So, in between being heard by upper management and being offered a promotion … I forgot my immediate situation: my current management sucks.
Today, I had a urinary joust with my project lead. Loads of fun. I have a hard time being told to do something I don’t want to do … and I have a tendency to throw it back: “You want it so bad, do it yourself. In my judgement, it’s unneeded.”
Then I had a rant fest with #2 on my project. I leveled with him – I don’t know what he does, I’ve expressed interest in knowing, I feel like I have a right to know, and in the absence of knowing, I’m left to assume that it’s zero value added because I never see any product coming from the management team to help us do our job.
He didn’t like that. He was fine when I said they should be doing more by way of leadership; he was not fine when I said I had a right to know what they did.
After all of this, I found myself wondering … why did I stay?! Oh yeah, I have a get out of jail free card. I think I had better play it sooner than later.
So … I finally did it. It’s taken me nearly 10 years since I first started working the problem.
Back in highschool, we were challenged by a science professor to solve (showing/explaining your work) the volume of a icosahedron.
I can’t remember if it took me a day or two, but I had solved the volume for the upper and lower portions of an icosahedron. Solving the middle part was a bit trickier though … I know there was a trick to it, an insight, I just hadn’t figured it out yet.
Well, after those two days, I occassionally revisited the problem for a few hours every few years or so, but for whatever reason, last night, it clicked. I can’t tell you what clicked, why it clicked, or what I was doing when it clicked. All I can tell you is that it clicked, I forgot what it was I was doing, sat down, and wrote out the solution. Then, to sanity check myself, I wrote a C++ program to (1) view my model in 3-D and (2) further sanity check my solutions (during which, I saw some numeric discrepancies and realized I had used the wrong variable in one spot of my original solution).
I have thought often times that an Icosahedron would be a nice, relatively primitive shape to base a 3-D world terrtain generation program on. I just never found anything that gave me the basic coordinates to plot for a unit Icosahedron. Now I’ve solved that on my own. So, onwards with research into geometric subdivision and optimization algorithms and fractals!! w00t!
…but not today. My radio silence of late has been due to trying to get things at home squared away. In terms of office space, that means getting all my hardware and software sorted out, and in the process of that, I decided to undertake a few special but needed projects.
If you visit the Personal link above, that’ll take you to the web server hosted off of my machine at home. There’s probably some kind of bogus rule on my ISP that says I can’t do that for too long – but I doubt I’ll get the kind of traffic that will make them take notice. Anyways … I’ve set up a new blog specifically to cover the Chastain Family experience – something I should probably think and talk about more AND something that Lisa can participate with me in, and hopefully the kids too as they get older. I also set up a new family photo album. I’ve got a few family pictures in it, but it will be growing quickly over the next few weeks. I’ve got something like 500 pictures to sort through and post.
Anyways … so that’s what I’ve been up to. Go check it out!
Done and sent to the prof. And it is rough and it is bad… but I’ll wait to hear back from prof before stating how bad it is. But it’s a rough draft and worthy of all scorn that should be heaped upon it.
…I so want to be done…
…but I’ve got 2 more projects aside from this… and final looming in the future… all this to be done within 2.5 weeks
:whimper:
…at least I’ll be graduating…
So, I’ve had this printer… for over 2 years now… and I’ve never been able to get it installed right because it’s got a complicated software suite for a driver instead of JUST A FREAKIN’ DRIVER!!!
So, anyways, the symptom I would always have with this beast would be that after like 2 hours of fumbling around with installing/uninstalling the driver, I’d finally be able to get my printer to print.
…until I wanted to install some other piece of software, at which point Windows would say “Hey, you’ve got this incomplete driver installation… I should uninstall it before I install anything else, okay?” And I would sigh and hit okay and watch 4 more hours of pain and suffering being born before my eyes.
But today, something new happened. It worked. First time through. Past the regular hang-up spot and closed itself without any error messages or ctrl-alt-del fiascos.
…so, I’m happy that it’s installed now… …but I’m still mad that it took 2 years before it decided to cooperate.
weird. frustrating. done.
I will never uninstall this printer. …that is unless it has me fooled and will uninstall itself the next time I install some new software