April, 2008

I'm not much of a book person during the better part of the year - mainly because I have enough reading from school to keep me occupied. Now that the exams are over, I've got my eye on a few books that I'd like to dive into.

I don't read novels (fiction) so most of the time I don't see the point in buying a book. If I need some information, I just Google it. It's always available and most of all, always up to date - especially when they are books about technical information that changes almost monthly.

A colleague of mine approached me about a month and a half ago because she was looking for a programmer to do some work - temporary summer position - setting up a Wiki, and customizing it.

At first, I was interested in the job, but after looking at my options and current status, I had to turn it down. From that point onwards, I started looking for friends I knew from university that could fill the position. I asked a handful of close friends first, and they all had jobs lined up for the summer, I started asking acquaintances that I had interacted with, but not necessarily worked with them directly, and most of them had temporary or full time offerings. I was having a hard time finding people who were unemployed in Software Engineering. 

Wordpress? What? - You thought this blog was running on Drupal?

Well, you're right, it is running on Drupal, but my brother's blog is running Wordpress.

I had 4 teeth extracted a while ago and for a few days after the surgery, I stayed at my parents, where after lots of haggling from my brother, I finally caved - I started playing a first person shooter on a game console.

Don't get me wrong, I love first person shooter games (big fan of Tribes), I'm just not good at them with the analog sticks on game pads. Give me a mouse and keyboard, and I can kick ass.

Army of Two - Exactly what the title says - Two player game where you can go Rambo, or be as covert as you like - to a certain degree.

The game is very linear, you cannot deviate from the story very much, or take your own path to complete the mission, but it's not so bad. The maps are fairly big, so you can approach the enemy from different angles to use different tactics.

The concept of a two player game like this was a lot of fun, and there were a lot of 'bonding' moment - playing it with my brother. But him being the sharpshooter that he is with FPS games, there were times when he got frustrated at me because i couldn't pull my weight.

While working on a project; designing a RIA in Adobe Flex, I was using the a Data Grid, and populating it using a HTTP Service that ran PHP.

It was a painful process.

I've had quite a lot of people contact me asking where my photography portfolio was. I've been posting lots about my new gear, and new found websites, but no proof that I'm actually doing something.

So here's the response to all of you:

With school and work keeping me busy, I've barely had time to go through all my photo shoots and send the clients their proofs.

But to be completely honest, I have a portfolio, I have about 4 different proof of concepts ready to go… but I'm not happy with any of them. I'll start working on one idea, get about 50% through creating it, and when I wake up the next day, I'll find a ton of things wrong with it. Colour, style, layout… you name it.

For the past few months, I have not been happy with her performance of any of the web-browsers I’ve tried. As more and more sites become Flash, and JavaScript oriented – ala Web 2.0 – the browsers have to adapt to run those at optimum performance.

Firefox