Category: Uncategorized

Slow Death

I’m getting so completely and absolutely slammed it’s not funny.

I’ve begun to wonder where the flaw is in my handling of this situation, and I’m beginning to think it’s a combination of low reading speed, bad time management, and having a lot of stuff on my plate at once. It’s undoubtedly at least partly my fault. It’s not that I’m procrastinating — I recognize that procrastination in a dog-eat-dog program will basically skewer you very quickly (which is happening). It’s that the time I do have is managed in such a way that I have to split my attention across two or three different activities at any one given time. It doesn’t help that I’ve already had to basically blow off a client because I don’t have the time to complete a major work request. Not only is that a monetary hit, I’m always afraid of alienating the client by not being attentive enough. Of course, the big thing I value about my client relationships is communication, which has saved me from a whole lot of problems (and has probably stopped me from losing a client or two).
Far from it from me to diverge from my main point. I’m not completely to blame here — the pace of the class is cutthroat, and I’m not the only one questioning my own abilities. The consensus between a fellow writing tutor and myself seems to be that we both woefully misjudged our abilities at the start of the program. We assumed that we would only have to read the material and analyze in class; instead, we are expected to mark up the book and do some small amount of analysis on our own while reading. This turns two hour’s worth of reading into what is easily eight hours (which is about as much time as I spent reading on Sunday). The pace of the class itself is such that there’s a paper due tomorrow on the reading which is also due tomorrow, which means I can’t turn the paper in (or even write it) because I’m too tired to finish the reading.

…

So why am I posting this?

White Flag

I surrender!
I’ve decided I can’t take any more reading tonight. I realized today that I’ll probably have to take a huge hit in my work hours in order to stay sane this quarter with this workload and everything else going on. My boss probably won’t be happy, but she’s let me do it before. I’ll probably come to a conclusion by the end of the week and adjust my hours accordingly.
I only made it halfway through the reading, but of course, I’ll catch up tomorrow. Today’s Enrollment Growth DTF meeting really screwed up my ability to read, and I’m deader than a doornail.
Pages Read Today for Class: 84

Pages Read to Date For Class: 266 (89 pages/day average)

Books Read to Date For Class: 1 (1 in progress)

The First Two Days

Class started yesterday, so I thought I’d share my reflections on what’s gone on so far. I meant to do this last night, but obviously didn’t get around to it, or else I would’ve posted before now.

As most readers probably know, I’m taking The Novel: Life and Form this quarter — a class that focuses mostly on literary interpretation and comprehension. The first day consisted both of reviewing the syllabus and discussing some of the historical background behind our first reading, The Princess de Clèves. Thad is a very energetic and knowledgeable faculty member; he is very clearly versed in much of the historical background surrounding this novel. The expectations for this class are extremely high — five-page papers, 125 pages of reading a night on average, a presentation to the class once every other week, and a question on the text brought to class every day — but the faculty evaluations I’ve read about him suggest that this is the norm and ends up being quite beneficial.

I came home and had lunch with Amanda while watching Season 2 of Quantum Leap. After she left for her class, I read quite a bit of the book. By the time I was done reading around 11PM, I had read 108 pages (the introduction, editor’s note, chronology, and parts 1 and 2). Quite impressive for me, since I usually don’t do that much in such a short amount of time.

I went to class this morning and met up with a fellow writing tutor, who is taking the same course. He apparently had a rude awakening last night because of the length of the text. I’m not surprised; even I didn’t really expect that the reading would take so long. The entire class day basically consisted of dissecting the text, which I enjoyed immensely. It’s been a long time since I really have been able to get deeply into the text and discuss the details. The last time I did that was in high school.

Tonight entailed 76 pages of reading from The Princess de Clèves, which I haven’t quite completed at the time of this writing. I still have about 20 pages left. Overall, this is going to be a very hectic quarter between my work at the Writing Center, my work with the Enrollment Coordination Committee and the Enrollment Growth DTF, and my work with naturalaxis. I’m basically going to get slammed. As a good friend of mine put it, "we’re going to get our asses kicked, but we’re paying to get our asses kicked." I second that thought. Hopefully, it doesn’t completely and utterly cripple me in the process. I have confidence I will succeed, however, since I usually do, albeit with a fair amount of griping.

Pages Read to Date for Class: 184 (92 pages/day average)
Class Books Read to Date: 1

Pixelary

So, for the last year or so, I’ve been tinkering around with a new client management system for naturalaxis, and even partially coded it at one point before losing the code. Anyway, I took another shot at it, and it’s currently coming along alright. I’m already using it in a production environment to track my active accounts for the company. The current features — which are limited to the consultant’s interface — include:

  • Support ticket functionality, including the capacity to add notes on ticket items
  • Streamlined timesheet review and posting
  • Contact management: each account can have multiple people associated with it

Percentage-wise, the code is probably about 40% complete, at least in terms of being able to use it for both clients and consultants without any bells and whistles. Some things I still need to finish to put this code completely into production:

  • Complete the coding for the billing interface, which I haven’t even started yet. This is the really important part of the program, since it sends the bills out and provides me with the up-to-date information on each account’s standing.
  • Add e-mail functionality, which I have a component for, but haven’t wired into anything yet. Ideally, the component will be wired into anything that generates output. I’m likely using PHPMailer to save myself a lot of work here.
  • Completing the code for account credits and charges.
  • Making the generation of some information more dependent on the configuration files to make generalizing the system easier.
  • Finish any code I haven’t finished (duh).

That’s the short list, but contains most of the major stuff. There are some things I’m holding off on until the software is initially released:

  • E-mail gatewayAbility to e-mail a support address and automatically add a ticket to the system, provided that the originating e-mail address has an account within the system itself. I expect that this article from evolt.org will help quite a lot.
  • Client management of multiple accountsOne user in the system should be able to manage multiple accounts within the same system on the client side. The way the code is currently implemented, a single user can only be assigned to a single account unless multiple user names are used.
  • System configuration wizardThe skeletal framework for this is there, but probably won’t make it into the initial release. I’d love to be able to change the system configuration without actually using the configuration file.
  • System installerThis is an involved component in and of itself. The installer would automatically set up the MySQL databases needed for Pixelary, create the configuration file, create initial users, and populate the databases accordingly.

The goal here is to get something that I can release via SourceForge — probably under the BSD license. We’ll see about that — for now, I just want a running system that I can be proud of.

Reactions on the Gubernatorial Election

The Seattle Times ran an article today regarding the election, stating that Rossi intended to challenge the results. Figures, but here’s why it won’t affect this election:

First, state law only allows for three recounts via Chapter 29A.64.070 of the Revised Code of Washington. It explicitly states that "After the original count, canvass, and certification of results, the votes cast in any single precinct may not be recounted and the results recertified more than twice". Thus, no further recounts or checks are available; legally, Christine Gregoire is governor-elect of Washington State.

Second, from the standpoint of sheer popularity, Rossi campaigning for voter reform would likely only alienate him from the populace. This would be an extremely stupid undertaking on his part; far more effective would be a citizen action group committed to ensuring that the State of Washington reform its electoral procedures. This does, of course, assume that the blame lies with the State and not explicitly with King County, where several election mishaps occurred — a careful and thoughtful review of electoral procedure at this point is warranted, but not if it is spearheaded by Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi. That smacks of revenge, and is not the spirit in which such reviews should be held.

Not that Mrs. Gregoire is all that innocent either. The article quotes her as saying:

Finishing on top in a vote count had Gregoire putting a much rosier tint on things.

She said the state’s election system has proven itself a “model to the rest of the nation and to the world at large.”

“This is the biggest display of democracy I have ever seen,” she said.

This is so incredibly wrong that it’s almost funny that she dared to utter such a thing. This was shameful for the entire State; not only did we only elect a governor by 130 votes, we underwent several hand recounts in what essentially amounted to a pissing contest between Democratic and Republican parties. This was not a model, unless the model we want to set for the rest of the world is that, by complaining enough about the results, the party you want to win will.

Washington State was a farce in this electoral year. Perhaps we should take measures to ensure that nothing this idiotic happens again.

Weather Script

So I completely wasted my time the last few hours and wrote a command-line-based PHP script that fetches the weather from wunderground.com, parses the resulting HTML file, and outputs the results on the command line. This is a lot like what some Eggdrop scripts do (and they even get the output from the same site). The result looks like:


pellis@localhost(~): weather 98296

Forecast for Everett, Washington (98296; as of 4:53 PM PST on December 22, 2004):
Currently 39F | Humidity: 100% | Dew Point: 39F | Wind: North at 0 mph
Pressure: 30.52 in | Conditions: Clear | Visibility: 10.0 miles | Sunrise/Sunset: 07:55 AM (PST)/04:19 PM (PST)

A completely worthless use of my time, but an interesting exercise. I may end up using this.

WA’s Supreme Court orders Ballots Counted

From the Seattle Times Breaking News service:

Wednesday, December 22, 2004 1:56 PM

Supreme Court orders King County to count disputed ballots

The state Supreme Court ruled today that King County should count hundreds of recently discovered ballots in the hand recount of the still-undecided governor’s race.