30 Brumaire CCXII (November 20, 2003)
It's A Thursday Entry Trifecta!
Well, just when my carpet was starting to dry out, it rains again. And I'm not talking a small amount of rain here, I'm talking enough rain to require me to take two hops to get across the ditch by the highway. (First hop = Into the water. Second hop = Out of the water.)
On the plus side, I have government tests on Saturday for a year-long intern position that would start in May. I don't know if my thesis will be done by then, but applying for this type of stuff gives me an incentive to try and get it finished.
Speaking of my thesis, the hardware finally came back in, meaning I can start up my experiments first thing in January. If it had been about a week earlier I probably could have got them done this month, but as it is I'd be running into the exam period if I started now, and that's out of the question. So, in the meantime, I'm writing. Lots of writing, tons of writing, oodles and oodles of writing. Well, I would be if I could concentrate on it. I think I've found the best method of doing it though, I gather all the papers I'm likely to refer to, find myself a nice location with no computers and that's not too isolated, and I then proceed to write it all out in a notebook. It seems to be working fairly well, as I got more done tonight than I did all last week. Here's hoping everything but the analysis and conclusions can be finished by the end of December.
On a final note, referring to an earlier entry from today, I've decided to see if I'll have enough money to somehow build a MAME cabinet come next term. I won't have need for a router anymore, and in an effort to conserve power I'm going to switch my database over to heimdall. This will give me a spare Celeron to fool around with, so why the hell not. Of course, that does defeat my whole 'saving power' idea, but if I only turn it on occassionally so as to fiddle with it then I should be alright… Right?
No more entries for a while, so enjoy these in the meantime.
What is the government position?
System analyst. I'd be determining and documenting the "business and information systems requirements of health care staff," plus other things, for the Department of Health and Wellness.
To be perfectly honest, as much as I'd like the job, the position kind of scares me.
Posted by g026r at 1 Frimaire CCXII 13:02 (2003/11/21)
Yeah, really. Health care seems too important; I'll stick to aspirations of making video games or XML parsers.
Video games. You can use xml in video games, you know? We do. I wrote my own SAX parser for our front end. It needs improving though, as it doesnt validate. Or..okay, theres one that doesnt check if its good against a DTD or schema, and ours doesnt do that. But it also doesnt even check to see if its well formed XML :)
The whole problem with XML is validating it. Parsing XML is super easy if you're not validating. So unless you're relying on XML made by untrustworthy people, or the XML isn't parsed at run-time, I think you're better off spending your energy making the XML-generator generate proper XML, not in making the parser validate it.
Yeah. Our XML was written by artists, Or generated by a WYSWIG editor I wrote. The artist written XML was nasty for a while.
Well, the tests were yesterday. The General Competency Test (Level 2) was essentially the same as I did for the federal government several years ago, while the written test seems to have changed. Now, instead of answering questions about various paragraphs, you have to read a 4 page essay and summarize it in 90 minutes.
I don't think I did so well on that second one.
Posted by g026r at 3 Frimaire CCXII 15:14 (2003/11/23)
Summarizing an essay? Ouch.
Thats just not fun.
No, not at all. To add to the fun, it was a summary of the various federal plans that, since the Great Depression, have been designed to create equality between the provinces.
Posted by g026r at 3 Frimaire CCXII 17:33 (2003/11/23)
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