20. August 2008 by Asher.

So I’ve been told many times by a a few people (my mentor being the biggest supporter), but I’m not sure what to get into and how to go about it. Some things I’ve been looking into:

- KeePass(X): an encrypted password storage system for both Windows and Unix. Part of the reason I’m thinking about this because I use it frequently to store a lot of my passwords and think it would be a good place to make my entrance into the open source world.

- Jetlang/Retlang: libraries for messaging based concurrency. These libraries are both based on Erlang and were started by Mike Rettig, with whom I currently work. At work, I’ve used Retlan a fair amount, so feel that it would be a really good project to work on and would help me learn more about a library that I employ in some of my projects at work.

The open source world that have prevented me from dabbling in it. Until recently I had trouble finding time for more than my school work. However, recently I feel that I have more time (not doing homework until the wee hours of the morning) and should contribute to some of the open source projects, which I frequently use. I’m just am unsure of the best way to start this adventure. I feel like, as is true for most projects, that there is a lot of ramp up time for any project to which I want to contribute code. I’m not sure if the best way to overcome this is to just lock myself in my room for a weekend and learn as much code as I can or to slowly learn what I can while contributing smaller amounts. I guess either way I just need to pick one, make my mentor help me out and dive in!

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26. May 2008 by Asher.

Wow, it has been so long since I’ve posted on here. I guess I just sort of let it slip my mind for a little while and found other things to be a little more interesting with the weather getting nicer here. Anyways, I’m going to try to post a little more often.

Anyways, Friday night I went out with D and some of her friends from work. We met at a bar downtown before going to see the new Indiana Jones flick. ….. And now this post is taking a completely different turn than I had originally intended. Originally, I was going to post about how much I didn’t like the movie and that the coolest part of going to see Crystal Skull was the Dyson Airblade hand-dryers in the men’s restroom.

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However, I was just bumming around on one of my forums and found a thread on a review of the Indian Jones. I spent some time reading this and it brought up some something I’ve always noticed but never really given too much thought too until now; how much one’s expectations for a film, effects their review of the film. I know there have been several times that I have gone to a movie expecting it be horrible (most recently Ironman) and I left really enjoying it.

With Indian Jones I went in fully hyped up to see the movie, having been hyped up to see it for several months, and came out of the movie severely  disappointed with the film as another installment in the Indiana Jones series. What interests me more is that in the thread I was reading, many people had very low expectations and came out “loving” the film or rather at least liking it. To me it is amazing how we as humans let our expectation influence us so much. And what is even more amazing is that professional movie reviews claim that their expectation of a film don’t influence their review, I sort of doubt that.

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27. April 2008 by Asher.

Ever heard of navel-gazing? Omphaloskepsis? I had not of until Friday morning.

Navel-gazing is, as was described to me, the act of a Buddhist monk staring into his navel trying to figure out the meaning of life. Wikipedia explains it in a very similar way. I’m not even going to ponder the craziness of one looking deep into their own navel as a source of enlightenment, rather I’d like to discuss why I am now blessed with this knowledge.

Friday morning I went to talked to my boss about a program we had been working on Thursday afternoon. I stated that Thursday night I had thought of a better way to accomplish our goal and wanted to run it by him. At this he went into a long rant about not having time to navel-gaze, not gold-plating things and to just do it his way and now.

This concept confuses me, almost everything I’ve read or been told about programming is that a good programmer is one that is always thinking. I have even been told by the President of a Java Shop in Ann Arbor that the biggest reason that sending programming project overseas is due to communication issues causing problems with overseas programmers actually thinking about the specification as opposed to just programming what they are told.

Most of my college education we were not taught how to solve a problem in a specific way, but we were given the tools that could solve the programming problems and the knowledge of how to apply them in various ways. To be more specific we are not just typing monkeys, we are actually paid to be thinking monkeys. (Insane isn’t  it!) It amazes me that someone who has worked in the programming industry so long would not understand this simple fact that makes programming such a difficult thing to do.

However; I continued to think about this problem, discussed it with another member of my team, who agreed with my ideas and was able to accomplish our goals within 30 minutes of programming and testing. Mind you, I had spend 4 hours Thursday afternoon trying to think about how to test the code I was asked to add and couldn’t figure out the best way to do it. (Usually a sign that something is wrong, hence the thinking.)

I think this experience helps me realize how important thinking about the best way to accomplish something is never a bad idea. Thinking about solutions most often leads to a increased knowledge, a better solution and hopefully a quicker solution. So moral of the day: Keep thinking!

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20. April 2008 by Asher.

Oh yeah, we cannot forget the AK 47s (which I missed out on), the army helmet, the video games and numerous other things I’m forgetting to mention or maybe even withholding.

Most of you may know, but this past weekend was my friend Adam’s (who we affectionately called Dad) bachelor party. I know what happens at bachelor parties stays secret, so I’ll only let slip the few, allowed highlights from Saturday night. I’ll start out with Friday night around 9pm, everyone received an email notifying us of this shin-dig and it’s date and time (being less that 24 hours later). On that Jake and I decided to cancel all weekend activities that we previously had planned and road trip early Saturday morning to Ann Arbor. We arrived in Ann Arbor, while he group was at a shooting range so Jake and I ventured to Dominick’s (a local bar that has lots of outdoor seating and whose specialty is Sangria, I highly recommend that you try it out!) Here we split a 1/2 gallon of Sangria while waiting for the party to return.

The rest of the night consisted of drinking at Adam’s bachelor-pad (or rather crappy Ann Arbor house in the student ghetto). The high light of the night was seeing Adam (who was wearing an army helmet) put his head through both the Plexiglas and screen parts of his storm door and then preceding to kick the door several times. I think the door had given him an evil look or something of the sort. Anyways, it was a great time, nice to be back in Ann Arbor and I got to see the sport-court-esque material in which the administration covered the Diag for graduation, which is being held there this year since the Bighouse is under construction. Interesting stuff, I came across a piece, I’ll post it up later.

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15. April 2008 by Asher.

Last week some of my colleagues kept talking about this restaurant near us in the loop, called Wow Bao (bao is pronounced like wow). They refused to tell me exactly what it was, but just insisted that I had to go there to know. This past Monday morning we all went, and this is what is was.

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There is no other way to explain it other than a ball of dough stuffed with scrambled eggs and either bacon, veggies or spicy sausage. More of the story however is that this may be one of the best breakfasts I’ve had in awhile. (To those of you that know me, yes I know I don’t eat breakfast much, but have started recently!)

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13. April 2008 by Asher.

This is from St. Patty’s Day weekend, a few weeks ago.

This was in response to an age-old question, first brought to my attention my my friends Jake and Joe. How many bottles can you drink from at once? As Joe demonstrates above, four is clearly possible, but do we think it is possible to do more than four? I think that five or 6 is definitely do-able. To me it isn’t so much a question of how many bottles you can fit into your mouth, but rather how many you can hold in a small area. If you can hold the bottles close enough together, you should just be able to hold them high enough that the liquid forms on steady stream flowing perfectly into your mouth..seems reasonable, yes?

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13. April 2008 by Asher.

Hello All! I just decided to start my first blog ever today. For now, I’m just going to use a temporary design provided to me, but over time I would like to change it and make it a lot cooler. So if you have any suggestions for looks, please let me know. I plan on writing mainly about my life with regards to sports, friends, Chicago, programming, technology and any other random sh!t that comes to mind. Thanks all!!

Random Wikipedia Adventure: There is a programming language called D. I haven’t read much about it other than some of what I read on Wikipedia. To me it looks like a cross between C++ and C#, which some other cool features, such as nested functions. I don’t know if anything will ever come of it, but it is still a baby, only being release in Jan ‘07.

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