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Today was a bad day. It was another one of those days where nothing seemed to go right. At work I’ve just been switched to a C# project, which pretty much sucks. But it wasn’t necessarily the code that bothered me. Sure, the syntax is ugly, but that simply wasn’t it. I don’t agree with a lot of the .NET methodologies, but again, it wasn’t .NET that ruined my day—it was my childish behavior.

All day I spent my time on simplistic things, yet managed not to complete a single task. I got so frustrated because I couldn’t do the things I knew were easy. It was one right after another. By lunch I was definitely ready to go home.

Unfortunately, there was a guy working with me who is relatively new to .NET and OO programming, and was trying to learn a thing or two. I say unfortunately because I was too frustrated with myself to teach/explain anything. Having someone watch the simpler things go badly aggravated me even more, since I’d normally have everything I tried today finished in 30 minutes.

Now I could complain write all day about how much I don’t like this and that, but I’d just be ignoring the real issue: my poor attitude. The truth is there are tons of people who write successful .NET applications and really do enjoy it, I’m just not one of them.

I honestly am annoyed with the thought of being back at the beginning again; especially with a language I have no desire to learn. As a result of my annoyances, though, I ruined mine and the “paired programmer’s” day today. From now on, I hope to quit being so childish when I get stuck on things, and do my best to keep a positive attitude no matter what the situation.

Of course, talk is cheap, so we’ll see how it goes.

I don’t know what’s going on lately (the last 2 weeks), but for me, Gmail has been lagging beyond the extreme. It’s taking nearly 10 seconds to archive or open an email. I’m only using 30% of the alloted space, so it doesn’t have anything to do with that. It’s to the point where I’m not reading email more than once a day. That could arguably be a good thing, but not under these conditions. Hopefully things speed up soon…

Some of my favorite photographs come from long exposure shots. Typically, there are two general situations in which long exposures deem appropriate: night shots and moving water. Of course, there are plenty of other reasons to use a long exposure, but as an beginner, these are the two situations that are blatantly apparent to me. Having no easy access to rushing water, I usually try my luck with night shots.

Traffic at night is fun to shoot. But I hate doing it around Morgantown because of the obnoxious (students?) kids roaming around all night. Yesterday, I was in the mood to go take some pictures and play around with what I had (hopefully) learned about long exposures. Without considering the interstates, I thought three main places to be appropriate: Beechurst¹, Pateson, and High Street. In the summer, Beechurst at 10:00 pm is somewhat bland, and I had been to Pateson a few nights before. That left High Street. Even without too much traffic, the street/traffic lights would be enough to get a reasonable shot (they tend to glow like stars at 15 seconds and up).

I was on High Street for about 15 minutes before deciding to leave. I took about 10 pictures or so. With nearly every picture, I had to listen to ridiculous comments being shouted out of passing cars and “townies” out roaming the streets. Of course, none of it made any sense. Examples include: “Are you shooting a porno?”, “YEAHHHHH, TAKE MY PICTURE!”, “Whooooooooooooooooooooooo”, and so on. Probably the most uncomfortable, though, was when these three guys were walking by. One of them said “Dude, he’s taking a picture—[to me:] Are you taking a picture of the East Coast?” Then his strung out friend, standing about a foot from me, starts going nuts “[looking at me:] F*** yeah this is the East Coast. F*** you, F*** you, and F*** you [pointing at his two friends and myself]. This is the F***ing East Coast B****!” Since Amie was with me, we left. The last thing I want is to get into an altercation with a strung out heroin addict because I was taking a picture of High Street, especially with Amie with me. I guess deep down stuff like this weighs on my mind. It makes me choose to leave rather than deal with it. I’m just tired of the fact that I have to make the choice.

¹ I say Beechurst mainly because of the walking bridge above the road by the PRT station. There’s also potential going up the hill toward Evansdale, but I’ve yet to try it.

The on-line experience changes on a daily basis. The vast improvements of today’s web application’s (especially considering Ajax-based application’s) have brought great benefit to the user experience. However, I seem to have lost something in the transition: patience. Technology in general has put a spin on my level of patience on-line. My first internet experience came from a 66Mhz processor with minimal RAM and a 14.4 kbps dial-up modem (can you beat that one?). I remember thinking the ability to listen to music on the internet was awesome. I would wait over 20 minutes to download a 30 second clip of a song. That’s 20 minutes for 30 seconds. Now, if I can’t download a 40Mb file in a little over a minute, I’m not happy.

These days, even running Windows eats away at my patience. I can’t stand waiting on it to boot up (or shut down). It seems to take longer and longer every day. I hate being able to get to the GUI before it’s fully loaded. While it’s really a deceptive attempt by Microsoft to make you think Windows loads fast, some users still view it as an advantage, but it shouldn’t be. It’s not like you can do anything. You wait just as long, if not longer, to open a program or browser, only you get to look at your desktop background while it thinks. When I actually see the Windows interface, I should be done waiting. But that’s just me. I’m sure the Mac OS runs a lot smoother than Windows, which leaves me with more temptation to switch.

Lately I’ve been looking into optimizing my site a little bit. It’s annoying how slow it is. It’s all because of the two APIs. I’ve brushed up some of the database queries but you can barely tell, if at all. I’m aware that the APIs are causing the site to bog down a bit, so I’ve been looking into alternative ways to get the data. Currently, I’m creating the requests and parsing the data out manually, but other libraries and gems (such as flickr.rb) probably handle it better than I do. Also, I knew Typo comes pre-packaged with various API capabilities, so I downloaded the source to check it out. I noticed they have a delicious.rb file located under an “aggregations” folder in the models directory. What is the idea behind this? Is this something you install/setup? If so, what is the benefit of doing this? Also, I don’t know that Typo code is the most efficient interface to the del.icio.us API, but I’m sure it’s better than mine. I got this quote from the wiki: “Aggregations let you access attributes on an ActiveRecord object through sort of proxy objects.” I kind of get that, but it’s not clear-cut to me. I’ll be looking into it, but I thought I might get a response or two that may be a bit clearer. Any other thoughts on optimization (other than removing the APIs completely)? What about a form of caching? I’m unfamiliar with techniques to improve effeciency and speed.

I’ll be the first to admit I’m not perfect. And for the most part, I think I’m conscious about my flaws. I would have to say my level of patience (or lack there of) is probably the most dominating, though. I’ve always been impatient, but it’s the worst when I’m in traffic.

I don’t really understand how someone can handle slow, restraining traffic. It’s impossible for me. The thing is, I’m not really in a hurry to get anywhere, but I just want to get there at my own pace. I don’t necessarily have road rage, but I guess to some, I might. I don’t act crazy or do anything stupid, I’m just easily annoyed. To me, a person with road rage is a person who is abnoxious, vulgar and/or violent to others, and I’m not like that. The most dramatic thing I do is speed up and/or pass someone in the slow lane. And just so you know, I rarely go faster than 80 mph—I probably average 76-77 mph.

My top two irritations in traffic are: 1) when a car in the fast lane is along side of (and going the same speed as) a car in the slow lane, and I’m behind the car in the fast lane wanting to go faster and 2) when a car cruises along side of me (when I’m in the slow lane) in my blind spot for a long period of time. I cringe just thinking about it.

Update: I forgot to mention, this mostly concerns interstate traffic, although I do have many issues driving through town.