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Warren Shea

Archive for March, 2011

Daily Randomness

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011 at 1:37 am

At lunch, 2 guys and a girl were infront of me, in line to order food. I was looking at the girl’s legs thinking that she was really thin. Like, the jeans looked painted on. And then I looked up at her face and it was a guy. And I was very, very disturbed. *shudder*

I had salmon teriyaki for all 3 meals today. I really like it and it’s healthier than many other things. Anyways, I don’t know how long I’ll really enjoy this dish.. I’m just getting a bit sick of chicken salad and turkey breast sub.

I had 3 Coke Zeros today. Each was 222mL. I drank 666mL of Coke Zero. I am feeling quite devilish.

When I walk home at night….I’m scared that someone from behind is going to rob me or stab me. I’m a bit paranoid that way. So whenever I see a shadow behind me, I tense up, and get ready to defend myself. It’s not a terrible thing…I’d rather be prepared than unprepared, regardless of how unlikely that might be. I’ve been like that as long as I can remember but I’m less scared when there are more people around. But tonight, as I walked home at midnight, I was a bit….uneasy.

I think one of my best, and most interesting skills is being able to pick up on subtle pauses and nuances that people unintentionally do. In some scenarios, I’m quite accurate in understanding something noticeable based on something generally unnoticed. Like a detective…like House…or Batman! It’s how I have my sixth sense in driving. When I walk around other people, I’m generally observant. I used to observe the people around me like I observe people driving around me….but I’ve found that it’s not quite as interesting anymore as people are more prone to do random things now. Stop suddenly to text. Change direction or walk in an inefficient path. I can’t read random chaos! But, as I’ve started to notice, I’m becoming more aware when a guy is checking out another girl. Now, I’ve had quite a bit of practice myself, often trying to do it in a subtle way…so I understand the male mind quite well. So when I’m around people, for example, on the subway or walking to work, I tend to start noticing as other males glance at attractive females. Some are obvious, doing a head turn or tilt or eyebrow raise or something like that….and some do quick glances….where they don’t move at all, but their eyes change direction or dart around. I dunno, it’s just what I’ve been trying to visually pay attention to as I walk around, among a sea of strangers. I’ve got my music but I need to visually challenge myself or try to observe things…and this is the best I can come up with for now. I’m quite pleased when I catch someone do a subtle glance. Or when I catch people glancing at Z.

Firefox 4 came out today. It does a nice, but inconsistent with other browsers, javascript alert. The background overlays and it’s like there’s a div in the middle. I’ve got my FireFTP and my FireBug so I’m quite happy. I’m noticing my Error Console doesn’t seem to work that well though…that could be a pretty important problem as I’ve come to rely on that thing. I’ve found submission to forms, or javascript to run slightly slower. Not sure why, or if that was maybe just my terribad code…I’ll have to observe this more.

It’s been 3 days since I blogged…when I don’t blog for that long, I get really antsy…like I need to write something, fast. Even if it’s a garbage post like this. I dunno, I can go a day without thinking about it now (I couldn’t go a day w/o blogging a year ago tho). But I start to get antsy by 2 days and by 3, I feel like I haven’t written in a week. Maybe time just passes really slowly for me cuz my life is terribly uninteresting. I’ve spent 3 of the last 8 nights working til almost midnight. I went to a basketball game on Friday and worked on Sunday as well…my life is just being dominated by work lately, as I knew it would.

I really wanna spend more time with my Mac, with Link and his musical inadequacy (cuz I can’t play that ocarina to save my life), with ASP.NET 4.0, and with my EPIC SITE. Those are the 4 things I want to do an unfortunately, haven’t touched them much at all.

I’ve been zoning out to music a lot more lately…I’ve been thinking about some things in my life, where i was last year at this time and the months that followed…trying to remember what I had done or how I would have changed it. The things I wish I did. Or didn’t do. Last year was an important year for me…I saw shades of gray that never existed before, I questioned things in my life I had previously just accepted. My life is in such a different place now…but is it better? I don’t know…well, better in many things. But possibly not better in a few key ones. And those few might be the most important ones. Sorry, this paragraph is especially and intentionally vague. Sometimes I just wish I could write what I want to write. But…everyone has their secrets…

Good weekend…

Sunday, March 20th, 2011 at 11:39 pm

Friday’s basketball game was fun, Raptors won and we got free pizza. Score.

Regarding Project Y:
I just finished up after starting today at 7pm. I said I was gonna work on it all weekend but I ended up finishing the bulk of it on Friday in like, 4 hours. It’s mostly done except this paging system that I have to do manually….THAT…should be interesting. Thinking over how to dev it in my head already…my “what to think about as I try to sleep” thinking. Doing that also tends to lead to a dream where I’ve solved the problem in my dream, using completely unrealistic methods that do not apply to real world logic. It’s a nice feeling to wake up and try to remember what dream Warren did or how dream Warren accomplished these goals that still trouble me. It’s a rare feeling when I wake up to those kinda dreams…I kind of relish them.

Anyways, I shoulda spent more time this weekend on Project 3. I’ll need to work late the next few days to catch that up.

My weekend was spent mostly playing Hard Corps: Uprising on the PS3 (already released on the XBOX a while ago). It’s basically Contra. 2D 3rd person side-scrolling shooter with weapon power ups. It’s hard. But not impossible. Takes practice to play well and a lot of practice to beat the regular game. I’m not sure if I have the time to practice and be good enough for that. Also, you need a good partner…which, unfortunately, I don’t have. I can only think of one person off the top of my head who’s good enough at these type of games to play w/ me and he’s out of the country…I tried playing online with someone of equal skill but while it didn’t lag for him (he hosted the game), it lagged for me….caused some unnecessary deaths. Next time, I’ll host the game.

Anyways…I really gotta work my ass off again this week. Sorta looking forward to it though…I’ve really been listening to my music a lot lately….and I’ve really been enjoying it and feeling the words. Like, you can listen to a song a hundred times but you might not get it, you listen to the chorus, the tune…but you only know the words well, not perfect. When you really…understand them all….it’s more interesting. Songs I’ve liked no longer seem to be relevant to my tastes, the opposite is true as well. Also, songs that didn’t really apply to me in my past are more relevant now. Y’know? Just….listening to old stuff but it seems new again. I love it.

Glad to say that my life is finally getting the peace that it had before, months ago. The doctor appointments are less frequent, issues are generally more or less resolved. Some other…life problems seem to be resolved for the moment as well. Everything that was giving me stress, making my blood boil, bothering me….it all seems to be gone. My life is just the way I like it: drama that exists only in my head and created by me. Topic of another post…but I enjoy drama when it’s created by myself and within my control. And I enjoy getting rid of drama that’s out of my control…but I don’t enjoy that kind of drama. Does that make sense? Basically, when my life is going really well, I create my own problems….for fun. And life is going well right now….so I wonder what I’ll come up with :D

I felt like I hadn’t blogged in days and days…but it’s only been 3. I just wanted to write a bit I guess….

Off to bed, need to wake up early tomorrow :(

<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.

Singing Contest

Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 at 9:46 pm

I recently tweeted:

No1 at the office means I can sing aloud w/o fear of sounding terrible, which I most certainly do. If the monitors could shatter, they would

I love to sing. But I’m also quite bad at it. Not terribad, but bad.

Anyways, my friends in highschool and I used to have an N’CHYNK group (…like N’SYNC…but chinese). Like, it wasn’t an “official” group, we never officially preformed, but there were 6 or 7 guys who enjoyed singing occasionally.

Anyways, I lived with 3 of them in UWaterloo first or second year. One time, we had our old highschool friends come visit from Toronto and we were kinda bored and trash talking each other, and decided to have a singing contest.

It was best of 3 songs, me VS my friend. I chose a song, he chose a song, and the judges chose a song…I lost 1-2 and while I don’t remember what songs I lost to, the one I won to was:

Don’t Wanna Lose You Now – Backstreet Boys

As I’m singing to myself, quietly, I was just reminded of this moment and thought I’d write about it.

On another note, the song above has always been a favorite of mine. It’s probably my favorite non-single from the good ol’ pop days.

/back to work but might write more tonight and this wasn’t my intended post for today…

Accomplishments #5.5 – Mid March 2011 Edition

Tuesday, March 15th, 2011 at 11:59 pm

Shows / Movies
127 Hours – Done
ReBoot (entire series) – In Progress
Clannad (entire series) – In Progress
King’s Speech – To Watch
The Kids Are All Right – To Watch
The Fighter – To Watch
True Grit – To Watch
Winter’s Bone – To Watch

Books & Manga
Wicked (Novel) – To Read
Son of a Watch (Novel) – To Read

warrenshea.com
Finish my Social Network post – To Do

Gaming
Finish Super Mario Bros. (Wii) – Complete!
Finish Zelda: Ocarina of Time (N64) – slowly in progress

Web Development and Design
Start ASP.NET (4.0!) book – To Do
Start my HTML5 book maybe? – To Do

Other
Learn my Mac OS – in progress

Notes
Hmmmmmmmmmm………what have I been doing all month other than Mario? I guess I played that from the 5th to the 12th…so that’s 8/15 days.
I played a little DCUOnline, a little WoW (very very casually….like, 3 hours in the last 2 weeks), not much DOTA….I put stickers on Predaking one night…
Well. Honestly. I can’t think of anything. The last 2 weeks have been 1/2 games, 1/2 ????

End of month is looking rough, I think the next 2 weeks are the busiest work weeks I’ve had in like, 6 months. So while I want to say I’ll accomplish a lot, I don’t know if I will. On the plus side, I’m learning some new web things at work. I’m been thinking about my epic site database and how I want to do things…but I don’t know if I’ll start coding in April….even though I said I would…it doesn’t look like I’ll be ready enough.

I got a high contrast ultrasound done today as my original ultrasound and MRI proved inconclusive tests. The doctor poked me with a needle to inject contrast stuff into my blood…but couldn’t get a vein, so he had to take it out. It hurt. And there was a lot of blood. Good times. :S And then he tried again, in the same spot..and it worked….but I still wasn’t happy. I think they figured out, finally, what I have and it looks….non-harmful. Which is good, very good news. I see a specialist in early April so I’ll see what that guy says and confirm. Also, I got my (original) MRI appointment, the one I would have gotten if not for the other, rush, 6 day one. My MRI appointment is June 22, 2011. Sweet, only 4 months later! That really woulda come in handy /sarcasm.

Also, I have a DVD with my MRI on it. It freaks me out. There is no way that the inside of me looks so much like Space, the Final Frontier. Seriously tho, I looked at the MRI for a bit but after a while, I just couldn’t look at it anymore. It’s like looking at myself….if I had X-Ray vision. But not the X-Ray vision that can be used in the perverted way, it’s the X-Ray vision used in the disturbing “I wanna see your insidesssss” way. *shudder*

I thought of a lot of things to do and write about today, while I was working into the night…but alas, my post for the 15th is taken already. And I don’t think I’ll blog right after this as I have more work to do. Q_Q