Reprieve

A couple bits of good news the other day have really re-energised me. First of all, as of Thursday, I have been approved by the Lao government. Apparently, my visa has also been approved which is good because I had thought I'd have to go through that process once I got there. I'm still not 100% sure on what my visa situation in terms of my travel arrangements but at least it has been approved.

The other really good bit of news is that my start date is going to be pushed back. I don't have the new date yet but the tentative date is Sept 20 for arrival in Bangkok. This is really good news because I was really starting to feel stressed out from the lack of time to get ready to go.

Since then I've really found a boost in my energy to get work done to go. I still have a lot to do but it feels really good to have the time I'll need to get it all done.

Preparations

Still working on getting everything together for the trip to Laos. The time crunch is really starting to get a little crazy. The current start date in Laos is Sept 1 which means if I subtract a day to get from Bangkok to Vientiane and 2 days to get from here to Bangkok then I'm leaving on Sept 29. Aug 19-24 I'm in Montreal and Ottawa for orientation so that makes things pretty crazy.

I'm increasingly thinking of not running my Linux box while I'm away. At first I thought I would keep it going but I won't be around to maintain it and shutting it down will make things much easier. This increases my impetus to get the new design live on tildefrugal.net so that I can still keep my blog going on there. I have signed up for a gmail account so I'll probably just have everything forward to there or just give that address out to people to use depending on how much I want to keep the spam down.

Somewhere in the middle of this I'm also supposed to complete 80 hours of volunteer work. I've gotten started on this but I'm getting a bit concerned about having enough time to complete it. Not to mention that I haven't even been final approved yet!

All in all, August is going to be pretty nuts for me. I'm suspecting that they're going to have to approve me pretty soon or bump back my start date but I don't want to count on that until it's a definite.

Laos bound

Well the big news lately has definitely been that I got offered a co-operant position with CUSO to go to Laos for 6 months. I'm still waiting for the final approval overseas but it's pretty much a go. Definitely shaking things up in my life now.

Things have gone from not doing much at all to suddenly being very busy. Switching to printing on fibre paper for black and white means that my time in the darkroom doesn't go as far (although the results are worth it). I'm also trying to work on my final project for Photoshop class but am feeling a little bit blocked at the moment. And, now I'm trying to make plans for going to Laos in a few months. Still don't have the final date but it's probably going to be in September and I'll have a pre-departure orientation in Ottawa some time in August.

Hopefully, once my classes finish up things will be a bit calmer. Or at least, they'll be more focused to-wards the things I need to get done before I leave. There's a lot of different things I still need to do. I'm trying to figure out photo equipment with regards to what i want to take. I also have a lot of issues around film (how much to take, can I get it overseas, should I process it overseas) that still need to be worked out. On top of that, I'm trying to find a new camera bag and possibly a point and shoot camera that I can carry along with me at all times. Then there's also the matter of getting some repair work done on some gear. I have 1 camera that's not operating (and may be dead), another that really should be checked out and have a battery conversion done before I leave (although it works great), and another camera that needs to be checked out.

Then there's the other things I should be doing too. I really should get the computer room and basement sorted out before I leave because I'm not sure how much travelling I'll do after my placement so I really don't know when I'll be back. I also want to complete the update and re-design work on the site so that can go "live" at tildefrugal.net and be moved off of my development platform.

And there's probably 50 other little things I haven't even thought about yet.

Copyright and fair use

Had a bit of a strange experience with copyright recently (no, I am not being sued by the RIAA or MPAA or any similar organization). I started working on my final project for my Photoshop class (still 6 weeks left so I'm really early on this) and I was looking online for some images to use in the project. In particular, I was looking for pictures of gears to incorporate into the image. I found a few basic graphics but a lot of the other stuff I found was more artistic. For some reason I was really bothered by the idea of ripping off another artist's work for my own image. What's particularly odd about this is that the week before I had no problem with ripping off 50+ images from the net to use in another project for the class. In that case though, I was looking for journalistic pictures. I briefly thought about the copyright issues involved in using other people's photos for that project but dismissed my concerns because I knew what I was doing would be considered "fair use". The same would be true for the pictures of gears I was looking for but it felt wrong to use them. I think the primary issue was that the pictures of gears seemed much more artistic or creative than the news photos I used for the other project. It felt wrong to be using someone else's creative efforts in my own project. However, that's not to say that there isn't creativity involved in getting good news photos. It's interesting because I obviously have some type of division between artistic photos and news photos in my mind but I was never really made aware of it before. I'm still not exactly sure where I draw the line.

I suppose I could go even further with this and look at my beliefs with regards to other copyrighted media and what my beliefs around piracy are. I'm not entirely sure why I should feel that using someone else's work in a fair use situation should be morally objectionable while I feel no moral objections to-wards some forms of copyright violation. I think I'll save that discussion for another day though.

Long delay in updates

Wow, not working has seriously put a cramp on my updating schedule. It's not that I don't have the time to update it, it's just that I find myself doing other things. I think the big reason is that I used to update frequently while I was at work. Slow times at work were kind of odd, you didn't really have anything to do that was work related but it also wasn't exactly free time. You had to pick things that you could do that you could also drop pretty quickly if a call came in. So working on my blog was great, I could start a post and if a call came in, then I'd just leave that window open and handle the call. If I had the chance, I might still update while I was on the phone, or I'd just pick it up later.

I can't believe how much of a difference leaving Eastlink has made though. Even just the next day my mother was commenting about how much more positive I seemed. It's like a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I'm still looking for work but I'm also focusing pretty heavily on the 2 courses I'm taking right now (Advanced Photo and Advanced Photoshop). I'm really enjoying both classes. I haven't really gotten too deep into any photoshop work lately but I've been spending a lot of time in the darkroom printing photos. I think my printing has really improved although it still needs some work. Hopefully next week I'll learn how to print on fibre paper and I'll be able to give that a try.

Other than that, I haven't been up to much of anything. I haven't had much of a social life lately as it is and Landon's still away so I haven't been up to much at all. I have been downloading a ton of anime lately. Mostly I'm downloading fansubbbed material that isn't available in English with a commercial release. I can't believe the quality of the work that's been done and this is all from fans! It really puts some commercial releases to shame. My only concern though is how much of an impact it would have on commercial anime releases coming to North America. It would suck if companies stopped releasing stuff because it had already been released as a fansub.

Listening means you not talking

I guess it might have something to do with the fact that I only have 3 days left at work here but I've been really in a "rant mode" lately.

One of the things I'm noticing is that rude customers are bugging me more. But I'm also noticing that there's a lot of little rude things that people do that they probably don't even realize they're doing.

Frequently customers cut off my opening spiel on the phone. This is particularly annoying if they cut me off before I give my name and then proceed to ask who they're speaking with. Or if they may cut you off before you get to say anything and then immediately ask if it's the internet department (which again, I mention in my opening spiel). Another related thing I experience on a regular basis is customers who start with asking how I'm doing (which is nice) but then proceed right into talking about what their problem is before you get a chance to respond. I think a lot of people have just adopted, "Hi how are you today?" as a standard opening line but have forgotten that it's a question that they should give time to be answered. If you honestly cared about how I'm doing then you'd give me the time to answer. If you don't care (as these people obviously do not), then don't bother asking, it's that simple.

Related to this is people who will cut you off in general or just not stop talking long enough for you to get a word in edgewise. What I find most annoying is the group of people who have mastered the art of pausing for just long enough for you to think you can start talking but then cut you off as soon as you try to get something out. Often the customer will go on at great length about things which are completely unrelated to the problem at hand. This is especially annoying if you then finally manage to ask them what the error message says and they then proceed to either not have it or omit all of the pertinent information. Often it goes something like this, "yeah the error says 'Some errors occurred while processing the requested tasks,' blah blah blah." Well every error in sending and receiving mail in Outlook Express starts that way so this is completely useless. If the customer then proceeds to start talking again about more stuff (related or not) it's particularly annoying because you just want to get the chance to ask them what the complete error message says so you can determine what the problem actually is.

On the opposite end of the spectrum are customers who expect you to instantly know what the problem is without them giving you any information. Usually this goes something like, "yeah my email isn't working, what's wrong?" Unless there's a system-wide outage there's really no way that I can answer that question. If I don't even have your account up yet then I can't tell what's going on with your connection which means that I don't know anything about the problem. I think a lot of these customers think that just by telling you the problem or error message that you'll instantly know what the problem is. Unfortunately, it doesn't usually work that way. Even with the complete error message there's not always a lot of detail to tell you exactly what the problem is. Troubleshooting is all about a process of elimination. You check settings and try different fixes until something works. Now a good tech will have the experience and instincts to narrow things down pretty quickly but they still have to start somewhere. Usually you have to start with the easiest or least intrusive fix and go from there.

Been awhile since I've updated things

Well vacation and the trip to Toronto have put a pretty big delay on my blogging.

Here's the quick update. Toronto was really fun, didn't really do much of anything other than just hang out with my brother and his wife but it was really cool. I got to see a lot of their neighbourhood and a lot more of Toronto than I saw the last time I was really there back in grade 9. My impression of Toronto before going was more of the "big city" tons of skyscrapers idea but it's not like that at all, you only have that in a fairly contained area of downtown and then everything else is pretty much 4 storeys tall as far as the eye can see. I think if I had to move up there I could handle it but I'm still not really sure how I'd feel about living there. I think the key is to find the cooler stuff that's around and then you can really enjoy yourself.

The other big update is that I've put in my notice at Eastlink. I'm just way to fed up with the working environment and it's time for me to move onto something else. Unfortunately, I really don't know exactly what will be yet. I didn't get into the photo programme at the community college and I turned down my acceptance into the IT programme. Still trying to figure a lot of things out.

My vacation is nigh

Just need to make it through another 3 hrs or so and then I hit vacation time. It's been a year since I've had any time off here so I'm pretty psyched about having a good 2 weeks away from here.

It's been a crazy week. Sneddy quit last Friday and that had a lot of us pretty down. Fortunately, he did get offered a job with Nova Group and will be heading to Japan in November so that's really cool for him. I pretty much figured that while I think living in Japan would be cool that I wasn't at all interested in the job. The only thing that keeps me going at Eastlink right now is the fact that my home life is really stable and pretty good. I'd like to move out but the support system I have at home right now enables me to function, I really don't want to mess with that until after I have a better work situation in place. Going to Japan could give me some cool aspects of living in Japan but it would also give me a ton of culture shock and I know how hard that can be. Combine that with a job that I'm not interested in either and I really don't know how well I'd be able to cope with that. I hope Sneddy has a good time though.

I'm still wrestling with the whole work and school question. I've looked through the community college's calendar again and I still don't feel any interest towards their IT programme. I had briefly considered their web concentration instead of networking but that didn't feel right either. A big problem that I have though is that their course descriptions are incredibly vague. There's almost no information on what technologies or programs you work with in each of the courses. I'm pretty sure it will be a pretty heavy MS focus and I really am not interested in that. I'd rather a UNIX focus and I don't think that's the case.

I really don't think that I want to go into the fields that their IT programme prepares you for. So I'm just stuck with the question of what to move into. I'm really thinking that the community college's printing course sounds cool but it has even fewer details on the courses than their IT programme does. I'm thinking that I see myself more in a situation where I'm working with scanning and manipulating images and printing them out as opposed to managing a network. It's really annoying because my mother is trying to encourage me to take the IT programme because I've always been interested in computers but in the past she's commented that she really doesn't see me working as a systems administrator and I think I agree with her. So I don't think she really understands what their programme covers. I really don't want to take the programme but I keep feeling pressured into doing it. What really sucks though is that the printing course is a 2 year programme with start times every 2 years and the next start time is 2005 so it's not even an option for this year. My only concern is if I'm more just interested in this type of programme as an excuse to justify buying some really cool and expensvie scanners and printers for my own personal use.

Trapped by work

Work has really created a strange situation that just leaves me feeling trapped. They want to maintain a certain level of turnover within our department. As far as I know, this is for cost reasons; they want the more senior agents on higher pay scales to leave and be replaced with new agents on a lower pay scale. I can understand the argument although personally I think that the extra value that experienced agents bring to the team is far greater than the slight extra cost of our salaries. Unfortunately, there's no easy way to measure this so it's not really something I can prove to management.

From what I've heard (from management), they would like to see an average turnover rate of 18 months for employees. I've been here now for 3 years (just hit my 3 year mark yesterday) so I'm well past that. From management's perspective, people like me are messing up their turnover numbers, they'd really prefer to see senior agents like me leave.

As I said above, I can understand this perspective. I may think that perspective is wrong but that's the way things are right now. The perspective itself is not the problem. The problem is with 2 other situations at work.

The first situation is that there is no opportunity for advancement at work. I want to make it clear that I'm not just saying this as a bitter employee who hasn't been able to advance while others have. There is literally, no room for advancement. Actually, that's not entirely true, it is theoretically possible to advance to Tier 2 support. However, there are currently only 3 Tier 2 jobs and the Tier 2 agents also have nowhere to move. So unless more Tier 2 spots are created or a Tier 2 leaves, there's nowhere else to go. And even then, you get 30+ agents all competing for that 1 job. If I ignore re-organizations, only 2 people have moved from my department to other departments within the company. Counting re-organizations, 4 other employees who were in my department when I started are now in other departments in the company. Given the number of people that have worked in my department during the time I've been here, that's a pretty poor statistic. I really wish I had the actual numbers for how many people have worked here during that time and for how long but I don't. I can definitely say it's been at least 50-60 agents because we have over 30 now and I can easily think of 20 people that don't work here now.

The other problem is that work refuses to give out references. Again, this is not a case of me going to management asking for a reference and being turned down. This is an actual policy of our department (and possibly company-wide). Tier 2 agents used to give out references but they have been told not to. The same applies to both team managers for the department. The only thing that the company will do is allow us to refer a potential employer to the HR department where they will confirm that we did indeed work for the company. This makes it more difficult to leave the company because any job that wants references is going to want a reference from your current employer.

So the end result of this is that the company does not want to retain me at my current position but then have erected barriers for me to leave it. I can't move within the company and they're making it harder to leave. In the end, I want to leave this position and the company wants me to leave the position but I'm still stuck in this position.

Corporate wisdom

I had wanted to stay away from bitching about work too much on this blog but this is just ridiculous. Management has come up with this "solution" to the schedule which involves moving our work week from Sunday to Saturday to Monday to Sunday. Supposedly, this is to give us more weekends.

Here's the problems I see in this plan:

• It's a big assumption that everyone wants weekends off. They've never asked everyone what they want in the schedule in a proper survey. The closest they got was asking us for comments on the schedule and just taking down how many people happened to say certain things (like they wanted weekends off). Obviously this isn't the proper way to do things but they keep using these numbers to justify what they do with the schedule (unless it goes against what they want to do in which case they just say, "we have to staff by the call volumes").
  
• This does nothing to give us more weekends off. The call volumes haven't changed, they still need just as many people in on the weekend. At best, this might make it slightly easier to transition on and off the weekend because it's not split between the beginning and end of the week.
  
• One of my co-workers sent out an open letter to our manager asking exactly what these changes entailed and why it was good for us. As far as I know, management never responded to this email. Supposedly, someone did draft a reply addressing this but I never received it and neither did any of the people who sit around me so if it did go out it didn't reach everyone.
  

The vote for this took place last week. I voted no for the reasons I've outlined above. It did go through though. The new development though is that apparently payroll can't change our pay period. So now the "solution" to this is that on certain pay periods we'll have a day's pay held back and then pay us for that day on a future pay period. So some pay periods you'll only be paid for 72hrs and others you'll be paid for 88 and some will be for 80.

What really bothers me about this is that management didn't even consider the payroll implications before coming up with this schedule change. My other big concern is that while we did get to meet and discuss this, management didn't have any answers to our questions (such as tax implications).

I also have no reason to believe that payroll is going to be able to properly handle having 30 people all being paid different amounts each pay period. Frequently, mistakes in payroll take 1-2 pay periods at least to be fixed, the extra complexity of this new pay scale will just make that worse.

Fortunately it's going to a new vote. But all of this has completely delayed the schedule. The current schedule runs out on April 3 and we still don't have a finalized schedule for April 4 on.

Decent days off

Well I actually had a really good set of days off. I booked my flight and hotel for my trip to Toronto. I also managed to finish off my Illustrator project to the point where I felt good about putting it in. It wasn't perfect and there was a lot more I could've done with it but I finished off the body and the shading so it at least looked done. I think Stephen, my teacher, was pretty impressed with the way I did the shading so that was pretty cool. Mostly just slacked on Wednesday playing video games but that was nice too.

I'm getting pretty psyched about the trip to Toronto, should be pretty fun.

Only thing that's got me a little worried is I still haven't heard from the community college about my application to the photo programme but I have to let them know pretty soon if I want to take the IT programme. But I really haven't been that keen on doing the IT course. I'm really not sure what to do. It's really clear that having a consistent schedule is good for me because I've been able to do so much more now that I've been on days for a few weeks. I need to quit soon but I really need to figure out what to move on to.

Con jobs

Around 2 or 3 weeks ago I was heading home from work and a man approached me saying that he and his wife were from New Ross (a small town maybe about a 1hr drive away from Halifax). He told me that he had lost his wallet and didn't have any money to get gas for the trip home. He was fairly presentable and clean shaven and sounded pretty legit. The fact that it was after midnight at this point in a residential area added a bit of credibility to his story as well, you don't normally see people bumming change in that neighborhood. I felt a little bad for him but I didn't have much money on me and I told him I couldn't spare any money. I felt a little guilty about that as I walked away.

Today the same man approached me outside of Tim Horton's and told me the same story. Now I know this is just a con job that he's trying to pull. I know it was at least 2 weeks ago that I saw him because I've been on day shifts that long and I was walking home from work at night the first time he approached me. I find it extremely hard to believe that someone stranded in Halifax for 2 weeks wasn't able to scrape together some change for a phone call in order to call someone who could help them out. Second, he still looked fairly clean shaven and presentable. Anyone stuck for 2 weeks and not enough money to get home certainly would look a lot worse for wear. If they were legitimately stranded then that really wouldn't be the case. If he's had somewhere to stay for 2 weeks then either he's had enough money to fill up the tank of gas or he's got someone in the city helping him out in which case I think they'd be way more willing to loan him $20 than put him and his wife up for 2 weeks.

I just found the whole thing really annoying. I mean I try to be a good person and will help out people bumming change some times. But I'm also pretty cynical and will assume someone might be trying to scam me. When I ran into this guy the first time I did feel a bit guilty that I didn't give him any money and really started to question my cynicism. It's not often that you catch con artists in a lie so usually you never really do know the truth. What annoys me the most is that con artists like this are just making it harder for people who are legitimately in need of help.

Progress

Making some progress on the mech now. Last night I was able to sit down and really hammer out a bit more of the design. I had a decent idea of what I wanted and looking at some reference material really helped. I have the obvious Robotech and Gundam stuff to look at but I also have this weird roleplaying game called Mekton kicking around that's all mech based as well and has some decent pictures I can look at. The big advantage with Mekton is that a lot of the Mechs have the really old-school geometric look that's a lot easier to pull off in illustrator. Also, the art style has a lot less shading so it's much easier to look at for the basic shapes.

The other thing that I'm finding really helpful is if I mix up the work a bit. Working on just the lines and shapes gets a bit monotonous at times and it's hard to see how the final result will look. So I've been taking breaks from it to work on some of the colouring and shading. I think this is turning out fairly well and it means that I get to look at what the finished product will be and that helps pump me up a bit more. Last night I got the head, left shoulder and left arm mocked up with the head and shoulder shaded as well. My one complaint at the moment is that for some reason I see the drawing as more of a power armour suit than a mech, I'm not sure exactly why and it's not really a bad thing so I'm just going with it all. Hoping to get the chest, right shoulder and arm, and maybe the legs done tonight. If I could get all that done I'd be doing pretty well. That would get me the basic body done and then I could go back and focus on detail work to flesh it out. If I really make some good progress, I might add a 2nd mech to the scene as well. If I go for that it will definitely be based off of the same design but probably just different colours and a modified pose. That could be pushing it for Tuesday though. The other big advantage of working on the shading and colouring now is that if I don't finish then at least I'll have some of what I'm going for to show instead of it all being a pile of shapes.

Procrastination

I've really been putting off working on my Illustrator final assignment. I've made a little bit of progress on some basic mock-up but I need to put a lot more time in on this and it's due on Tuesday. I think the biggest thing I'm running into is just a lot of frustration with working with Illustrator. With my Photoshop class, I'd already used the program a lot before I took the course. I'm much more used to working with raster images too so the thought process just makes sense to me. Switching to vector images is a big change in thought process. I really like the fact that you can constantly tweak things but I just can't get into "the zone" like I can with raster images. Between my frustration and lack of inspiration for the project I just haven't been getting much done. I'm liking the mech idea though so if I can start making some more progress on that it might help fire me up. Of course I've also picked the absolute worst time to start playing Neverwinter Nights in terms of productivity. Fortunately (in an odd way), I took a quick peek at a walkthrough and found out some info on the henchmen quests and I think I may have screwed some of them up by ditching some of the items I'd need to complete the quests so I may start over (I've only finished 3 of the districts from chapter 1 so I'm not too far in). That should help kill my enthusiasm for it a bit and if I can hold off on starting over until after my Illustrator class finishes on Tuesday then I may be able to get some more work done.

Stupid firewall

Well not really the firewall, my own stupidity. Apparently, during one of my kernel upgrades (I assume) I lost the setting to load the ftp connection tracking module. I need this in order for passive ftp transfers to work through my firewall. I didn't notice a problem for awhile because I don't use passive ftp. However, it looks like blogger switched to passive ftp recently which meant it couldn't update my blog for a period of time. It was a pretty easy fix though so I can't complain too much. Turned off iptables, blogger connects, okay it's a problem on my end. Checked my autoloading modules, nothing in there. Made sure I had compiled the ftp connection tracking module, yes I did. Added it back to the autoload and modprobed it into memory, should be all good. Of course half the reason for this blog entry is to test that theory.

PHP function to save me tons of work/code

Wow, I just happened to be looking around through the PHP manual and I found some really useful code in the classes section. For awhile now, I've been trying to figure out how to get my image search form working. I wanted to be able to split the results over more than 1 page (for users with low bandwidth) but was trying to figure out how to carry over the results to the next page (without having to do the query again). The page on classes has a tip for how to make a class carry over to another page which is exactly what I want to do. This is also really handy for other parts of my site as well. For instance, if you click on an individual image from the search results, I want to have links to the previous and next result (as well as back up to the results page). Right now, I was doing this in a horribly kludgy way that involved additional database hits. With this new technique, I should be to just do 1 database query and then carry those results over to various pages without doing any additional database queries. Also, I may be able to use this to achieve the abstraction that I mentioned wanting, that would require a bit more playing to determine if it's possible or not. Still, I'm really happy that I can get the carry over working because that's been the big thing holding me back in finishing off my image search interface.

Some site progress

Making a bit of progress on the site. I've been picking away at stuff while I'm at work which has been good. I managed to find some php code that does exactly what I want with seperating out most of the database functions. It should really help cut down on the code and also means that if anything changes with my MySQL setup then I only have to change it in 1 spot. The one thing I don't like is that it still makes use of some MySQL specific functions in the individual functions themselves (mysql_fetch_array()). All of the other connection stuff is handled by a seperate class now which is nice. I need to see if I can move this into that class (or another seperate function) because then I could make all the code db independant except for the one DB function. That way if I switch to a different database (like Oracle or Sybase) then I could update just 1 function to make it work. Abstraction layers are definitely cool. Need to see if I can set this up somehow. What I'm really looking for is something like Perl's DBI interface.

Creative frustration

Still trying to work on my final project for my Illustrator class. The big problem I'm running into is that I really don't have a clear idea of what I want to do. I had sort of toyed around with the idea of doing a perspective drawing but my heart's just not in it. I think I'm mostly disappointed because what I had really wanted to be able to do before taking the class was to try drawing a comic or at least some characters for a comic. I just haven't been able to pull off good drawings like this and I think it's really frustrated me. Part of the problem is that I can picture in my mind what I want to draw but I still can't get from creating basic shapes and then turning them into the final idea. I've since moved on to trying to draw a mech to still get some manga/anime action but with something that's a bit easier to create using polygons. I was feeling a bit better about doing this because it's much closer to my original idea of wanting to do a manga or anime style drawing.

I tried doing some work on it yesterday and was still running into some problems. I think the big problem is I try to go too quickly from creating the basic shapes to going to final details. The other problem I think is that I need to find some decent mech references to get ideas from. I was trying to draw it just based on a picture in my head and it just wasn't turning out. I also need to go back and layout my design a bit better. The good thing at least is that the technique I'm using to do the lighting/shading seems to work pretty good and will let me handle colour and lighting as 2 independant factors which is very cool. This will allow me to place a shadow across more than one shape and have the lighting look right instead of having to break up the shapes or create a gradient mesh to do this.

Slowly updating the site

Well I was able to pick away on the site a bit today. Still need to figure out the navigation problems and that's holding me back quite a bit. In the meantime though, I'm trying to pick at some of the other unfinished work on the site. Mostly today I did some work on the admin back-end. I have some interfaces for interacting with the database content. A lot of these were written at different times so it will be good to update everything so it's consistent. I polished off my lens menu function yesterday (this function gives me a form menu to select which lens was used with a shot, will be used in a few places). Today I polished a few things with it and also entered in the majority of my lenses into the database. I really need to do up an interface for adding this type of content. It's not that big of a deal for me right now but if I switched to hosting that didn't offer me shell access I'd be out of luck. It's also a bit easier to work with and also would allow me to perform some error checking.

Next up, I think I'll fix my photo editing interface to work with the new database structure I've devised. I'm beginning to think that I should move as much of the work as possible into standard functions. This way I can make the scripts as generalised as possible and only have to maintain the info in the back-end. Only thing is that where it's being included in every document, it might create a bit of bloat. I may split the functions out into some logical groupings to cut down on this.

The next big thing I really should do is work out the image searching functionality. It's pretty much just hacked together right now so it needs a lot of work. There's no front-end for searching either, just the page that actually displays the resutls. This makes it moderately useful for me but completely useless for anyone else.

The other thing that is really needed is error checking. Right now there's basically none. I think things are relatively secure but it's nice to have an actual error message or have things break gracefully rather than just spitting out some MySQL or PHP error.

Career direction

Still trying to work out the whole career direction, "what am I going to do with my life?" question. I'm not sure exactly when it happened but I decided that I wasn't going to teach English in Japan. I think living in Japan could be very cool but I don't think the teaching English is really my thing. I think I mostly got excited about it because it would have been a chance to get out of Eastlink. I think I'll still go to the info session to get some info about life in Japan. Once I did some reading about the experience it just didn't seem like something for me.

It's been really frustrating lately, I'm coming up with more things that I don't want to do but I still don't feel any closer to figuring out what to do. I'm not really excited at all about either community college prospect for the fall (Photo or IT). I am still really interested in the job at NSCAD but it's a major long shot where I don't have a CS degree so I doubt that will come through. About all I know for certain right now is that I need to leave Eastlink.

In some ways though, I'm really beginning to feel that maybe I'm going about this wrong. I've really been searching for that ultimate dream job and I can't figure out what that is. At the moment though, maybe I need to focus more just on some quality of life. If I could get some better balance in my life I think I would be a lot happier. Maybe then I could move on to figuring out that ultimate dream job. On the other hand though, it's a lot easier to motivate yourself to change when things aren't good.

I tried to make it easier by trying to look instead at where I'd want to be in 3 years. I chose 3 years because I'm almost 27 now so that would put me at 30. I came up with a couple ideas in that I'd like to have my own place (still living at home right now) and few ideas about lifestyle but still couldn't get any clearer idea of what I need to do to get there or what I'd like to be doing. Maybe the fact that I was more focused on lifestyle instead of work is an indication that this is more important to me than I give it credit.

Still looking for the answers but at least I'm asking some questions.