EDIT: Thursday (Sept 9, 2010).
I did my reinstall last night. Formatting and reinstalling Windows is so much faster and less painless than before. The time consuming part is installing all the programs, etc…I think I’m pretty much up to speed.

EDIT: Monday (Sept 13, 2010).
My computer’s back up to speed…well, it’s been up to speed for a while. I just installed Visual Studio 2010 that I got from the UWaterloo MSDN. With that installation, my 60GB System Partition was almost filled up. Yesterday, I did some partitioning…merging, deleting, etc. I couldn’t increase the size of the system partition because other partitions had gotten in the way so what I did was move all my files from the other 2 partitions to my 2TB external, and then did a format/partition deletion. From that point on, I repartitioned the drive back to 3 with revised numbers.

Click for larger image

It’s pretty awesome how Windows 7 can partition…no need for Partition Magic. It can’t merge or anything but with my solution, copying files to my external/copying it back, partition merging can be accomplished through other means.

OCD
If you see my partition’d drives, you’ll notice a lot of them are “perfect numbers”. If I can, I try to have the numbers come up to nice numbers, 100.00 GB, 300.00 GB, 50.00 GB. You have to convert them from MB so if I want 100GB, it’s 100×1024 = 102400 MB…I figure out those numbers and dump the rest of the space into another partition. Something about having the number just so. I like things in simple numbers if I can help it.

/my computer is organized so well right now! :D that makes me sleep better at night. it really does.

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