Insomia

1st reason is that I'm hungry. The other is that I'm thinking of a friend's condition.

The education that I had led me to scary conclusions. So here I am, doing a reading on the possible causes. Now I'm more at ease but it also told me how much I have returned to my teachers.

Hoping for the best and the results soon.

A day at the beach, a night at the screen

Work: Like a day at a beach today, except for a chicken that marrs it.
Learnt that not all happiness are sold at the same price. Should exercise caution..

Today(23 feb) is a "hot" day. Sorry friends, but I got an movie appointment oredi.

Fav 3 movies for the year 2006
1. North Country
2. In her shoes
3. Broke back mountain

Better 3 horror movies for the year 2006
1. The Dark
2. 49 days
3. Heirloom

Btw, I've added Kelvin's and Juliann's blog as links to my page at http://jwqh.blogspot.com

A summary

New resolution: complain less about work.
So here goes, "Argghhhhhhhhh!!!"

Ok, so now you know what gone on at work today.
In an hour and a half more (currently 2230 hrs), I'll earn a treat from someone who forgot about me again.

"I don't care!" - The Fugitive

I finished my ammendments to a monster of a program today (20 Feb). There were some imperfections but my blog subject says it all.

A disgusting-bill-snatching-friend complained that I don't post daily. So there it is. A streak of posts for the last few days. As for some poly friends who complained that Friendster spams their mailbox with notifications, well.. the subject says it all. [derisive snort] IT pple some more..

My transport costs is going up but [see subject]. My workplace is so ulu that I needed the speed.

Had dinner with 3 guys and a lovely gal. We did some catching up while my skin did the disgusting.. hee.. It'll take a few more days to heal yet. Too bad that another galfren of ours can't make it. All 3 guys made sales pitches to me but the terms are not satisfactory. Two of them had a condition which I proclaimed near 5 years ago, that I'll never accept. So it looks like I have to save up abit and then see if my Punggol fren has a better offer.

Layers

I'm moulting.. courtesy of a deep sunburn at Desaru.


Today (19 Jan) is the customary wedding of Weijin. I met up w Joanne and Zaiqian and we appeared early! Unfortunately, our dear nation has people who enjoys being late for weddings in ample supply. The wedding started at 2030 hrs, as usual..

Perhaps its the first wedding of a classmate that we attended (some married in secrecy, you see..), our table was determined to floor the groom. A generous glass of wine awaits him, with beer and prawn heads as side dishes (idea contributed by QingQing). Weijin downed them all without batting an eye.

"What??!! Round 2!!", we demanded. The groom promptly fled the scene. We then turned our evil onto the buddy and the photographer. The buddy was rather smitten with our lovely Chunling and got her abit worried. Thus began Operation-floor-the-buddy. The photographer was just.. collateral damage. They drank a full mug easily..

Thanks to all for a nice day, the Indian gal for serving us promptly and Shanheng for the lift.

No games for the wicked

This morning, I went out with XKA to have a morning run. Nice =)

I got back at about 2pm and tried to logon to Earth - failed.
When I woke up from my nap, I tried to play MapleStory, but someone stole a kill from me. I dropped his fame and quickly logged off.
Finally, I tried to play Rome: Total War. I had previously un-installed it due to instability. Now my OS thinks that it's installed. I cleaned/repaired the registry to no effect. Windows sucks =
Watching a Taiwan program on ch 8 now. They were eating off seafood at shallow waters among some islands. The aboriginal claimed that after having their innards eaten (by them), you can cut it into two and the sea cucumber can regenerate into 2 seperate beings in a matter of days. Weird huh?

The access code is.. "Alone".

from Gargoyles - City of Stone, part 3
I'm getting no support from my intended sources and it's frustrating. If you ask me to fix a portion of the code and I feedback to you that what you told me should happen and what I observed doesn't match, I don't expect an amazed reply saying, "It shouldn't be the case."
Yippee. Great powers of observation. How about pointing me in the right direction?

Happily, I do get help from my colleagues, though very off the mark. They point me in weird tangents of approaches. Rather refreshing from the brute force approach I take to solving my problems these days - studying codes line by line.

If I'm behind schedule, my boss would bestow me with her presence beside me, adding her vast intellect via brainwaves to my puny mind. Thankfully, this only slows me down at a rate of about 1~2 hrs / day.

The "users with acid tongues" are taking a long vacation. Our paths won't cross again.
Signatures are less of a problem now. Cut corners more intelligently and avoid that grouchy auntie, who seems to love to reject my transport forms, when it's done in the same way as everyone's..

Yah.. not very happy, but I can sell my happiness for $500.

Sarumun marches on, but Helm's Deep shall not fall, as long as men defends it!

Warning: These stories are technical in nature

Story #1
Last week, I was given a bug fix request. The consultant did not gave me support but asked me to read the documentation. After studying the code for a full day, I figured out how to run it and found.. nothing wrong with it.
She studied the code and found 2 lines of code which she believed should fix the error. Boss was very happy and was on the verge of throwing a new task to me. JW however tested it again and found.. nothing wrong with it.
I caught hold of her and proved it to her that it works. She left, puzzled.
"Maybe you should test in the QA server", my boss suggested. JW did and found.. nothing wrong with it.
"I still encountered errors in the UAT server", the consultant said. JW spent half a day in the UAT room to recreate the test data and found.. nothing wrong with it.
"It can't be", she said. She tested it and found something wrong with it.
I was prepared and pointed out what was not wrong with it. The material number we are viewing is not the one we believed we should view. Heavy customisation in this "big government project" has redirected us to another material number.

Hard to imagine that this simple thing dragged over 6 days?
Harder still to convince people that I'm right.

Story #2
My desk buddy is Joseph, who's a hacker at heart. He likes to know the internal workings of things. His problem was a program that will give a dump upon execution. Upon analysis, we found that the previous programmer has coded it in such a way that the SQL compiler on the database end was overwhelmed, like some 4000 values for a single field. Since I was shaking legs while waiting for people to believe me (see Story #1), I looked into this problem with him. Together, we had a solution to simplify the SQL statement while not sacrificing performance.
As the consultant for this program was not proactive in verifying his changes, his manager was roped in to test it. I don't know what possessed him, but he looked into the code and picked faults at it.
"Why did you code this way? MY company doesn't do it this way. Its so hard for my consultants to read!". What "went wrong" was that Joseph arranged the comment fields to 72 characters per line, which made perfect sense to us but not to him. He prefers the comments to stretch on and on, off the visible width of the screen.
He also picked fault with the coding we made. That the changes we did "disturbed" the original logic coded by his company. He even gave suggestion on how to code it.

Translation: our solution can't be better than what his company comes up with.

"What the??!!", our team was flabbergasted upon hearing his commandments from Joseph. The first could be dismissed due to lunacy. The second just show outright lack of technical understanding on his part. In short, he wanted Joseph to download the entire content of the tables and then filter it off.
Joseph was rather unhappy with complying. By following that guy's "orders" to revert the codes, he'll be re-introducing the same problem that caused the dump. If he follows his suggestion to fetch everything, its not efficient and doesn't sit well with him. Newly corrupted JW told him to heck care, just do as that smart aleck says, an interesting reversal of roles.

[Just before they left office, JW reverted back to his old ways and coded a possible alternative solution]