thehowe_v7.1

The end of the semester is keeping me quite busy, but I wanted to post a quick update now that I've got the new website up. Hey, new website! Yes, indeed, after 6 months of off-and-on work (mostly off), I've finally managed to get the new website to a state where it can be live on the wild wild internet.

There are a number of changes in the new site, most of which you don't care about: I've re-implemented the backend in Ruby on Rails, I've revamped the blogging engine, I've redesigned the code to make it easier to add new features, blah, blah, blah.

Changes you should care about:

• Added tags to the blog posts.
• Improved commenting feature
• Added rudimentary search to the site
• Easier to change code = more improvements, more often
• RSS feed for the blog posts
• Improved hiding of "angsty" posts and other content not appropriate for public consumption (using the new VIP system)

Anyways, I'm relatively excited about this. Which I guess says something about me. Enjoy!

Well, it's been a while, so I thought I'd put something here. It's been a great summer working for S3, and I've still got about a month to go. Today was the company picnic, which was OK. Free food and free beer are always a plus.

I start grad school in a little over a month, and I still haven't registered for classes. I should probably get on that. I've been avoiding thinking about school until August, so I guess I can put that off for a few more days. I should also probably start thinking about the research job I've got lined up.

I've been working a lot with Ruby on Rails this summer, and I've gotten a lot of good ideas for ways to redesign the backend of the site to be more maintainable and easier to change, so I may implement some of those in the future. I think first I need to get around installing a proper linux distro onto a virtual machine on my laptop, so I can actually test the php code real-time.

Anyways, Venture Bros. is finishing up, so that's probably enough for now.

So I thought I should put something up here, since it's been awhile. This summer while I'm at Amazon I think I might do another site redesign. I'm not sure yet - I've got some cool ideas I'd like to prototype first that require PHP 5, which my web host hasn't upgraded to yet. Maybe I'll get Brock to give me a sandbox on one of his servers. If that happens then I probably won't try to port all of these old blog entries over to the new system; the changes I'm thinking about are fairly large even on the database level, and I don't feel like trying to manually convert ~4 years of old entries.

While I'm on the subject, it's interesting how long I've been doing this whole "blogging" thing. There are 3 years, 7 months worth of old blog entries in my archive, going back all the way to freshman year of college when I still called them "rants". You should go back and read them sometime - I've moved all of the depressing ones to be hidden unless you're logged in, so it should make for a fairly entertaining read.

Anyways, back to the topic at hand. I'm also hoping to get started on my online version of Overpower this summer. I've learned a lot over the past two semesters that I think will really help me in implementing this. I feel like I'm at the point now where this is doable, if I can find the time. Realistically I probably won't be able to get a version out this summer, but I would like to get some more of the design worked out in my head.

As a final note, thanks a ton to everybody who wished me a happy birthday today. You made my day.

All the rest of you suck ;).

Well, seeing as how I'm back at school with some time to spare, I thought I'd to a quick & boring housekeeping update. Break was nice, got to do lots and lots of nothing (as my dad said, I was "decompressing"). Read some good books, watched some good movies, generally just had a good time. Christmas was nice, as always. Got a bunch of DVDs, a few books, and a gargantuan Star Wars lego set. No complaints there. Troy got an mp3 player, but I had to help him pick out which one. We ended up choosing an iPod - it's overpriced and toolish, but it's fairly idiot-proof, so that worked out fairly well.

I thought I should make official mention that I've instituted a new site feature. I like to call it the "Angstblocker." Or maybe "Angstblocker 6000," I haven't really decided yet. Anyways, the way it works is, I mark the entries that I deem too full of angst to unleash upon the general public. From that point on, in order to view said entries, you need to be logged on as a member. Not a big deal, but worth mention.

My class schedule is looking to be quite nasty - my worst semester yet. I've got sixteen credits of upper-level computer science classes, with three separate groups to juggle for group programming assignments. On the plus side, the time-schedule my classes fit into is probably one of my best yet. We'll see, but I suspect I'm not going to have much free time this semester.

It's been awhile; life's been busy. The project cycle has been pretty vicious this semester, and when you add in the stupid busy work from non-engineering classes, I've been kept pretty busy. Deadlines for applying to grad school are coming up in a few months, so I should probably start working on that. I don't think I mentioned it here, but I did get a job offer from Amazon. A very generous offer. So that was nice. Even though I'm doing grad school, the job offer extends into an automatic internship offer, so I'm pretty well set for this summer, which is also nice.

News from home: apparently OE is doing exceptionally well in football this year. I don't really know all the specifics (my eyes kind of glaze over when people try to tell them to me), but apparently this team is the best in at least a decade, which is pretty cool. On a sadder note, apparently some kid in Troy's class commited suicide. I guess Troy sat next to him in classes the day he died, so he had a really tough time with that.

What else... I saw Dahlke a few weeks ago! He was in A² for a checkup, so we caught up over lunch. A big article appeared about him in a medical journal a few months back, which was neat. Apparently his cancer treatments were really experimental, and kind of a big deal, which I wasn't aware of. On a more selfish note, I also learned that I'm even more pathetic than I was previously aware of: apparently Loren Hunt has a girlfriend at Alma. The fact that Loren is now socially more successful than me is really pretty pathetic.

Moving on... work on the new website is progressing nicely, despite my lack of free time. It's currently about two-thirds of the way complete, with only the photoalbum, "about me" page, and some administrative stuff for me to finish. I expect I'll be cycling the links on the thehowe.com front page sometime early next month. At that point I'll also be shutting down the blog replies functionality on v5.0, since some of the changes I'm making for v6.0 have broken the old code.

So, I'm working on a new version of the website: howe_v6.0. Check it out if you want, most of the links don't work yet. This post is actually a test to try and figure out a problem, but I thought I'd at least put something.

I've been told that I don't post often enough to satisfy my out-of-school-yet-jobless contemporaries (i.e. Tom). This is a natural consequence of having the TV and my computer in two separate rooms this year. The internet is an excellent window into reality, but the TV is a portal to the magical world of the imagination. When it comes down to a choice I'm going to choose the TV because, let's face it, my life is boring as hell - which brings us to the second reason I haven't been posting. Unless you'd like to hear about my troubles installing graphics libraries for 487 or how cool function pointers are in C, I really don't have all that much to talk about.

That all being said, I actually do have a fair amount of news. Amazon has formally extended me a job offer for after this year. I'll get more details from them at the career fair next week, but I'm pretty much set on sticking around for a Master's degree.

Living in the house has been going well. Brock's been on an exercise streak since his girlfriend broke up with him, so I've been tagging along with him to the pool to get some laps in whenever possible. Eric keeps on buying cheap meat whenever we go to the store, so he keeps on having to cook it before it goes bad, so I've had some breaks from frozen dinners. On the downside, he likes to use lard in his cooking. Frequently. So, I try not to eat his food too often. We were supposed to have another Eric living with us, but he didn't come back to Michigan this year. We're in the middle of trying to get him to pay us - hopefully all will end well in that regard.

Classes have been busy but manageable. Despite the fact that I'm taking two absolute blow-off classes (Cultural Anthropology 101 and Astronomy 102), this semester is shaping up to be my busiest one yet. That's due to my two EECS classes, 487 (Intro to Graphics), and 381 (Advanced and Object Oriented Programming), both of which have a pretty heavy workload. As a nice surprise this semester it turns out I'm in the same Astro 102 lecture as Gracie Byrnes, so that's good. It's nice to have an attractive female actually happy to see me again - that hasn't happened since Ashley visited me in Seattle. Well, Jess did stop by to see me on her way to Northern before school started, but she's basically like my little sister, so that doesn't count.

Well, I'm home from Seattle. The experience as a whole was an overwhelmingly positive one. I'll post a good-bye email I sent in a few minutes. Now I'm just spending a few weeks relaxing at home before I head down to Ann Arbor.

I've got a new webpage in the works - something that I hope will make me a little bit of cash on the side. While I was at Amazon I worked a lot with their webservices, and they've actually got a really powerful set of tools available. So, I'm using that to make a comic book/graphic novel store. I'll only get between 5 and 15 percent of any sales, but it's not costing me a cent. So, if I can get some traffic, I win. There are actually some interesting problems - there's a one-request-per-second rule, and I can only do a limited set of actions in one webservice request, so I get to do some interesting caching and data manipulation on my end - but I have to work around limits on how long I can keep data in cache, which varies depending on what I'm storing. Like I said, an interesting set of problems.

But anyways, that'll probably be keeping me busy for the next couple of months or so. I've got a backlog now of about three other big projects besides the comic shop, so don't expect any major site updates anytime soon.

So, it occurred to me that I hadn't updated in awhile. I'd say I haven't done anything, but that wouldn't be strictly true. Last weekend my parents flew into town for the weekend to visit. On Saturday we drove about two hours north to a little port called Anacortes or something like that, and took a ferry out onto one of the islands off the coast and did a 5-hour sea kayaking excursion. It was a lot of fun - perfect weather, saw lots of wildlife (harbor seals, various starfish and jellyfish, even some orcas in the distance), and it was a hell of a lot easier than canoing.

After we drove back Saturday night, we got up Sunday morning and went on a 4+ hour hike at Tiger Mountain just outside of Seattle. It was a beautiful hike - awesome forest, a pretty damn rough hike. We gained roughly 2500 feet of elevation in about 2.4 miles - but over half of that (1300 feet) was in the last approx. 0.8 miles. Needless to say, it was pretty damn steep. We had some great views of the city and the surrounding mountains at the top, after which we took a slightly easier (but longer) trail down. My legs were sore as hell at the end, but it was worth it.

After the hike we came back to the apartment, showered, went out to dinner, and then went and saw Batman Begins at the local theatre. It was the best Batman movie ever. The villain wasn't the coolest (nobody beats Jack Nicholson as Joker), but it was the best representation of Batman I've ever seen on screen. I may even go see it again this weekend - we'll see.

What else... not too much going on this week. My project at work is progressing nicely, and it's been getting more satisfying as I get deeper into it. We've got an Intern rafting trip this Friday, so that should be fun. In about two weeks, on the 6th, Ashley is flying out to visit for a few days, so that should be a blast. I'll have to figure out what we're going to do, though. Going up in the Space Needle is a given, but beyond that there doesn't seem to be too much to do in Seattle. Ah well, I'm sure I'll think of something.

Oh, and in case you haven't noticed, I added a PhotoAlbum to the site, which is updated with what few pictures I've taken this summer. Enjoy.

Note: So, I just had this whole damn thing written up when I got booted because my session expired. I'm currently working on updating the site's code, but I probably won't get around to fixing those kind of flaws until this summer.

The College of Engineering Internship fair was this past Thursday. That meant that I, along with just about every other undergrad engineering student, got all spiffed up to beg for a job this summer. I'm usually pretty skeptical about these huge career fairs, but this one went fairly well for me. Most of the reps I talked to seemed pretty impressed that I had taken the initiative to learn all the skills required to build this website. I even got asked back for an interview with National Instruments on Tuesday! We'll see how it goes, but I'm cautiously optimistic. There's only about 25 other people they're interviewing, and about 20 of those are hardware guys. That means not much competition for me, which is probably a good thing.

Of course, the downside to this is that I had to go out and buy a new dress shirt. For some reason, all my dress shirts from high school have become something of a tight fit. Imagine that. The damn thing cost about double what I thought it should, so it had better be worth it. Hell, for what I payed the damn thing better include a jetpack and shoot friggin' lasers out of its buttons.