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Hmm, seems that I’ve survived my first week! Started work on the 30th, and got lost as hell for about three days straight trying to find the place. Now that I know my way around, and I’m getting there early. Alarm goes off at 0500, I’m usually awake by 0400, and I try to be on the road between 0530-0630. Today the lights weren’t even on yet in Engineering when I showed up lolol. As long as I can be on the Interstate by 0700, I can get there with time to spare, and no body is picky about when I show up. It’s basically an 8-hour work day with 3-hours of driving / over 220 kilometres each day. On the upside, I’m doing about $15/day in petrol in a car that’s well below the modern norm for fuel efficency, so whatever a regular weeks pay cheque nets, fuel costs ought to be staying a float.

My first day was essentially getting up to speed. One of the guys there, Steve got me started installing the OS on my work station, introduced me to the guy responsible for setting up my access to stuff, etc. While at home I’ll usually take like a week to break in a new setup, I kept stuff on my work station pretty light. I’m there to work not customise things, besides all I really care about is a decent command line environment and having the tools needed for getting stuff done. Made sure to bring my laptop and loads of stuff on my flash drive just in case. Since it’s so far from home and moving isn’t going to happen overnight, I travel well stocked with Miles’ old backpack. That reminds me, I still need to eat the candy I stored in it xD. Since there’s no strict dress code, I’ve even gotten to keep my boots :-).

The second day, wasn’t very productive IMHO. Mostly cursing at some warts in one of the libraries being used, it’s a binding to a lib’ written in another language, so it’s not always perfect. Rest of the time was largely filling out the paper work for being hired. I can’t really complain about the paper work, since both the chef finacial officer and the woman from human resources helped me sort that stuff. Just got one thing left to do fir that, and I’ll be mapping that out over the weekend. To the library thing, all I can say is that I’m inclined to agree with my superior about it. It’s better to keep the code base more natural to the implementation language we’re using, than cuddling up to the libraries more static interface. Reading the code already in place, also shows me a few things about who I’m working with.

Being the Fraking New Guy (FNG) on deck, I’m a wee bit cautious about draconian issues. Generally I know what I’m doing well enough to figure stuff out but, eh, somewhere between programming and business its kind of easy to ruffle peoples feathers over little things and I’d rather not do that at first. So I’m trying to avoid walking into any walls so to speak. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of fixed policy about anything programming related and everything is quite laid back at the company, so I guess there’s nothing to worry about. Except getting tongue twisted explaining things lol. With my mother always telling me off whenever I’m on VoIP, I’ve gotten more used to typing all day than speaking. When Matt, my superior told me about the instant messengering system, I was happy as a clam!

Thurs/Fri were mostly spent trying to get stuff done, got a bit finished yesterday but didn’t have it ready for commit untill today, along side some other stuff. Really not sure what kind of pace is expected of me for generating results, but since I don’t have my mother interrupting me all the live long day, I’m getting more done in much less time than I’m used to doing it at home. I like it, kind of wish it was more like 10-12 hour days, so I could get more done at work lol. Doubt there are enough hours in the day to get done the amount of work I feel should be done. On my way out, I let my superior know what branch I pushed stuff out to and said I’d catch up on the remaining things tomorrow. What a curious look came when he reminded me tomorrow is Saturday xD.

After so many years of having to operate on a mentality like, “O.K. it’s the weekend…. time to cram as much work in as possible before Monday”, I find it kind of hard to not be working on the weekends… :-/. Guess I can spend it on my own projects or something. If it wasn’t supposed to be like an 8 hour work day, I would just sit and let it roll with how much I can get done and when. Habbits, whether it’s a 10 or 18 hour day, I’m used to staying at it. Although I must admit, 8 hours isn’t bad. Only real interruption is going to the bathroom and taking a lunch break; although ma would kill me if I work through those >_>, today I took a pen & pad with me, so that I could think ahead while eating. For what I’ve been doing for years, I’ve had to put up with trying to concentrate with a constant string of interupts. When your brains in the swing of things, having a massive context switch thrown at you dozens of times a day, is kind of like being hit by an eighteen wheeler. That’s one reason I love being able to sit working at the office instead of waiting on my mother hand and foot all day while trying to get crap done o/.

So far I like this job quite a lot. Out of the handful of interrested parties, this employer seemed like the best fit, and it’s finally a chance to work at something that’s more up my ally. If I survive the 90-day probational period, things ought to be good for a while. Coming home on the highway tonight, I was thanking the LORD for answered prayers. Feels almost like I’ve died and gone to heaven… nice place to work, good people, relaxed environment, and a there’s supposed to be a steady pay cheque to boot. It’s unbelievable how much I hate being idle, now I’m working. Murphy’s law has been on my ass a lot lately, yet it’s like I’ve been blessed. At least, it’s a glimpse of what life can be, and I hope it lasts for years.

And the only bad thing I can say about the job, is having to walk to the bathroom lol. You know when going down like two short hallways every now and then is the worst part of your day, there is something going right!!!

Between driving the area so much and being able to stop and map stuff out with this new cell phone, I’m even starting to learn shortcuts. Yesterday I made such good time, I was almost afraid I would be too early xD. WHere I live, if I don’t know where I’m going, I know enough that between my instincts and a compas, I can figure it out. Geeze, some of the roads around Newnan I’ve been on so much in my life, I could drive them blind.

When I get up in the morning, I head for the nearest Interstate access, get on to the I-85 N and head down to the I-285 N / W. Main strip around where work is located is more or less in between the level of newnans one, and the one over in Peachtree city. Nice spot, but confounding as all hell to find anthing until you’ve got it figured out. A few more years of commuting and I’ll probably know Duluth well. Personally, I like the Interstate system better than Georgia’s road ways; on the former the only way to get lost is to close your eyes and stop reading lol. It’s actually comforting when I make it to the I-85 S and then to the local high way. I know the area, and on the local, well, it may be terribly dark but after 10 years riding it, I not only can find my way home trivially, I also can figure out how to get to every neighboring city! The path up to Duluth, time will tell, hehehehe.

J-Day cometh….

As pleasant as being able to install driver updates through the Windows update crap has been, I must admit that being dropped into a 640x480x4 desktop shows me just how horrible the old PCs used to look.

At least on my *nix systems, I’ve only got to worry about keeping kernel + X.Org + drivers in sync >_>.

Lately my dreams have been getting worse, really not sure if I should  look forward to sleep or evade it at this point. On the upside, it beats boredom, on the down side it feels hours longer than the actual passage of time. That kind of adds up after a while, tiring.

I’m really not fond of holidays, haven’t been for a very long time, doubt that’s going to change anytime soon. As far as I’m concrened, just getting it done and over with is a good thing to me.

Really looking forward to getting started on the 30th.  In the mean time, I’ve been experimenting with something. In setting up the Windows build for Cassius, I set things up to be able to use the systems lua build (i.e. on linux) or build it as a dependency of Cassius. That’s gotten my brain cooking on making some reusable stuff out of it. Keyed in several libs so far, still need to iron a few things out, like moving header installation from premake time to prebuild time. While doing that and unrolling some loops, I also noticed a bug in some of the path.*() functions that premake uses. Seems that certain paths containing a $ need to be escaped (%$) IAW Lua’s pattern matching syntax, or you get an invalid return value :-/.

Premake was actually my main reason for learning Lua, but never had much chance to use Premake until this month. Kind of been focused on C# the last kind of months, and largely using GNU Makefiles for that stuff. My principal gripes with using C/C++, is setting up Windows builds is a bitch and for most of my own stuff, I require software that works on both. On vaguely POSIX respecting systems, it’s not that bad. One of these days I really need to work on setting up a linux or *bsd to windows cross compile.

One positive thing to come out of tinkering with a library (Cassius) for embedding programming languages. I’ve learned that Lua not only combines most of the features I like about JavaScript with a non CBF syntax, it also is a hell of a lot easier to build/embed then existing JavaScript engines o/. For how much I like the Curly Brace Family versus the irk of embedding stuff, Lua is arguably the better choice in the trade off.

Two ways that I’ve collected so many languages, one is trying to use the tool most appropriate for what I need done, the other is I’m used to juggling between languages rapidly. Whatever the problem calls for and limits implementation headaches, rather than whatever is the ‘mentally’ convienant language of the moment. That’s also some what a necessity of helping people here or there, can’t quite say, “Sorry, brains in C mode, shove your PHP up your arse”, now can I? lol.

Now if only the study of spoken languages were as trivial :-/.

Hmm, can’t sleep. Don’t really feel like coding or gaming. Hmm, maybe a deck of cards…

I’ve got to admit, friends are right in that actually sleeping from time to time is a good idea.  The last few weeks has been spent on minimal sleep levels, as usual for me. Thursday night/Friday morning, I just skipped sleeping, wasn’t tired until like 1100 Friday, and that only lasted like fifteen-twnety minutes, then caught up with me half a day later. I took a friends advice and got some rest, rather than waiting until the 29th, now I’m super charged again. Guess I’ll try and take it easy for a while, rather than focusing on how much stuff I can get done in spare time.

Of course though, my idea of taking it easy is nothing like sitting on my ass, hahaha! Going to get things shifted about, go through my back log of cleaning. I would like to transition to a more normal sleep routine, but that remains to be seen. I also need to get a few things sorted on Cassius, been refining things on the one branch for a while but haven’t had time to step back and prepare it for commit; once things are sorted and I’ve selected a branch to merge into the mainline, I’ll schedule time to sit back and do a review of things. After that I’ll probably find a safe place for storing it, as safe guard against all my computers popping a cork o/. I’m one of those backup freaks lol.

Over the years, I’ve spent enough of my life running on reserves that a little quality R&R gets me pumped up. I’m also not the kind of person who likes to be idle that much, programming at least exercises my thinking muscles a little bit. Right now I feel like I could jog twenty miles, but my feet would keep me if I did that! Actually, it’s kind of funny. When I was a little kid, inside my own head I always used to refer to my energy levels as “Normal”, “Auxiliary”, “Reserve”, and “Emergency” power. As an adult, my batteries don’t recharge so fast any more, sure as hell don’t last as long either: but consistently, the endurance level is still there lol. The real question is whether or not that’ll hold through to when I’m old, grey, and lucky if I can still piss under my own steam >_>.

The things that get me tired tend to differ from “Norms”, maybe it’s because I’m insane or that I hate having nothing to work on, dunno. Either way, time to crank up the radio, get off the PC for a bit, and get stuff done.

Crazy way of relaxing, eh?

Early yesterday morning, I got an e-mail from someone interested in a rounder with some ability at rails, and asking about my availability. Decided to sleep on it after doing a quick review of the company. I wonder what’s changed, that I haven’t been getting so many doors slammed in my face :-/. Spent most of the day focused on a branch of Cassius.

Sometime after setting my laptop on the table and firing up the desktop for a quick game break between interruptions, when checking the laptop, I noticed a pop up message saying something about an incoming call. Loading the stuff on my desktop crashed the game, but well, it was worth it lol. Seems the business that had me in for an interview wants me to show up again, and it sounds like things are going to another level :-). One condition is that I get a GED, which perfectly plays to my favour: that means I can get it sooner rather than later. Since then, I’ve mostly been trying to get stuff in order via an action plan. I figure, may as well have everything sorted and ready to roll, straighten up the car, etc and maybe hit the library a bit, hehe. I like things being organised.

The real twist of my brains interest circuits, the companies name is very similar to someone I’ve known for years. Similar enough that I’m getting finger twisted, and have to re-read the names as I type them lol.

Well ma has managed to interrupt me for over a solid hour, so I’m taking a break. So much for trying to get anything done, o/.

I’ve been experimenting with exporting functions to scripts through Cassius::Engine, one branch oriented towards heavier templating, one branch towards a C++0X only solution, and one towards a more flat method for runtime (ab)use. Now if only I had 36-hour days and some time to myself, that doesn’t involve being buggered off the computer

OK, now I an officially surprised with life. Years ago I had applied to some tech jobs and was turned down via automated emails sometime later. Fast forward to the present, and I actually hear something from one of those companies lol.

Being more than a wee bit suspicious of things coming in out of the blue. Like seriously, what’s the probability? What personal info that I have revealed, can be found trivially about me by any one doing their home work decently, so I’m not worried. The thing that bought that much level of trust out of me, was being told facts about the app’ I had dropped in (when, to where, to what), that no one but me could know: assuming that such a reputable company didn’t bungle their security, and no one was sniffing packets off our wires at the time.  It’s kind of like having a message from someone with a pre shared key that you trust, enough not to redirect to /dev/null but not enough to drop the deflector screen.

The real question is whether or not it leads to a viable job offer; I’ve no idea whether or not that one job interview will bear fruit. The insane thing, lacking a B.S. I’ve largely given up applying to tech jobs a long time ago, so recently I have focused on finding “Conventional” jobs in my area rather than things worth the effort.

Every thing that has come up in the past few weeks, all of them have been tech related!!! Sometimes I really wonder if someone up there has a sense of humour, one like mine anyway. But interviews, calls, and emails, still isn’t being hired, even if it is an improvement. Computers are one of the things that know the most about out of everything I know, computers are what I’ve spent most of the decade glued to and what I’ve been using most of my life. Wouldn’t it be bloody nice, if someone hired me to do something “Interesting” with them for a change?

• Having an occasional link on SpiderMonkey’s docs that actually throws you to MDN, is rather tiresome.
• GDB doesn’t always like dlopen()’ing a library that depends on (p)threads, using LD_PRELOAD fixes.
• Reading a functions documentation over again is more useful than a debugger, especially when you’re tired.
• Lua’s C API is really spoiling me.
• I know better than to git commit without sleep.
• Hmm, I wonder how long it would take this old laptop to compile V8… heh, can’t be that bad.

For now my plan is grab a quick snack, check the server list, and pass out sometime around dawn, then review the files in the morning. Sometime when I’m fresh, I need to focus on an interface between C++ and the engines loaded by Cassius. The partial SpiderMonkey and unfinished V8 support can largely wait until later.

Of course, the reason why I named the base class for embedding a language ‘Engine’ rather than sometime more conventional, is in order to have a ‘Cassius::V8Engine’ in there, haha!