Warren Shea - World of Warren

Archive for the ‘Work’ Category

<in Orcish> Werk Werk!

Friday, March 18th, 2011 at 1:48 am

So the senior developer that works with me has gone on vacation this week so I’m helping out with 3 of his tasks.

And while the timelines are tight (one week) and as of today (Thursday), I’ve only fully completed 1 of them, I gotta say that I’m having more fun working than I have in months. I can’t disclose the nature of the projects for obvious reasons…but 2 of the 3 of them involve learning something new or building something interesting. And the third project, the one that doesn’t involve learning something new…likely won’t get done by the end of this week :D

Anyways, one of them, let’s call it Project X, involves
1. Developing in a better language than I’m used to.
2. Developing on a different browser and platform.
It’s just…different. Challenging but within my reach.
The best part is that I can apply the things I’ve learned in Project X to warrenshea.com. So I may do that in the near future. Again, I can’t tell you what I’m doing yet….be patient, I’ll reveal it in a matter of time.

So on Sunday-Monday, I worked from 2am-6am. That was brutal and pretty much messed up my day. Good thing for Overtime Pay :) Well, technically I slept from 6am-noon so I missed a few hours in the morning. But ah well, I made it up that night (had to do some testing from 5pm-7pm).
Tuesday – Worked from 9:30am-10:30pm on Project X (13 hours)
Wednesday – Worked from 9:30am-Midnight on Project X (15.5 hours)
Thursday – Worked from 9:30am-4:30pm on Project X, went to Richmond Hill to have dinner with my family (parents, niece, nephew, bro, etc.), came back, worked AND FINISHED Project X! WAHOO!
Friday (tomorrow) – Work on Project Y from 9:30am-5pm, go to a basketball game (Raptors VS Wizards), maybe go to a birthday dinner after, and then come home and hopefully work on Project Y
Saturday – Possible Birthday party (another one), possible Toronto Comicon. If I don’t do that, I’ll be working on Project Y.
Sunday – Project Y.

So Project Y involves (from a technical standpoint)
Taking a Querystring from the URL
Loading a server generated XML via a JSP (see next point) but using the Querystring from the URL (thus, using AJAX to generate the XML as it needs to be after page load)
The JSP loads the XML from a cross-domain XML (this must be done so that my page can access the XML and prevent the cross-domain issue)
Anyways, eventually I end up with the XML, unique to the querystring.
I parse it, output the content to the page. I need to create a paging system manually (I’m using only HTML and JavaScript here, no server side languages).
And done!

Well, as I wrote that out, it doesn’t seem hard at all. Time consuming, but fun. Not doing standard HTML/CSS/JavaScript….using AJAX, XML, Querystrings (in JavaScript)…it’s interesting.

Anyways, that’s Project Y. Sounds easy, the (not hardest but) time consuming part will be outputting the XML into the page…I did the same thing here: [Redacted] a couple years ago…that was fun. God, there’s SO MUCH JAVASCRIPT on that page. browserDetection functions because I didn’t know jQuery at the time. JavaScript AJAX calls because I didn’t know jQuery at the time. Multiple XMLs, JSON….I had months to do that thing. Project Y has 3 days. So I’m gonna work my arse off partly because of the responsibility I feel that I need to deliver to the senior developer, but mostly because I simply can’t wait to do this. Not sure how much I’ll learn but it certainly sounds fun. 2 days to do it is pretty tight, especially considering it’s the weekend and I might do other stuff on Saturday….but I’m always up for a developing challenge.

I swear, if I didn’t have to work the next day, I would have pulled all nighters doing what I was doing this week. I loved it so much. Coding all night, just me, my music, my text editor and my focused, enthusiastic, eager mind. It’s not everyday I’m so excited to do work after all…I may as well milk it.

Anyways, off to bed. Based on the amount of sleep I’m gonna get tonight…I predict being very tired for the Raptor game tomorrow. Stupid me. Seriously.

Posted in All Posts, Browsers, CSS, Daily Randomness, Development, Family, JavaScript / Java Frameworks, My Life, New Technologies, Web Developer, Work, XHTML | No Comments »

…in one year…

Friday, January 7th, 2011 at 11:59 pm

Today is a special day for me.

This day represents a number of things making it one of the most important days of my life. Today marks the one year anniversary of the day I quit WoW and began a new life…

You might be thinking “So you quit playing a game, that’s not a big deal…”. You’ve got some nerve…
Quitting WoW was a big deal, not because I was quitting a game, but because of the amount of time I spent playing this game and the adverse affect playing it had on my life and mental growth.

What my life was like before January 7, 2010

I had 400 days of playtime between March 2005 and January 2010. That’s 400 days of playtime within 57 months ( = 4.75 years = 1734~ days ).
At 400 days of playtime in 1734 days, that’s an average of 0.23 = 23% of the day = 331.2 minutes = 5.5 hours/day…everyday…for 4.75 years.
It was another huge aspect of my life, more or less equal to that of my professional life.

In the years after school, during work, my week of 168 hours (24×7) was split up into:

45 hours of work a week (including commute time)
56 hours of sleep a week (at an average of 8 hours/day)
50 hours of WoW a week
17 hours for everything else – going out, hygiene tasks, laundry, playing other non-WoW games, drawing, coding….

Despite the game taking so much of my life, I was able to:

Maintain my girlfriend for 6 years
Excel in my professional career

The items that were strained were:

Time with friends (and family)

And the things that were sacrificed were:

School

This was literally my schedule the weeks before I quit WoW – it’s absurd to the point that it seems like a joke, but it’s not. I played WoW every moment I could while I was awake and not at work or sleeping. While this isn’t completely accurate as I’d occasionally go out, watch a movie, go out to eat/eat, etc…this was always my weekly plan.
WoW schedule

After January 7, 2010
This was my schedule after I quit WoW. Look at all that time. My life, no longer surrounded by WoW.
WoW schedule

So with my new found free time, I began a number of tasks making this year possibly the most productive year I’ve had in my life. I accomplished so much this year, relative to the years I’d wasted playing WoW.

What I’ve done in the last year

warrenshea.com
I finally got off my ass and created a personal site, something I had intended to do for years. I’m quite happy with it, I was able to integrate WordPress into my code. I was able to move 3 months worth of posts from Blogger to WordPress.
I created 4 different themes which are fairly different visually…though the layout is fundamentally the same, something I hope to change with future themes.

Blogging
300 posts since my first one, on Jan 26, 2010.
300 posts in 12 months is, on average, roughly 25.25 posts/month. That…is a lot of posts.

Twitter
1486 tweets (tho this seems to be incorrect – damn you twitter!) since Jan 18, 2010.
Not that the number of tweets is an accomplishment, it’s more the fact that I didn’t stop using it like I do so many other things.

Improved development skills
Learned general PHP. Went from comfort level 0 to comfort level 8, my skill is probably still around 6-7 though…
Improved ASP.NET C# 3.5. Despite all my studying and development this year, I’d still only give myself a 3 in terms of knowledge. Maybe a 1-2 before this year. I hope to bump that up…
Improved XHTML 1.0 and CSS 2.0 skills
Improved jQuery, Web Accessibility knowledge

Reading
Actually read some novels, a format of media I haven’t touched in years. Completed 4~ novels in the last few months. While I’m generally always reading (Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga), novels have always been something I’ve generally avoided. Too many words. Not enough pictures :) It is an accomplishment for someone like me, to have read 4~ novels among the other things I do/read.

Gaming
This area has been relatively quiet. Nothing worth of note, no long games I would claim as achievements for completion.

Art
This area has also been pretty quiet this year. While drawing is/has always been a hobby of mine, my skill has never been good enough to make it anything more than a hobby, which is why it’s something I’ll only do when I feel like it, I have no desire to improve my skills here.

What I hope to accomplish this year

warrenshea.com
Do I have anything left other than some themes? In a perfect world, I’d like to maintain 2 sites for myself.

warrenshea.com as a professional/resume type site
yet_to_be_determined.com as a personal site, with blog posts, etc. kind of like what I have now but without the projects and resume section. A fully personal site.

I would still like to do a few themes, a professional one, maybe another “theme”Â one like Megaman/Naruto….but of what? Prince of Tennis, Death Note, Hikaru no Go come to mind…
I would like to scrap it all and re-build it now my CSS and HTML skills are much higher than they were a year ago. I would use SASS rather than CSS. I would use HTML5 rather than XHTML 1.0. I would organize my <h#> tags better, since WordPress uses <H2>, I would use…other ones. I would get rid of my general hate of <p> tags and use them over my <br /> tags…

Blogging
I’ve blogged too much last year. Ever since I got sick with the flu, I feel like I’ve been less inclined to blog.
If I’m the type of person to always be addicted to something, blogging would definitely be the World of Warcraft replacement of this year. Considering how much time I blog/write, while it’s significantly less than WoW, it’s the thing I’ve consistently spent the most time on this year. My WordPress is open 80% of the time I’m at my comp and I have so have drafts I haven’t posted…topics that seem relevant at the time and that I enjoy writing but don’t enjoy proof reading.

For blogging this year, I hope it becomes secondary to studying web development, which I’m going to try to make my new addiction (if it were at all possible to force an addiction…). I definitely know I will be blogging less this year. If there were 300 posts last year, I hope to keep it around 150-200 posts this year…and that’s fine with me. I’ve blogged my brains out, it’s time to move on and do something else.

Reading, Gaming, Art
These are no longer goals (except Zelda: Ocarina of Time…and maybe another RPG). I’m done trying to do these things if they interfere with…

Improving development skills
My goals this year is to improve in ASP.NET C#, CSS3. and HTML5. Of the things I want to learn and become proficient in, it’s definitely these 3 items, with a significance on ASP.NET C#. While this has been my goal every year for a few years, I expect this year to be the year that I catch up to the development world. Last year was getting over WoW, it was setting up warrenshea.com and learning PHP, and improving my skills all around. This year is all about going from a 3 in knowledge to an 8 in ASP.NET C#. CSS3 and HTML5 take a back seat to that but are still things I’d like to learn over the next year.

The skill increase leads to…

Epic Site
This is the year that I’m going to do it. I’m going to try to spend time learning ASP.NET C# (again), and really focus on getting this up and running.

How I’ve changed professionally this last year

There have been a couple ups but a lot of downs in my professional life this year, more so than any other year in my life. It has been extremely difficult year.

Roughly 1/4 into the year, my team had a (figurative) bomb dropped on us one Thursday making the next day, Friday, the worst day of work I had ever experienced and ever hope to experience. Personal morale was so low, I didn’t even know this job could affect me that much. Thinking about that day and the reasons why it occurred…it honestly makes me sick to my stomach. It may have even been the worst day of my life this year (in terms of how I felt emotionally)…though that day has some competition………

Roughly half way into the year, I had another professionally crushing moment leaving me depressed for months. While it’s been almost 1/2 a year since it occurred, I know I haven’t recovered from this. There’s still a bitter taste in my mouth that I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of as it’s something I have to face every single day of work.

As this year ends, I wonder if I can take another year like this one. As my ambition increased, so did my disappointment. As I start to care more about my job and career, the more I start to dislike it. It was much easier coming in to work every morning, doing task A, B, and C, and leaving know I’d accomplished A, B, and C. It seems like these days are: doing task A, going to meeting B, going to meeting C, doing task A, meeting D, leaving task A for tomorrow. Like I’m not doing anything. Nothing of personal value/pride/gain. I think I work best doing small tasks quickly and well. Quantity is an important aspect of my professional life. Without frequent moments of pride, I can’t help but feel…unmotivated and aimless. I hate long projects that last more than a couple weeks and that’s honestly all I have I right now.

To be honest, I don’t think I’d dislike what I’m doing now if not for what happened earlier this year. If I’ve changed at all this year regarding my outlook on my professional career, it is that I’m less naive. But I’m also very bitter. I’ve been burned so many times this year…it’s harder and harder to keep my work smile.

How I hope to change professionally this year

There’s a certain groove I used to have when I worked. I didn’t care about anything political, I did a good job on what I worked on, woke up every morning ready to tackle my projects, and left every day knowing I’d accomplished and learned enough that I wouldn’t carry the thought of work with me. I’ve lost that this year but I want to recapture it, somehow. I don’t quite know how yet…but I want to make work fun again. It hasn’t been for a while…not like it used to be.

How I’ve changed in my mindset of relationships and love this last year.

This year was a big year for me. I was able to finally answer a life-long question/riddle/dilemma that had plagued me for years. There had been something I’d been wondering, if the path I’d been on had been correct or not. It was always a nagging thought in the back of my mind but I’ve finally put it to rest. I can’t stress how important it is to answer a riddle that only you can answer and have no means of figuring out other than….you just realize it. It’s so…settling. I feel so relieved :)

…in one year…

How much will change by Jan 7, 2012?
What will I accomplish?
How will my life have changed?
What will I have figured out?

We’ll see….in one year…

Posted in All Posts, Blogging, Daily Randomness, Epic Site (yet to be named), Games, Introspection, Love, My Life, Past, Web Developer, Work, World of Warcraft, worldofwarren.com, Writing | 2 Comments »

Tire Gauge

Friday, December 17th, 2010 at 2:44 am

So, I took the last 3 days off (used vacation days). Why?

All 3 days have some sort of Holiday Potluck/Gift Exchange/Social Gathering. Well, all 3 days have some type of social gathering/mingling thing. And let me say, I hate that stuff. I would rather code for 4 hours than do 30 minutes of social mingling. I would rather work overtime on Friday night than mingle with people I never talk to or people I’m never going to talk to again. I hate the idea that corporations or departments want everyone to be friends. To force them. I don’t understand why they don’t get that we’re merely co-workers. Any friendship being created should be natural and not forced.

I guess I just hate mingling with people, people that I don’t know, people that I wouldn’t talk to outside of work. I’m paid to develop, not to talk. If I wanted to be social, I would have been….I dunno, but not a developer. Granted, this is a very…extreme point of view of social recluse (me).

I do social things with non-friends (read: coworkers) sometimes. And they’re okay. So these gatherings aren’t the only reason I took these days off.

The other reason is: gift exchanges.

Now, I’m the type of person that….well, remembers when I’ve been wronged. I remember if someone has pissed me off, I rarely forget stuff like that. I’m stubborn and I hold a grudge forever. It’s not mature, it’s not rational, but it’s me.

I remember when I was in art class in elementary school. I had brought in a Mega Man Nintendo Power and was using it for artistic reference. My friend decided to take his exact-o knife and cut a 0.5cm cut on one of the pages. For what reason, I could only fathom. Idiocy comes to mind. But the result was clear: I was furious. You let someone touch your stuff and they’re idiots, they don’t care what happens to it, it’s not their stuff. Common courtesy is something the average person lacks, imo.

When I was in highschool, I had just purchased a brand new Garfield book. This dude spilt a can of Sprite all over the book (I had the book less than 1 hour!) and all the pages got wrinkly and wavey. He didn’t apologize or anything, he just insisted: “It’s alright”. Well, yes, I could still read it…but the pages were all wrinkled and wobbly when they dried. The book, which was new when I got it, was no longer new because of someone’s accident. But y’know accidents happen, it’s the lack of apologizing and admitting that bothers me. What is “alright” to them is not alright to me.

When I was in University, I had accidentally thrown out my credit card in my garbage. My mother, every Wednesday night, collected all the garbage in the house and put it in a big black garbage bag. Being Wednesday, she had done it, and I was unaware my credit card had mixed in with all the garbage. Realizing my mistake later that night, I went to the garbage bag only to see my credit card cut up into slices. Confused, I confronted my mom asking: “Why did you cut up my credit card?!”. She said “Well, you were throwing it away so I thought I should cut it up”. Fair enough. I asked “If you were going to cut it up, couldn’t you have asked me about it before cutting it? Maybe check the date on the card, check that it hadn’t expired yet”. She replied with “I did check the date, the card was expired”. Except….you know what, the card wasn’t expired. She read the date and didn’t do the math or the logic or whatever it is that your brain does to determine if a date is in the past or future. She just…man, she didn’t think. She saw the credit card in the trash and rather than simply ask me
a) Did you mean to throw your credit card out?
or
b) Did you want me to cut this credit card up?
she just did it. So I had to get a new credit card…
Not only that, but why was she going through my trash in the first place?! (again, something my mom did that really pissed me off).

It bothers the fuck out of me when shit happens and affects me, which isn’t my fault, but because people don’t
a) think (because they’re idiots)
b) care (because what’s not theirs doesn’t matter to them)
Whatever retarded karma or whatever that is really bothers me, that someone’s ridiculously avoidable mistake or error in judgement or idiocy could negatively affect my life.

Okay. Relax. I went off track. I will write more on this later (it’s actually a post I’ve had in my drafts for a while now).

Getting back to: I remember when I’m wronged and gift exchanges.

Last year, in my department gift exchange, I got a terrible gift. I mean, there’s alcohol, that’s whatever. There’s tons of that. There’s some other stuff that
a) has a christmas theme
b) is related to food, can be used around the house (a bowl or a sushi set).
Well, last year, I got the most useless gift ever.

A Tire Gauge.

This one:

Definitely the worst gift for a number of reasons:
1. Who the Fuck NEEDS a Tire Gauge?
2. Who the Fuck WANTS a Tire Gauge?
3. IT’S A FUCKING TIRE GAUGE

Needless to say, I got the gift, which nobody wanted to trade me for, and which might possibly be the worst gift I’ve ever gotten in my life ever. What stings is that I also spent $20 to get a gift someone else might have actually wanted. I basically see it that I purchased this WORSE THAN USELESS (because useless would be something that was “meh”…but this is worse than useless because it makes me ANGRY everytime I think about it) gift.

So, given me, the fact that I hold grudges forever and never forget stuff, I’ve sworn off these gift exchange events.

The reason why I don’t let people touch my stuff, books, toys, whatever, the reason why I’m OCD is…I trust people and they disappoint me. And when I get disappointed, I try never let myself feel that again. I learn my lesson quickly, burned once is all it takes, and I take precautions never to be burned again.

/thinks I need to start making a RAGE category…cuz man, I got lots of those.

Posted in All Posts, OCD, Work | 2 Comments »

I’m screwed tomorrow.

Monday, December 6th, 2010 at 5:24 pm

Plan:
06:30am – Wake up
07:15am – Leave condo, Drive to meeting area
08:30am – Arrive at meeting area, begin presentations
12:00pm – Lunch
01:00pm – Continue presentations
05:30pm – Dinner
06:30pm – Leave
08:00pm – Arrive home

Nevermind the 13.5 hour day.
Nevermind the 8 hours of presentations.
I can’t even easily do the first thing: 6:30am – Wake up

No amount of sleep will keep me awake and for 8 hours…and there’s no chance I can sleep at 9 or 10 or whatever….

Sigh……

Anyways, just thinking about tomorrow….I need something to focus on for 9 hours. Something to keep me entertained, in any way….I remember last time, I thought about blog post ideas. I could probably do the same…yes, that sounds like a plan!

Now I’m off to get my hair cut! My highlights are fading out :( I think the last time I dyed it was Early/Mid August…quite a while ago!

Will write more upon my return. I’ve neglected the blog for too long now….damn GT5…but more on that later!

Posted in All Posts, Daily Randomness, Work | No Comments »

I am. Burnt. Out.

Saturday, October 16th, 2010 at 4:09 pm

I woke up at 3pm today…and I’m currently getting ready to go to work (yes, on a Saturday). I’ve worked 3 weekends in a row and I’m already scheduled to work next weekend. I’m exhausted.

My whole routine is off lately. I’m not caught up on my shows, Hell’s Kitchen, House, 30 Rock, How I Met Your Mother, Big Bang Theory, Office, Smallville.

I still have to finish Mad Men, True Blood S3…

I’ve been buying blu-rays but I don’t have time to watch the extras…

My free time consists of watching a show here and there…and…well, that’s it. Every other night I work on my side project for a few hours…it’s just like when I was working on warrenshea.com…..but now I’m doing it for someone else which is much less gratifying.

My blog posts have been lacking as well…I’ll be honest, for this month, I really wanted to do 1 post/day. Which I haven’t done in a long time, it’s pretty difficult to keep up (for me) unless you’re spiritually/emotionally troubled (that’s when I get my best thinking done) – and I haven’t been, I’ve been too busy for that sh!t. While I’ve been keeping up with the 1 post/day (I’m one day behind but I can make that up), some of my posts in the last week have been pretty terrible. Even for me.

I have a vacation coming up, I impulsively took the 25th to the 29th off cuz I am just f*cking done. Frozen on the inside, burnt on the outside (so it balances out) – Lisa Simpson.

I don’t really have anything planned for the vacation. My hope is to take some me time: catch up on all the shows listed above, watch some blu ray commentaries, study ASP.NET and HTML 5. I haven’t touched either in so long…how can I retain my knowledge if I don’t practice/have time to practice? It all seems counter productive/efficient.

Like I said, so far I’ve worked the night of the 1st and 2nd (Fri and Sat), I worked on the 11th on my side project (Thanksgiving Monday), I’m going to work today and maybe tomorrow (16 and 17), I have to do some work next weekend on the 24…we also have to do work on Sunday the 31st. I’m praying that my vacation will prevent me getting called into that though.

Where’s the me time? Reliable to a fault is certainly killing me…I’m starting to rethink my life and the paths I’m on…I may need to change them to make myself happy….

Ever since I stopped working on warrenshea.com, I’ve also stopped my technical posts, relating to the web, etc. Meaning I’m not learning anything new, worthy of blogging about.

/this last month has sucked. and it’s only 1/2 way done. something needs to change.

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