Day In The Life of Baz

Had a jolly good time at work today. I work at the Information Desk at the University. Doing basic things like answering the phone, taking messages, and just generally pointing anyone who asks in the right direction.

So my head is down and I’m minding my own business and when all of a sudden the fire alarm starts going off. It was kind of funny to see people with this confused look on their face. I first looked up, then left, then right. There didn’t seem to be any fire or any smoke. I calmly packed my stuff up and slid out. Yeah we’re not supposed to leave the desk unmanned, but hey, the building was on fire.

People were walking by all confused and stuff looking at me and asking me what was going on. I gave them the lil’ shrug and continued moving. I called the cops then waited in the library.

There were these guys doing some renovations to the book store at the school. I was told that they knocked over a ladder or something and it clipped on of the sprinklers and set the system off.

Oh well. I hope I still get paid up till 4:00PM.

Agggghhh!!

I’m at work and I’ve downloaded tons of files from somewhere (lol) and EggDisk.com is now down. I hope they come back up soon. Or at least by the end of the week when I get back to work. I don’t even want the think about what would happen if they stay down.

For those who don’t know. EggDisk is an online file storage place. They give you 6GB of storage with and insane upload and download speed. You also get 30GB fo download bandwidth each month. You can share files with the world, other EggDisk users, or not at all. The Maximum file size is 150MB. Perfect for just about everything: video clips, Ripped MP3 Albums, Comic Books, etc.

Give them a try when they get back up.

Popularity: 7%

Had my second interview with the guys down in Plano today. I’m not really sure how it went. First of all there was the time issue. I was sort of behind schedule leaving Wichita Falls due to some issues with the rental car I had. It basically stunk of smoke, so I had to return it for another one. After that was taken care of I flew home, got dressed and zoomed down there. Almost got lost a couple times, but nothing real serious.

But this is the interesting part right here. When I was five minutes away, I needed to use the restroom. I decided that it would be best if I don’t walk in there and the first thing out of my mouth is: “where’s your bathroom?”. So I stopped a couple minutes early at a gas station. Here’s the funny thing, my zipper broke right then and there. I guess that’s why you need a portfolio at at interview: to hide the fact that your fly is constantly open and can’t close.

Anyways, I had the interview with a Vice President of Development. Nice guy actually. We spoke about ambitions and what I want to do and stuff like that. Just the normal interview stuff.

Maybe getting a job to do a “database” for the Counseling center at Midwestern State University. Currently they have a database “written” in MS Access. All the forms etc. are contained the the Access database and it is accessed (lol) over the network in the office.

My rebuild would be done in C# of course, since that’s what I’m learning right now. I haven’t really decided yet, but I think I’ll just stick with the MS Access database format right now. A SQL Sever 2005 setup would be best, but I don’t think the have the resources available for that (i.e. A dedicated machine to run the server). So I’ll just plop the Database file onto a computer somewhere on the network and let everybody have fun that way.

I’ve done some preliminary tests with the whole thing and it looks promising. It was done over my home network though, and I still can’t get that to work right. The only problem I’ve come across is what happens when two people try to save the same record. The first person gets to save, but the second person is greeted with an error that crashes the program. It will be simple enough to do a quick exception handler to solve that problem and besides that’s the way it should work. I may go a little bit deeper into “locking” a record when it’s being accessed, but I’m not sure.

Ok,

Before the rant, let me give you a brief introduction of how this class goes. Well maybe the introduction is the rant, but anyway. We get into class and the professor “teaches”. This includes going through the book and performing proofs for the various theorems in the text book. These proofs she haves from her notes, which I’m assuming were compiled from the solution manual for this text book. By the way the text book is: Contemporary Abstract Algebra, Sixth Edition. By Joseph A. Gallian. The proofs in the text book are often inadequate for her tastes, so we are forced to go deep into the proofs that she find satisfactory. I’m all fine with that.

This is what I don’t get. We don’t really learn much in class that helps us with the homework that she assigns everyday. We have “in class” homework, which we go over in the class and “take up” homework, which she picks up and grades. And funny enough we are also graded on the in class portion. She will pick a problem and call out people at “random” or from some sort of mental list she keeps and if you are unable to do the problem, guess what you grade is for that day. I couldn’t tell you because it’s all objective.