Update

I haven't blogged in awhile and since I have 30 minutes of downtime until a scrum meeting, I felt compelled to do a brief update since Doug was keeping me posted on topics from old. I'm about to hit my one year at BAH, which has been a blast. I've been doing an excessive amount of cleaning/housekeeping lately (Tim spends half his time in Jersey), seeing as Abby has at last graduated from VT and this week is moving in with me in Reston temporarily until we can find a place in Arlington. She landed a job with an arch firm in downtown DC, so we're looking for places as close as possible to a Metro stop. Parking and gas prices in the area is getting quite absurd. I am just getting over a roller coaster of illness from the past couple of days, I've been battling the flu + viral infection + pink eye. I got better.

Northern Virginia

So its been awhile since I've last posted. There is quite a few reasons for this. I have officially moved to Reston, Va. I was out of the country for a couple days in Ireland while everything I owned was either in boxes or in 3 different locations in Virginia. As of now, I work in Tysons Corner for Booz Allen Hamilton. I'm currently in the process of writing a photo site of my recent trips and will provide a link when I've finished and hopefully when life has slowed down a bit. I'm wishing its before football season.

Swiss Part 2 Vals/Zurich

So in the middle of the week, Abby and I took a few trains and busses to the middle of the country to a small ski town called Vals. It was the very opposite of Lugano and Riva San Vitale, cold and windy. I had packed for blacksburg weather, but it was much much colder than I anticipated. Should have known because it was in the Alps =P The main attraction of Vals was the Thermal Baths, a very modernistic bath house filled with old German couples in speedos. Not exactly the most romantic of gettaways. Being that we were the youngest couple there and didn't speak any german, we still had fun. The second day there we went on a hike on one of the towns trails. We took the ski lift up to the middle of the mountain only to find that we were stuck in a few feet of snow and fog that allowed only 2 to 5 feet of visiblity. We didn't have enough money to take the ski lift back down so we hiked the trail though we both didn't want to. After trudging through the snow for 3 hours in only jeans and sweatshirts, we made it to a bus stop /coffee bar on the otherside of the mountain. The bus had stopped running for the day so we warmed up with some coffee and walked another 3 miles down the bus road/trail. That night, after a few long hot showers, we went to a fancy/dressy restaurant in town and enjoyed a nice bottle of wine.

The next morning we were up early to catch a bus back to Chur where we hopped on a train to Zurich. The train was a double decker, which I had never seen before. We arrived in Zurich, which is a very beautiful city. We met up with Abby's Uncle Brian for lunch at a place called the Zaug Haus. It was an old artillery depot converted to a beer and schnitzel joint. It was the first time I had wiener schnitzel and was surprisingly declicious. We walked around town and did the touristy thing for a bit before we met back up with Brian and headed home.

Switzerland - Part 1 flying/arriving

It I think its about time I start sharing my trip to Switzerland over Spring Break. I went over there for the most part to visit Abby, but also to take some time off and also to meet some of Abby's family.

I flew out of Roanoke because I didn't want to drive up to Dulles and leave me car there. My roommate, Richie, dropped me off and I boarded a flight to DC. As I was waiting to board, Dr. Arthur and his wife showed up at the gate. They were also flying to Zürich for Spring Break but had different connecting flights. I met up with my brother who was flying back from a business trip to Tampa. We had a beer in the terminal while I killed some time waiting for my connecting flight. The transatlantic flight from DC to Zürich took about 8 hours. I sat next to a Russian computer science professor. He was writing a paper on string theory which I kept glancing over and reading from time to time. He didn't speak English too well so I couldn't really have a decent conversation with him.

I arrived in Zürich at 6 or 7 in the morning, not too sure because the timezone change threw me off. I didn't sleep at all on the flight. I stayed up and watched Casino Royale about 3 times. The airport in Zürich was really interesting because it was the first time I had seen smoking bars. They are glass encasements where people are allowed to smoke. The ones I saw had the Camel logo etched into the glass and said "smoking will kill you". A bit blunt and humorous at the same time. It was also the first time I was exposed to everything being completely in German. So I was immediately disoriented trying to find where I needed to go. All the workers did speak English so I was able to ask for help. The flight to Lugano, the town north of the villa Abby was staying, was really interesting, it took maybe 25 minutes but it flew directly over the Alps to the southern part of the country.

So I arrived in one piece but extremely tired while Abby was there to pick me up. We took two trains to get back to VTs building in Riva San Vitale. I was there maybe an hour before I fell asleep. Riva was a small lake side town in a valley with several churches and huge mountains surrounding them. You literally had to stretch your neck back to see the tops. The thing I liked about Riva was that is was a small italian town. It had small roads, vineyards along the mountain sides, and palm trees. Yes Palm trees! Abby and I stayed in Riva for a few nights but we traveled to Lugano and Bellinzona during the four days we were there.

Betsy Ross' thread, they hate Freedom!

hahaha, ok, so for some reason the premier of Saul of the Molemen on Adult Swim cracks me up. I ran home from the lab last night so I could catch it. A little shorter than I anticipated but I think it might be a funny but short series.

Last night was the due date for the first project for the professor whom I work for at Tech. I missed a block of office hours last week so I felt compelled to compensate but holding hours the night of the due date. I figured, everyone should be done, few questions here and there, great time to finish some homework. Boy I was wrong. I think about a 1/3 of the class showed up! So as I was running around the lab answering Web-Cat questions. Suffice to say I'll be doing my homework tonight.

But on another note, I couldn't help but think back to when I took the class 4 years ago. I recall having a difficult time as well because JUnit testing just seemed dumb to me then. Having to test every aspect of your code is a great idea, don't get me wrong, but it slows down development. Especially if you have to write 10 times more code than necessary to test it. Ontop of that Web-Cat was new and no one knew how to debug its cryptic messages that would make you search for bugs in random places of your code. Even last night, I was confused with half of what it was spewing out. The only good thing I recognize is the unlimited submissions. But as of last night, seeing some of the reactions and the tempers of some of the students I couldn't help but think to myself "I've been there". I took Data Structures in the summer which about killed me physically due to lack of sleep and extremely poor diet. I even recall having to chug soda for OS, junior year, when I sprinted across campus to catch my professor's office hours because I stayed up all night and couldn't figure out my process scheduler at first.

So I decided to list a few things that I feel were essential

1) ssh + Vi
I couldn't stand GUIs, too distracting for me.
most people who know me would agree.

2) cout, echo, System.out.print
statements that helped me avoid messy debuggers

3) reading the project spec 3 times before I touch the keyboard.
I had a bad habit of jumping in and coding before I knew all the details
bad idea. I like the quote: "If you don't understand it, you can't program it"

4) Not skipping class
my professors always gave hints in lecture, rewarding those who were learning
and not programming atm I guess.

Goals

Ok so for Webmail we have to come up with quarterly and personal goals. So I decided to blog them and describe my intentions / meaning with each one.

Work:
1) Become more acquainted with Object-Oriented PHP
I've started working more with them at webmail and also with my undergraduate research so I figured I'd kill two birds with one O'Reilly book.

2) Write a 20% project
I've written one or two but never really finished one. I was writing a perl project that dynamically created wrappers around function calls of any script that used a package called LexWrap. It did time and memory stamps to help development, but apparent some guy at google beat me to it and I soon moved on once I saw the link Bill showed me.

3) Work on keeping up with my spreadsheet schedules
I'll be the first to admit I'm horrible at keeping up with mine at work. It's just that I'm not accustomed to doing it, but I'm willing to give it a shot.

4) Get to work earlier, leave later..... than usual
I don't think I need to elaborate on this one

Personal:
1) attend Mass on Sundays
I used to go to the church in Bedford mainly because the mass is done in Latin. I took Latin for 3 years in high school so it peaks my interests a bit to try to remember. Theres a chapel on campus and I'm aiming to attend every sunday morning or evening. Maybe not on SuperBowl Sunday =P

2) finish 1984 by George Orwell
I started reading the book Sophomore year of college and had to return it. So I never got around to finishing it. Hopefully I will this time, now that I went out an bought it.

3) play Perl golf with someone
I started playing with Professor McPherson but he won't have the time this semester. So it's something I've wanted to do for fun, hopefully/maybe someone at webmail will do it.

4) Learn enough Italian
I'm leaving for Southern Switzerland in less than a month as of today, so I'm going to try and learn a bit so I don't get lost or in trouble when I go over seas.


Those are my goals for the next couple of months.

Recap

Ok, so I've started my senior year of college at VT. Many things have changed in the past couple weeks. So I'll touch up on those. First off this is the semester of the Wii. My roommate Dick and I both received one. Abby, my girlfriend of 1 year+, bought mine for Christmas and Dick's birthday was last week and acquired one. Zelda Twilight Princess, hands down, best game ever but its debatable with Zelda Ocarina of Time. So far we have had no broken TVs even though one of them we have borrowed. heh. Many of the games we've played are amazing but I haven't had enough time to beat them like Dick has. Maybe I can catch up in the summer.

Second, Europe. I will be travelling to Europe twice this year. Abby is studying abroad in Switzerland this semester, which has been a struggle communication-wise because her computer is on the verge of breaking and skype doesn't cut it when only one of us has a camera. But my parents bought plane tickets for me to visit her over Spring Break which I've been counting the days. We've agreed to visit two places, one of our choosing to make it fair. I really want to go to Germany mainly because it has a reputation for its beer and also because I enjoy Reisling which is an export of the country. So we will be travelling to Munich for a few days. She, being the architecture major, wants to visit Rome and the Vatican. It's a fair compromise because my family is Catholic and my grandmother would roll in her grave if she knew I missed out on an opportunity.

The other trip to Europe, one I just found out about this past weekend, is to Ireland. My parents are taking my older brother Tim and I as a graduation gift for me this summer. My dad enjoys a good Guinness every so often and my mom just really wants to see castles. Tim I think is in it for the Dublin bar crawl but I'm all for it. So I have been instructed to do some research on where I'd like to go within the country.

Finally, I'm excited about my CDM project. Its a database project for the Bioinformatics Dept I've been working on with 2 graduate students and 2 professors for undergraduate research credit. I've been working on the interface for a unique data mining project. I believe we are showing it off to a couple companies and they are writing a paper on this new approach. I feel its pretty exciting being apart of it.