Where Dustbunnies Go To Die

Not much has happened so far this week with the exception of writing my Visual Basic final exam last night. I would have posted immediately upon getting home, except that after I'd made dinner, and watched House and Boston Legal, it was after 1 o'clock in the morning and I had to collapse into bed.

I think the exam went well. It was ridiculously simple in concept - the instructor gave us the necessary files, including a Windows form layout, and we had to write the code to make it work like the sample application he provided. Some of the code was pre-written for us, which is what made it so simple - except that even after I followed all of the instructions, my version didn't quite work perfectly. I think he left a few things out on purpose. :) Anyway, I managed to fix all of the bugs and get it working by about 9:15, 15 minutes early. The instructor said it would be a couple of days before he had them marked.

Speaking of bugs, don't the rest of you programmer types just love it when you fix something that apparently has nothing to do with a bug you're trying to solve, and the bug goes away anyway? That happened at work today, just before it was time to go home. I didn't believe that fixing the seemingly-unrelated bug had fixed it, but I took my change out and the bug popped up again, so I guess I fixed it after all without meaning to. :)

Anyway, the only outstanding item I have is to clean up my assignment that was originally due last night, but for which the deadline was extended to Sunday morning. I think that all I have to do is make sure that all of my functions and subs are laid out within their respective files in alphabetical order (the instructor likes that, even though Visual Studio has a facility that allows you to jump directly to any method).

So yeah, as I said, when I got home last night I watched House and Boston Legal while eating dinner. House was outstanding as usual, and watching a new episode reminded me that I'd promised kosst_amojan that I would write up a panel on the show for Polaris 21 a couple of weeks ago, but I hadn't gotten to it yet. I'm thinking that maybe a discussion of the House/Wilson relationship (slashers, get your minds out of the gutter :P ) might be interesting. I'll have to dig out my old programme books and see what I gave him last time I provided him with a House panel for the con - all I can remember is the title ("Our House Is A Very Very Very Fine House" :) ).

Boston Legal was equally outstanding, I thought; they did something extremely interesting. For those of you who didn't see it, the office was held hostage along with a former defendant of Denny's, and they were forced to relive the former defendant's murder trial. Doesn't sound all that interesting, but the hostage-taker was the now-adult son of the victim. Denny (William Shatner's character) had defended the accused killer as his first case 50 years ago in partnership with his father. Every so often, Denny would get a dreamy look on his face and there would be a flashback to him and his father, 50 years ago. Still sounds dull, right? Except that they used clips from an old black-and-white movie or TV show in which a very young William Shatner had played a lawyer. I want to find out what those clips were from, but I don't really know where to start - he guest-starred on a lot of anthology shows back in the 1950s, and it could have been any of them, or a film. The actor playing his father looked a little like Spencer Tracy, I thought, but he looked too old to have been Tracy in the 1950s. Maybe someone in the weekly thread on the show at TrekBBS knows the answer, if nobody who's read this far does.

I have to pop over there and change my signature anyway, to reflect the new guests we've just announced for Polaris 21: Teryl Rothery (Stargate SG-1's Dr. Frasier, as well as the upcoming Babylon 5 movie) and Tanya Huff. (I guess this means I really have to make an effort to find time to watch Blood Ties before the con...) I'm kind of missing the place, though I can imagine what TNZ has been like over the past week or so just from reading the newspaper.

Oh, and the other thing I should mention is that the nomination period for the Constellation Awards is fast coming to an end (the deadline is April 15). The nomination ballot is available from the nomination guidelines page, here.

First, though, I want to get caught up and see what you lot have been up to over the past 48 hours. Later.

It's been a busy weekend... yesterday I met up with summ3r_daze for coffee around 2. We spent the time chatting about various topics, and at one point she asked what time it was. I pulled out my cellphone and we realized it was just after 5, and we'd sat there for three hours! I'm surprised the staff didn't come over to harass us about buying more coffee if we were going to take up a table (it seemed to be fairly busy the whole time). Obviously we were both enjoying the afternoon. :)

I came home, made dinner, read the paper, watched the Leafs pummel the Buffalo Sabres - always a good thing - and decided to start working on my VB assignment. I'd been thinking a lot about how I wanted to do it, but I hadn't actually started the work yet. Eight hours later... oy. And I was still coming up against a problem I didn't know how to solve, involving navigating between multiple forms. (It seems that when you hide a form, and later reopen it, the Load event doesn't actually fire, meaning that my code to open and read a file wasn't executing - so if the content of the form changed, those changes weren't being picked up.) I finally went to bed around 7 - which is going to kill me for sleeping tonight. :(

I woke up today and halfway up the street to Starbucks, I realized a possible solution to my form navigation problem. For fear of forgetting, I took out my cellphone and called my own home number, and left myself a message describing the solution. Jeez, is that what my answering machine sounds like? Good lord, that's awful. Okay, it's 20 years old, but it's digital, not tape - it shouldn't sound like a tape that's sat in a bucket of toxic waste. I may have to ditch the phone and buy a new one that either has a better answering machine built in, or pony up for Bell Call Answer.

Speaking of Bell, I also paid all of my bills today - that paycheque certainly didn't last long. (Okay, it was only for my first three days, but still...) I discovered that my bank had raised my Mastercard limit another two grand or so - so naturally I went shopping. At Future Shop, I considered picking up the first two seasons of Numb3rs, but decided instead on Stargate: Atlantis S2 - and then I found the entire series of Alien Nation in the 2-for-$30 bin, along with X3: The Last Stand. Then I popped into HMV, which I usually avoid like the plague because it's the most expensive of the music-and-video stores, but today I'm glad I did - I was finally able to get my hands on S5 of Queer As Folk. They had the special collectors' edition, which has some extra bonus features. And they had the Pet Shop Boys CD "Concrete," which is their concert album from last May, which was recorded with the BBC Concert Orchestra and directed by Trevor Horn, and features Rufus Wainwright singing "Casanova In Hell," Frances Barber singing "Friendly Fire," and Robbie Williams singing "Jealousy".

So yeah, as I said, that paycheque didn't last long...

Anyhow, back to my VB assignment for a bit. I hope my brilliant idea actually works...

We got our midterm results back tonight - I got 87/95, for a mark of 92%. The computer the instructor used to mark our exams couldn't add, however - it counted 45/50 on one side of the punch card (yes, punch card) and 41/45 on the other despite having marked 87 of my answers as being correct. Apperently I'm not the only one who had this problem; the instructor took our exams back to correct the marks.

We also got our first assignments back, and I got 100% there. The instructor said that if he'd wanted to be really picky, he'd have taken a couple of marks off. Apparently my comments are too verbose. Oy. Oh, and we got our second assignments tonight. This one's going to take quite a bit more work - I don't know where I'm going to find the time now.

First day of work tomorrow. I should be in bed, I suppose, but I only just finished dinner...

I went to class tonight, all prepared to write the midterm... and there were only something like 5 other people there tonight, and nobody else seemed ready because - get this - the instructor had forgotten to post on the class website that the midterm was being rescheduled for this evening.

Come on, people! It was supposed to be last Thursday, but class was cancelled due to the weather. When did you think it was going to be?

So now we're having it this Thursday. Argh.

Add to that, the instructor wanted the assignments (which were due tonight) handed in on a diskette, of all things. When I first learned that, I said to him, "Do you really mean a diskette? Not a CD?" and he confirmed it, and said that if anyone didn't have a diskette, not to bother buying them - he'd provide them. So I said that I would need one. I repeated that the next time the topic came up. So, tonight, does he have any diskettes with him? No! He said, "Nobody asked for one." *headdesk* So he said that we could just email a zip file to him containing all the files, which is what I ended up doing.

Anyhow... interview tomorrow afternoon, so I'm off to bed. I kind of wanted to go to bed an hour or so ago, but I got caught up in "Gay Marriage Debate #647" and "Should Hate Crimes Be A Distinct Class Of Criminal Charge? Debate #428" over at TrekBBS.

*headdesk*s all round.

I woke up a bit on the late side today, having worked for three or four hours last night on one of the end-of-chapter projects for my VB class. It was frustrating, as I wasn't having an issue with language syntax or creating the form in Visual Studio - it was actually trying to work out the logic. The problem was to create a stopwatch which will display the current clock time, the active elapsed time, the paused time, and the total of both. The active time was no issue at all, but the instructions said that only two timers should be used - one which fires once per second and updates the clock time (easy peasy) and one which fires once per millisecond. Trying to figure out how to calculate how long the stopwatch was paused for was giving me a headache. (It wasn't as easy as it sounds, because there also had to be a button that would reset everything except the clock time to zero. Otherwise I could have just calculated the difference between the current time and the time the stopwatch was started, and subtracted the active time.) I finally finished it up around 6 this morning when I figured out how to use the TimeSpan data type. Argh. I'm wondering whether I solved it in an unnecessarily complex fashion. Maybe I should email the instructor and ask him.

As for bowling... my arm was feeling a bit better at the beginning of the night - it was no longer painful to straighten my arm completely - but it flared up early in the first game and by the end of the night, it was the worst it had felt in quite some time. My scores were mediocre: 167, 149 and 166. I missed about three easy spares in each game, as I was pulling the ball left (all of them were in the right corner, as I recall), which made it even more annoying. (I came close to sparing another 6-7-10, though. Two centimetres to the left...) And to cap it all off, we lost all three games (though we were bowling without Randy, as he had to work again this week, so it was a miracle that the first game was close and the third game was so close that it came down to the final frame).

What nearly made the evening a disaster is that about halfway through the third game, after h8torun came off the lane, and as I was about to go up, she slipped on the step. I instinctively reached out to grab her, and she instinctively reached out to grab me. We managed to grab onto each other, but she had thrown out her right arm and I had grabbed her recently-dislocated wrist, which she still has wrapped. Judging from the way she finished the night, though, I didn't seem to have done any damage. Whew.

I'm supposed to go out with cuteteenboy tonight, but he has yet to call. My cellphone died at some point between the bowling alley and home, and is currently charging, so cuteteenboy, if you still want to go out and you see this, call the land line. It's the same number you called the other night.

My condolences to plaidlibrarian as the Liberals lost yesterday's byelection in York-South Weston, on which he was working. The funny thing is, I know Paul Ferreira, the NDP candidate who won. He bowls on Wednesday nights. Yeah, yeah, I know... big surprise. I know everybody. Mario and I were talking about him tonight - it seems Mario doesn't like him much. I don't think we finished the conversation, though, so I don't know if he ever said why, apart from him being a "typical politician". *shrug* I don't know, he's always been nice and friendly to me, as has his husband.

I had hoped that getting to bed by 2:30 or thereabouts this morning would have been the start to getting back on a more normal schedule, but sleeping until 2 this afternoon kind of put the kibosh on that idea.

I knew I was tired from yesterday, but that tired??? Sure, I'd only gotten about four or five hours of sleep the night before, and spent all afternoon and part of the evening at the TT/Polaris crew party, but I didn't think I needed nearly 12 hours of sleep.

The party was fun, though concom members once again outnumbered the volunteers whom the party is meant to thank for their work on the convention. It was held at a pub called "Rails & Ales", which serves the largest hamburgers I've ever seen. A couple of years ago, one of our group was heard to exclaim, "My God, that burger is as big as my face!" As I recall, it took me over an hour to eat mine. Last time we were there, there seemed to have been a decline in both the size and the quality of the burgers, but they seem to have rectified that (though the tzatziki burger is no longer on the menu :( ). I had the roast beef sandwich this time, though, which was excellent, and probably had as much meat in it as the burgers.

People started to trickle in around 2 (I'd gotten there early to meet gurudata and put together prize packages). The "who am I?" character guessing game went over well (we all drew a slip of paper on which was printed a character's picture and name, and people had to ask yes/no questions to try to guess who everyone was), though people guessed who I was fairly quickly in both instances. Once someone guessed the show a character was from, the game was usually over within the next two questions. For instance: "Are you male?" (yes.) "Are you from a Star Trek show?" (yes.) "Original?" (no.) "Voyager?" (yes.) "Are you human?" (no.) "Are you Tuvok?" (yes.) I think the round in which I was playing Seven of Nine went even faster, though I joked that they probably would have gotten it in one if I had just thrown out my chest and sucked in my stomach. (Well, maybe two - they might have guessed T'Pol first.) The longest any round went was when someone was playing as Buck Rogers.

We then spent some time trying to come up with false rumours to spread about other members of concom, but there wasn't a whole lot of creativity in the room at that point. (elizard100 said she was thinking about starting a rumour that I'd been turned straight, but she figured nobody would buy it.) I suggested that yellow_freshia (who is a librarian) secretly likes to fold the corners of pages over to mark her place. She then demonstrated her amazing ability to walk at a near-normal pace with a book balanced on her head.

So that was yesterday, and explains, perhaps a little, why I was so tired last night. And now I'm probably not going to get to bed until 5 or 6 again, because I spent all day today reading yesterday's newspaper and watching TV.

I'm not sure what compelled me, but I watched both The Simpsons or Family Guy tonight, for the first time in ages. I rather enjoyed much of FG - I laughed out loud a couple of times, at the "Wrath of Khan" spoof and the "Anchors Aweigh" bit (which went on, as FG bits often do, a little long, but I guess they had to get the most bang for the bucks they spent on getting the rights to the clip?). I then switched over to Desperate Housewives, which was a repeat. I could have sworn that the Globe TV listings said that tonight's episode was going to be a new one... but I watched it anyway, and thus failed to realize that I could have watched The Dresden Files instead. So I'll be staying up to catch the repeat at 3. Argh. And Studio 60? They've done better, but they've also done worse. This episode seemed to be lacking a bit of zip in the dialogue; I found myself wondering when Aaron Sorkin got bodysnatched by Harold Pinter.

Then I read a chapter and a half of my Visual Basic textbook... which is as dry as dust. Or maybe that's just because I'm reading the chapters I should have read a week ago, when we were covering stuff in class that I already knew.

Now I have a bunch of job alerts from various websites to go through, as I've fallen a bit behind.

I'll leave you all with a thought from tonight's television viewing... there's something seriously wrong with whoever it is at Global Television who thought that it was a good idea to follow up a commercial for Friends4Friends (an agency of the Responsible Gambling Council, which encourages people to intervene in friends' gambling problems) with a commercial for PartyPoker.net.

My grades for this past fall have finally been posted. As I expected, my marks fell a bit thanks to my butchering both finals, but I guess the instructor (particularly the C# instructor, since I didn't butcher the Scripting Languages final nearly as badly) was generous. Whether that was based on my emailing him the complete solution an hour after I got home with a note saying "just to prove I'm not a total spaz...", or because he knew that I knew what I was doing and had just made an early error that cost me over an hour, or possibly because the final wasn't weighted as heavily as I feared it would be, I'm not sure. Whatever the reason, I'm not complaining.

Course	Course Title	Final Grade
COMP 9342	INTERNET SCRIPTING LANGUAGES	B+
COMP 9370	INTRO TO C# (C-SHARP)	A

I'm not sure why it says that I attempted 6.3 and 6.0 GPA hours, but earned 0.0. Maybe because Continuing Education classes don't count toward a GPA?

*insert sound of choking*

That is all.

:(

I got my Scripting Languages Assignment #3 finished about an hour ago. It probably would have taken about four hours had I not gotten off to a horrendous start by being sidetracked due to a misunderstanding of the requirements...

As predicted, the third assignment was to incorporate database functionality into the Toronto Air Lines website we've been building all term. This required the addition of a whole whack of ASP and VBScript code into the existing HTML/Javascript code.

( Trials and tribulations of writing a single website using all of HTML, Javascript, VBScript, ASP and MySQL and getting it all to work together... )

Oh, I wanted to mention, rbegley, during Tuesday's C# lecture, the instructor was talking about different technologies that are in use today for working with Web forms, and he mentioned Ajax. When he did, I actually laughed out loud - I had to explain to him during the break that you had mentioned it when I was talking about the trials and tribulations of that assignment. I thought that was an amusing little coincidence...

In other (non-)news, this afternoon I finally got around to cracking open one of those Coca-Cola Blak samples I got a few months ago. (I was feeling a little groggier than usual.) Not terrible, but not great either. It actually tasted more like licorice than coffee to me... but maybe I've just become a Starbucks snob. :)

Off to bed now, I think. I have a lot of data entry ahead of me in the afternoon. Not to mention that I have some studying to do... we were given the option of doing the C# final on Tuesday of next week so that we could fit in one more lecture on Web forms, and I (along with most of the rest of the class) took it. So I have my Scripting Languages final on Monday, and my C# final on Tuesday. But with the assignment out of the way, I have the time now to take care of that, and I can attend the TT21 Polaris 21 meeting on Sunday - I was worried that I was going to have to skip it, after telling plaidlibrarian that I'd be there. I may even be able to go for dinner afterwards with everyone.

I had a mediocre night tonight at the bowling alley - 161, 149, 155. And my team only won one out of three games. Not to mention, we discovered that thanks to some clause in the league Constitution, we lost one of the points we thought we had taken last week when the other team failed to show up, because we didn't break 1050 (we had 1041).

WTF? The other team doesn't show up, doesn't declare their scores or bowl off, and we still are deemed to have lost a game against them? That makes no sense at all.

The weird thing is that it was someone who's not even the league statistician who somehow found out and filed a complaint about us with the league executive. I have no idea how he saw the scoresheets... anyway, Mario is submitting an amendment to the Constitution at the annual general meeting in January. This is ridiculous.

On the bright side, I got those changes I was making to my C# assignment completed this afternoon. I'm sure that I had previously found a way of modifying a record in the middle of an existing file (I'm not crazy, am I, carynb? Didn't I show you how I had done something along those lines in class last week?), but that code doesn't seem to be in any of the projects I have on my computer here at home. Using the Write file access mode, I can overwrite the file starting from the beginning. Using the ReadWrite mode, it appends everything to the end, even if I read up to the point where I want to change the file and then write my changed record. A Google search failed to turn up any way of overwriting records that are in the middle of the file. So as it stands now, I'm reading the file record-by-record and writing the record to a second file, unless the record I've just read is the one I'm updating - in which case, I'm writing the updated version. Then I'm closing the file, deleting the original and renaming the new file to the original name.

I was talking to Mario tonight about this, and he couldn't think of any other way of doing it without using something called Ajax Gadgets. He suggested that I put the following somewhere in my code as a comment: "No sane person would ever do this. Sane people would use a database."

Anyhoo, I had considered going out tonight, but a) I'm sore from bowling (another sign that I was bowling poorly - when I'm bowling well, my body doesn't bitch at me), and b) it's freezing out there (according to www.theweathernetwork.ca, it's only -4 with a wind chill of -12, but it felt like -20 when I got home an hour and a half ago). So fuck that noise.