Benfalk Blog

The remaining of my normal week has been filled with a mixed bag.  On Thursday I was told I can not have anymore overtime, which I think is due to the economic slowdown we are going through… at any rate it is good and bad.  It’s good in the part that I am going to have a lot more time to do things as I’m gaining about seven or so hours extra a week now.  What stinks about this however; is I have been working overtime for so long that I have come to budget that in as part of my pay.  This equates between 20 - 25% pay cut per week depending on the overtime I would have normally received.

I think I can budget around this, but only the next couple weeks will really tell me if I can or not.  One thing I have thought about doing is looking through Rent-A-Coder and seeing if there are any jobs I could pick up and make some extra dough that way.  I did that for awhile last spring and it was pretty cool but it took up too much extra time,lol, I think I’ll have extra time now.

On Friday night Emery came over and him, Vince, Lucas, Mason, and I all played DOTA.. and it was probably the most frustrating five hours I have ever spent.  Lucas, Mason, and I where on a team against Vince and Emery and we never won a single match =( .  After finally giving up on playing I started working on my user library again, it has been awhile since I looked at it and I was disappointed in myself as it took about fifteen minutes to find where I had left off in my code.  I basically spent the rest of the evening familiarizing myself with the library and making sure I had left no functions unfinished.  Hopefully after today i will be done with the base library.  I also want to start working on making some eye candy design for my blog today as well.

PS : I bought this shirt on Woot on Thursday.

Nanonauts

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Today was one of my better days in awhile =) .  I finished the first edition of my web based kiosk system at work today!!  It was an amazing feeling to finally see my work come to life and work like it was intended to.  To top it off, not only did I get it working but I found a way to roll out the system to the other kiosk flash cards in a fast way.  I’m going to make a seperate post detailing some of the problems I had to overcome in linux to get it to work so as not to clutter my captain’s logs.  I did find some bugs in the web portion of my display system after I rolled out the image to the other compact flash cards, but it’s not a big deal to fix.

I so far have been slowly enforcing my martial law plan that I set down for myself.  The first part of it was to get to bed at a descent time… which I have deamed to be between 10 - 10:30 pm.  Tomorrow I’m going to lay out a schedule of how I plan to finish my C++ book and set check dates to make sure I am on track for finishing it, and while I’m at it I might as well do the same for my running… for as much as I enjoy running it always seems to suffer during the winter months, but I hope to reverse that problem this year.

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I am slipping away from my habit structure… It is time to institute martial law on myself.  I haven’t ran in a week, read my C++ book, or even finished my CodeIgniter user library yet.  I spent the better part of the weekend playing DOTA, a Warcraft Three map style.  I must admit it is extremely fun and addicting, but I can’t spend all of my time playing games or I will wind up back in a slump like I was several years ago.  Starting tomorrow I am limiting the amount of computer games I play and setting up an actual scheduled timeline for finishing my user library and getting my C++ book read.

It seems if I don’t make time for my activities and plan them out they never happen =( .  I’m not sure if it has to do with the winter season, but it seems to happen to me around this time of the year, when I just stop planning and just float through the dark cold season.. it has to be the winter that does this to me.  I’m going to start things right and go to bed now, at a time of 10:40pm, and starting tomorrow I am going to be in bed by 10pm.

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The last two days have gone by pretty fast.  I never got a chance to post for Wednesday for a couple reasons.  Nothing overly exciting happened that day and I was incredibly tired from the last several days.  When I left work on Wednesday I ate at Pizza Hut with Lucas, Mason, and Jackie.. When I got home I dinked around for awhile but was getting tired super fast.  I decided to lay down and take a nap about about a quarter after six and ended up sleeping until the next morning =) .

I must have been tired because when I woke up Thursday morning I was still a little tired but could definitely tell a difference. Thursday was a pretty good day for me, I got a ton done on my kiosk system !!  With any luck I will be done today so I can mark this project as complete.  It has been the best project I have ever done at work, but it needs to come to an end so I can get other things done.

I haven’t finished my user library either… which has be upset with myself.  I haven’t been doing almost anything in my normal routine and it’s hard to pinpoint what is happening.  I think it’s partly to do with the shortened days along with the cold.  This is about the time last year when I lost a good routine of activities I was trying to uphold.  These are the things I need to keep in my mind to get done through this retarded winter season!

• RUN !
• CodeIgniter User Library
• C++ Book, Finish it!!!!

The list seems simple enough… I just need to stick to it.  Starting now I’m going to try to once again rebuild my routines that seem to have been slipping more and more the last couple of weeks.

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Another busy day.  I tried to do some load balancing of my tasks at work and got some of that tasks that had overflowed from no room on my board… I can honestly say for my part I have spent next to no time in any way wasting time at work in my attempts to catch up and it seems like a constant uphill battle.

Sometime shortly after lunch what looked like a down server at first had me busy pretty much the remainder of the day.  In the end as best as it could be determined, a port failed on the main router which a large segment of the network was feeding into for routing.  The last bit of time I had at the end of the day was spent working on my kiosk system.  I am so close to done with it that I have this urge to go in and finish it tonight almost.

I probably would have gone back in to finish it if I didn’t have laundry I had to do tonight… which was an adventure all in it’s own.  I have been putting of doing my laundry for the last week and a half and I was completely out of anything clean.  I took my laundry over to my brother’s apartment and in between washing and drying we watched a movie.  My clothes weren’t dry after a single run so I had to run them through the dryer twice =( .

It’s 1am now… off to bed.

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Today was not good for me.  I have been staying up to late and it caught up with me Monday morning =( .  To compound things worse I haven’t been to work in five days.  I spent most of my day trying to stay focused and get my kiosk project done but interruptions kept me from getting it finished… The grand finale to my work day was when I got back from helping a user to discover my boss had logged me out of my session on my computer so he could log in, setting me back a good hour and a half on a compile I had been working on for my system!!  I am told to lock my computer when I leave my area and I am punished for doing so by setting me back.

I decided against bringing my work home with me tonight, as I feel I have spent enough free time on it and I needed to relax from working on it.   I spent the remainder of my evening trying to stay awake and eventually found my way over to Lucas’s to watch “Hellboy 2″ and “Journey to the Center of the Earth.”  I liked Hellboy 2.. but found the other movie very retarded…. I am regretting staying after Hellboy 2 but ohh well, I guess it was worth the fun we had making fun of the movie.

Tomorrow I need to get into work early and start getting caught up on other projects… as I feel my boss is getting upset that I’m spending too much time on this kiosk project =\ .  With only so many hours in the day it seems like I am fighting an unwinnable war against time… I need to find a way to work on everything, but it’s not something I’m cut out to do.  I’m heading to bed tonight at 10:45 pm, hopefully with more sleep I’ll be able to get stuff better into shape tomorrow.

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