Category: work

Drainage Basin!

What a birthday!

It started off like any other day and I went to finally check my work email around 11:30. The agenda for the annual CA meetings was there from Friday which reminded me I needed to start preparing for my big presentation tomorrow. I checked the agenda for the meetings and noticed that my name wasn’t on the list for tomorrow. I got a terrible feeling in my gut. I checked the schedule for today and saw that I was supposed to present at 2:00…  TODAY!…  In 2 1/2 hours!… Holy crap.
Continue reading “Drainage Basin!”

the move

My boss, Michal, has given us the opportunity to move to Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, for work. He has opened up an EGI office, Energy & Geoscience Laboratory (yellow push-pin in center) there, which is where he is from.

When he first proposed this to me a few years ago, we were pretty apprehensive. Along with my mom’s poor health, Benjam’s work and trying to conceive, it didn’t seem like a good idea. Now, I’m kinda really excited for the adventure and culture shock!

work insomnia

Ugh.

In order to elicit an interest in our Black Sea project, my boss wants me to present our work progress at our annual CA (Corporate Associates) meeting in September. We’re not talking the measly 3-5 people at our usual end of project meetings. We’re talking 30-50 head honchos of the world’s biggest oil companies. Not to mention EGI’s director looming in the back with an eager look on his face that I perform well. This isn’t just an GIS presentation either, this is a technical performance on the tectonics and structural history of the region, in addition to our database. Little ‘ol me, playing with the big boys with their big toys.

To say I’m nervous is a slight understatment. Hence my inability to fall asleep.

new job and web standards

so i got a new job working for a local independent graphic designer / printer and its pretty nice. i get to work when i want, at my own pace, from home, doing what i love, and get paid for it. the only thing about it that really sucks is that i’m doing web design and as any semi-serious web designer that works for clients will tell you, coding for cross-browser compatibility SUCKS !!

i mean, why can’t all the browsers stop the damn browser wars and come to an agreement on what will and will not be supported?  it seems that the w3c has been doing a good job with stating what should be standard and what should not be standard, and most browsers do a pretty god job following those standards.

except one. microsoft’s internet explorer, the number one used browser on the planet. it works the way it wants to work, and getting your site to look the way you want it to in internet explorer is like trying to teach a four year old how to fly a plane. they may get some things right, but most of the time, they budge things up so bad, you have no idea what they are trying to do. and then all of a sudden, they don’t want to do anything anymore. it is the most annoying thing on the planet, because fixing one thing breaks another and when you get it all looking good in internet explorer and then go back and open up the same page in firefox (my personal favorite and most likely the favorite browser of any self-respecting web designer / aficionado) it looks totally whacked and nothing is where it is supposed to be.

and that’s not even considering the dinosaurs out there, who just absolutely have to have thier netscape communicator 4.75, which has almost no current standards support and what it does support (obsolete and completely annoying things like ‘blink’) it supports badly or is no longer a web standard.

but that’s okay, i figure anybody using web browsers older than the wheel are probably used to things looking all messed up, or they are too computer illiterate to care.

i eagerly await the release of internet explorer 7 (which has taken several years, because microsoft, in all thier wisdom, thought, “we have the monopoly on web browsers, why fuck with it?”. that is, until firefox started taking thier precious users and microsoft just HAS to have the monopoly) because that will mean (hopefully) that interent explorer will finally have decent web standards and png support and i won’t have to keep writing several versions of the same page just to get it to look right everywhere. (but hopefully it will still be subject to the same css hacks, so in case it does mess something up, i wont have to rewrite everything to fix it.)

now all we need is to kill off the dinosaurs and we’ll be all set.

election day aggravation

well…   it’s official…  Utah politics sucks my ass. I can’t believe that that many people are willing to throw away the rights of other people based on the sole fact that thier (the other people) way of life makes them (the stupid ones) uncomfortable.

election day was yesterday and on the ballot was a constitutional amendment (#3) that changed the definition of marraige to being the union of a man and a woman. it also took away the rights of any other such union. here is the actual text of that ammendment:

(1) Marriage consists only of the legal union between a man and a woman.
(2) No other domestic union, however denominated, may be recognized as a marriage or given the same or substantially equivalent legal effect.

now, the first part in itself is severly fucked up. why?  because. who are we to say that two people who aren’t a man and woman can’t get married?  why does it make you so uncomfortable?  and why do you think that by taking away thier rights it’s going to make you feel better about yourself?  i mean, while we’re at it, why don’t we take away women’s rights, and the rights of blacks, too?  what makes a gay marraige so threataning?  is it the fact that some book says it’s a sin and therefore it must be true?  or is it something to do with the safety of children?  because lord knows that gay people can’t love a child the way straight people can *end sarcasm*.
the second part of this little two line atrosity is even worse. look at it closely. it takes away the rights of common law marraiges, for ALL PEOPLE, not just same sex couples, who now, by law, can’t get married, visit each other in the hospital, make desicions in times of emergency, and determine what is best for the person with whom they’ve shared their whole life and love with because a single sentence that just got added to the utah constitution says so. how fucked up is that?
and don’t even get me started on the damn presidential election. i mean, if i hear one more person say they hate bush, AND THEN NOT VOTE FOR KERRY?!!  wtf?  i hear it all over the place… that bush is stupid and bush is lame, and bush sucks at this and bush sucks at that…  blah blah blah…  well, you just had your chance to fix it and what did you do?  sat on your ass and moaned about it. i voted. but only two of the things i voted for passed because the rest of the people in this closed-minded, bigoted state can’t see past thier own narrow feelings.

*end venting*

sorry about that, i’m just so frustrated, and it’s not just utah, like 12 states passed similar amendments. i mean, seriously.

— insert huge topic change here —

so…  i got engaged a little while ago, kinda excited, kinda nervous, kinda swamped with school, work, and now planning for a wedding (ok, not really ‘planning’, but saying ‘okay, sure’ to ideas my fiance throws out).  it’s not like i’m super stressed right now, but there are times when i’m not quite sure where to start and it gets to me a little bit.

also just got back from disneyland where my niece had her fourth birthday, got to hang out with my sister, and my niece for a day while at California Adventure, which is way cool. Tower of Terror is awesome, i recommend it to anybody, except for you wussies out there.

i’m also working on the new corporate intranet and public site for EGI, which is pretty dang huge for a guy who only designs websites as a hobby. the site uses ColdFusion, which is a server side script not unlike php and perl. although it does have its pros and cons. pro is its simplicity, theres no distinguising between the code and the html while coding, the code merely consists of specific html ‘tags’ (for instance <cfif> </cfif>), but because of it’s simplicity, it’s also a little harder to do complex things without a superfluous amount of code.

i also designed a site for a friend of mine (soon to be brother-in-law through two marriages) at www.photmillard.com.  i really like the way the site turned out for him, i’m actually quite proud of it. it’s simple, but the backend is custom coded in php to select a different random picture from each of the various photo albums and display it as a rollover on the main page every time it is refreshed. i also re-skinned the photo album that he uses (the same php script as mine), and created all new graphics, edited css, and code.

anywho…   it’s been a while, sorry to keep everybody in the dark about what’s going on, but i been busy.
plur, lates

p.s.- you may also notice (if you frequent my blog) that the look (and script) has changed, i was forced to do this by some weinie that kept comment spamming my blog. why do people feel they have to be dickheads?  what happened to respect?

school is catchin up

i just remembered like 20 min ago that i have a lab that is due tomorrow, (it shoulda been done two weeks ago), along with the lab that i have to do tomorrow, on top of that i took a math test today, which i got at most 3 out of 8 correct. my boss at egi is askin about these figures that i’m supposed to have drawn by tomorrow, and my bosses at paulsen are asking if i can come in tomorrow to work…

that’s a lot of stuff for one day:

  • do the lab that’s due tomorrow
  • work on egi stuff
  • work at paulsen
  • and go to lab

poopy

starting to get a little bit stressed, anybody wanna do my homework for me?

crap-on-a-stick, lates

stupid computers

the computer at paulsen construction was gettin to be pretty full, so i decided that it was about time to wipe the hard drive, get rid of the dual-boot that was on there and repartition the drive with one drive. because the reason that there were two partitions is no longer an issue.

so i did, except that the dumb thing decided that it wanted to make the new drive (freshly formatted, etc.) drive letter f ??? so i get windows all installed (all the while not knowing it was installing on drive f), which takes about an hour, and then check the thing and notice that its drive f. so i take the drive that was supposed to be f, and change it to d and try to change the new drive to drive c, but it won’t let me. but it’s okay, i’m not too pissed, just a little annoyed, cuz i can easily reformat, remove the conflicting drive, and reinstall windows, not that big a deal, except that when i remove the drive, and go to reformat, the computer doesn’t detect the hard drive !!!  OMG!  so i have to flash the BIOS, fiddle with shit, and finally get it to detect the hard drive after about a half an hour of stress. so it’s finally installing, and i’m playing on another computer, but i just wanted to let everybody know, that computers suck!  just buy ’em and leave ’em alone.

grrr, lates