monkey nonsense

i started my new job this week! it’s been pretty interesting so far. it’s been awhile since i’ve had to learn a new application.

i’m doing pretty much the same thing i did at my old company for my new company. and actually… i’ve discovered i really do like automation! i find it very interesting and even though i’m totally not nerdy (because i’m just way too cool for that ), it makes me excited to think of a reusable framework for automation!

yay for finding something interesting to do for a job! i wonder if this is what i’m going to do for a career? or whether the interest will wear away eventually… hey, it’s lasted 3+ years already!

my dad left me a message:

hey (chinese) mei, is this your (/chinese) phone mail? give me a call. (chinese)daddy’s at home right now. i wanted to know whether your jade artwork hangs with the round part at the top or the pointy part at the top? (/chinese) ok. give me a call. bye!

what google voice transcribed it to be:

hey nate this is the that you full of for me on my gimme a call about the johnny net okay way out to the end of the bob and maybe i’ll see you and that’s holding the again at this time and hi samantha it’s ian the don’t use it sounded okay give me a call bye

this puts a damper on my grand plans to give my parents my google voice number so i don’t have to listen through all their voicemails… i’m still going to have to listen through them because the transcription makes no sense!

my coworker sent me this article:

http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/10/23/1746254

“Developers seeking job security in the years ahead could find an unlikely edge in Cobol. According to an InfoWorld report, demand for Cobol skills is surging, with salaries on the rise. More importantly, the short supply of offshore Cobol programmers and the fact that mainframes aren’t going away anytime soon are spurring longevity for big-iron skills, with many companies looking to hire in-house Cobol pros to bridge mainframe Cobol apps to the rest of the enterprise. The report provides further evidence that Cobol may indeed be primed for a comeback, with new kinds of Cobol integration jobs emerging to prove old-guard skills are critical to some of the hottest areas of software development today.”

dude! my time at CGI was not a complete waste! i wonder if the SilkTest job market is better or worse than the COBOL job market. maybe it’s time to switch back to the other useless skill i’ve acquired in my 4 years of working…

ruby on rails is smarter than me.

so for the past few weeks, i’ve been messing around with ruby on rails. just playing around. and i created a model called “person” to keep track of users.

so i called the ruby command “ruby script/generate model person” expecting everything to be created named person. so “app/models/person.rb”, “db/migrate/001_create_person.rb”, etc. etc.

but i kept getting myself confused. some times it was people… some times it was person. because i was playing around so much, i kept getting mad at myself for being so wildly inconsistent with my naming convention! i even tried to do persons.

i just now noticed (because i started from scratch again since i broke my last attempt)… that ruby on rails, when i create the model person… is smart enough to rename things people when it needs it pluralized! genius.

too bad i didn’t notice this earlier.

imho, i am one of the coolest people i know! jk! i’m not one of the coolest… but i am one of the most NON-nerdiest people i know! maybe i know a lot of nerdy people (yes), maybe i just am not that nerdy (yes), but definitely one of the most non-nerdiest people i know.

so it seems very odd that i would be posting what i’m about to post.

i like the mac os. this is not nerdy… the mac os is far from nerdy. it’s very intuitive and doesn’t require a lot of computer savvy necessarily. i like the mac os because it allows me to use ruby on rails easily. ok… that was the nerdy part. ruby on rails comes with the mac os. unfortunately, i don’t have leopard so my ruby/rails versions are out of date… so it’s not as easy as it should/could be. but even still… installing a packaged ruby on rails (locomotive) was so easy, i was amazed! and then to install a webserver/myphp (MAMP) was also easy!! it was crazy! i remember wasting HOURS at the beginning of the semester in MISM classes trying to set up my laptop properly. it took me about a hour (and only because i was at panera’s trying to download the stuff) to install everything and get a working environment!

i went exploring today!

i went on a bike ride around the neighborhood. it’s kind of cool… there’s this neighborhood near my apartment that has streets named after colleges. i think only PA colleges… i saw villanova, bucknell, and drexel.  there’s even a carnegie (no mellon though) drive! haha

according to gmaps pedometer, i biked 4.4467 miles today! woo, so tired!

speaking of which, gmaps pedometer is kind of cool! i want to learn how to be nerdy enough so that i can program cool things with google maps’ API!

if you look down at the bottom of this page, there’s a little message about 679 (as of the time of this post) spam comments that have been blocked by Spam Karma 2. i gotta say, spam karma 2 is very effective. wordpress is supposed to have a bit of spam protection (isn’t it? i thought it was but what do i know?), but i still got an insane amount of spam comments.

now with spam karma, only real comments come in! and it never filters the real comments to spam.

i vaguely remember learning about spam filtering in school. in between naps and computer games, i think i remember learning about something about giving each message a score based on whether it had characteristics of spam or whatever. i think that’s how spam karma works. at least that’s what i’m guessing….

in any case, i like spam karma. it’s quite effective. anyone out there also experiencing spam comments (the heck are you able to spam everything now?!), you should use it!

so i just setup google adsense on my webpage (click the banner above and help me out! )

i gotta say, google is really good at targetting its ads… i don’t quite know why i have (as of this post) billy joel themed ads on the main page, but on a whim, i went into each individual post to see what ads i get…

weekend of scariness – all rock climbing ads
lunchboxes – lunchbox ads, even vintage lunchbox ads!
blogroll – mc hammer & curious george bags – monkey ads… they knew curious george was a monkey!
brain cells – accident and health insurance ads
snowboarding – snowboarding ads
2nd best day of m… no, maybe not – settlers of catan ads!

wow, pretty accurate!

http://metaatem.net/words.php!! now lazy people can make ransom notes with the click of a button! here’s a sample:

pretty cool! i think i might switch to flickr

So jason posted about windows live local with pictures of his house and wootton. i decided to also take a look to see my parents’ house in MD… so i typed in the address and this is what i got:

butttt….. that “2″, supposedly marking the house with my parents’ address…. is on my NEIGHBOR’s house!! that’s not 10720! that’s 107..er… 16? get it right microsoft!!!! our house has the COOL front walkway that my parents took forever deciding on! if you ever visited my house ANYtime during the fall 2002 semester (yeah, they took the entire semester…), you would’ve seen bricks strewn all over the place as my parents tried to decide on the design of our walkway. it’s what makes our house stand out in all of suburbia.

kind of think of it, it’s actually kinda creepy that they could’ve gotten such a clear picture of it…

here’s a picture of our old house in herndon, va… for some strange reason, the picture of it is from much farther out.