Andy Morrow's Blog

Long story made short – I have discovered jQuery. I had heard mention of its name before, but had not pursued it with any interest. I figured, I already know well enough how to use Prototype and script.aculo.us for Rails (which, in all honesty, I really don’t; I’d have to spend quite a bit of time in the documentation and examples in order to be able to do anything useful). Well, I finally bit the bullet with jQuery, and it’s amazing. You can accomplish so much with so much less code. It’s made web development fun again.

In other news, my collection of Dilbert strips on my wall has gone from 1 to 8. Progress!

It’s been a good week thus far. It’s almost 12 hours in (assuming one does not count Sunday). I think my final draft of my English paper ought to be acceptable. I have to put it in a paper folder to turn it in. Luckily, I went to the bookstore the same day and found paper folders for 10 cents each. So I won’t be bothered by parting with it. What’s more, they’re white and remind me of an albino whale for some reason I can’t quite explain.

Managed to get everything done yesterday except home teach the men that I’m assigned to visit. I’m going to wait for my companion to get home and then drag him along with me. It’ll be good for all of us. What’s more, I haven’t exactly read the lesson yet, but I managed to pull it off with the girls. Maybe that’s why they didn’t want to say anything except in answer to a direct question. I don’t know, but it was akward.

I’d better get some lunch and get to class.

Once again, it’s been a day of rest. Kind of. So far, I’ve gone to church, collected fast offerings (and paid a fast offering for the first time), and hung out with my friends. There’s a fireside tonight at 6, and I need to go on two home teaching visits immediately thereafter. And I still want to call and talk to both my family and Moriah. I’m glad it’s a day of rest – otherwise, I think I’d fall asleep before the end of the day.

I was very grateful that I went to the creamery yesterday and got some cereal and milk. I fasted until about 2 PM. At that point, I couldn’t do it any longer. It was a full fast, though, I think. The off-brand cereal is almost as good as the real deal – and certainly much cheaper. You get a huge dog-food-bag for only $5, the same price as a single box.

I’m going to go try and get some food at the Cannon center before church gets out in California and I can call people. So long.

My first test for the semester is done. Woo hoo! It took me from about 1:30 until about 3:45. I only left then because the testing center was closing soon and I thought I was going to lose my mind if I sat in that uncomfortable little plastic chair for any longer. I think it went well, however. I remembered all of the applicable ideas and theorems. If I made any mistakes, they were silly ones. I guess I ought to check up on a few bits and pieces of trig to be sure I got those right.

Anyway, other than that, all I’ve done today is go to an iPhone programming meeting and sleep. I was up rather too late last night with my friends, so I’ll have to work for the rest of the day to pull up the slack. Life is crazy, but I’m having fun.

Last night (this night? It now being 1:00 AM makes things questionable) I went to an incredible choir concert put on by BYU with the choir director for our ward. Four groups performed: the BYU Men’s Chorus, the BYU Singers, the BYU Women’s Chorus, and the BYU Concert Choir. Not only was the singing incredible (and largely a cappella), but there was some very interesting accompaniment. They had a bagpipe, flute, cello, piano, harpsichord, and assorted percussion. Even just adding percussion to a cappella sounds incredible. I really enjoyed it.

I made a little progress on Bob’s website. I’ve been struggling with IE – my most recent battle was with the hasLayout property. First, my list numbers appeared at the bottom of the list item instead of at the top as expected. Next, they disappeared completely. Normally it wouldn’t be such an issue – except that I don’t have a computer with IE to test it. There conveniently is, however, a service that will show you a screenshot of the primary versions of IE rendering your website. So I’m kind of shooting in the dark. I need to call in a favor with a floormate or two and borrow some time on somebody else’s computer.

In fact, I wouldn’t have ever found the solution without help from somebody on Stack Overflow, my new favorite website. It’s intended to be a community edited repository of all programming questions and knowledge. Both questions and answers are voted upon by the community so that the best of both rise to the top. It’s supposed to solve the problem with Googling for an hour to find an incomplete solution to an arcane problem. I love it.

Time for bed. See you all tomorrow.

Two items of interest. For my next CS project, I am going to write a game of Boggle. Dad will not be able to beat it. It will be incredible. Just wait.

Second, I’ve just been looking at the Dell Inspiron Mini 9. They’re really got something going on there. If I already had a desktop and was looking for a laptop, I would be seriously, seriously tempted. The baseline hardware is pretty medium (as in unimpressive), but it starts at around $350 – and it comes with Ubuntu instead of MS Windows (yuck). The thing is tiny and they all ship with solid state drives and wireless. It’s kind of a rip-off of the Macbook Air – no optical drive, very few ports, kind of low power processor, etc.; except its tech specs aren’t as impressive. It’s also not as big, however. Very interesting.

I’ve got to get to CS. I’m starting to understand my professor’s accent more easily, which makes class nicer. School is wonderful – but we’ll see how I’m feeling after my math exam tonight.

Thank you, thank you, thank you very much. People are actually reading! I blame it on following in Dad’s footsteps.

Today in calculus we went over problems for the test that starts tomorrow. I actually wound up being volunteered by my classmates to get up and prove a limit on the board. What’s more, I got it right the first time without any dawdling or pondering! I was quite proud of myself. I think that I’ll do just fine on the test as long as I can finish it in time. I was having much less trouble than my classmates sitting around me remembering the older stuff. Many of the people in the room were complaining of their brains exploding. I was feeling about ready to do something else, but was actually rather enjoying myself because I was quite certain that I was getting all the answers right.

Three other bits of news before I go. First, Dr. Snell told me that he won’t have a job for me in the CS department. Oh well. Second, Bob told me to go ahead and write some new software for invoicing. I estimated it would take me about 10 hours. We’ll see how close I was. Finally, my roommate is actually leaving for the weekend to go visit his uncle and his girlfriend. I’ll have the place to myself for a few whole days! I know, intensely exciting.

I had one other thing on my mind but appear to have forgotten it. We’ll see if it comes back while I do my laundry.

Hooray – my first comment! Thanks, Dad. I’d rather like for the comments to be shown below the post like they are on morrowlife. We’ll have to see if I can pull that off. In the mean time, the most recent five are in the sidebar.

Also, notice the new neat feature in the sidebar – an RSS feed of our sister blog! Another superb WordPress feature. Also, note that WordPress auto-saves the post whilst it is being edited. And it has neat statistics etc. And it imports from Blogger. And it can be hosted on any Linux server with MySQL and PHP. And it’s open source. I’m not trying to suggest in the slightest that morrowlife ought to switch over.

I’m very hopeful that I’ll be contacted by at least one of the companies I submitted a résumé to. If I couldn’t work at Apple, I’d really like Mozy. Admittedly, they’re headquartered in American Fark (I’m trying to pick up a local accent). I’d have to rent an apartment if I worked there, so they’d have to pay really, really well. It would still be fun, though – they have both an OS X desktop client and a number of Ruby on Rails web interfaces, both areas of expertise for me. That would be a lot of fun. What’s more, it says on their flyer that they have a free snack room and that it’s a “ninja friendly workplace”! They look like a company trying very hard to be cool – and probably succeeding. A lot more than Microsoft. They’re almost trying too hard.

Blue Coat is an interesting company. They specialize in filtering network traffic so as to eliminate threats (and probably employee time wasting) while maximizing bandwith for useful services (i.e. QoS optimization). They’re the company that has an office in Sunnyvale. That would be perfect. I’m a little more doubtful of getting anything from them, however.

I’d better go to bed, it being past midnight. See you all tomorrow.

Excellent news on the forefront of summer internships! I gave my résumé to Kevin, a member of the Cocoa team at Apple. Quinn, another Apple employee and a close friend of my good friend Dave DeLong, told me that I shouldn’t be perturbed by Kevin’s apparent lack of response. Lindsay, the recruiter, said that the résumés would be given to the hiring managers by Friday and we could probably expect a response within 3 weeks at the latest.

That’s not all, however. I also talked to a number of other companies that do summer internships, including one that’s headquartered in Sunnyvale. I gave one of my résumés to Mozy (an automated backup company) and one to Blue Coat (it wasn’t exactly clear what they do, but they’re middlemen for other businesses). I also talked to the NSA. They weren’t very interested – I was kind of wasting their time – but they said to come talk to them in four years. Obviously, they can’t do summer internships because of security clearance issues. Northrop Grumman, however, said that they did summer internships and that they managed to get clearance of some sort for their interns. I don’t know how they manage that, but it sounds interesting. I certainly hope that at least one of these works out.

Today’s the day that I turn in my résumé to Apple. I was up until almost 1 AM working on it, so they’d better like it. The devotional yesterday was very nice. I can’t remember the name of the speaker right now – I’ll put it up here later – but he spoke about a former leper colony on a Hawaiian island where Protestants, Catholics, and Mormons all mixed in friendship and love. Each church built a new building in the last century, and each of the other two churches helped each time. In fact, it was found that non-members had donated more time in the building of the Mormon chapel than the members had. It was a very nice talk.

My meeting with Bob yesterday was also nice. We went over a lot and are squared away for another few months, I think.

I’d better get to class.