Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in maidmarianjd's LiveJournal:

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Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
12:54 pm	Finished School I turned in my Master's project on Friday and am now officially done with school and ready for graduation on June 15th. I'm going to be in FL from Thurday May 31st till June 12th. I'll be staying with my parents who live about an hour south of Tampa. (Comment on this)
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
12:02 pm	Progress I had a great day Friday. I showed my professor a demo of my thesis project and he loved it. He said that I made his day. I still need to clean up the code, make the demo look pretty, and write a paper. I'm actually feeling motivated and excited about my project now. May 25th doesn't feel that looming any more. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 4th, 2007
5:03 pm	The big day So I found out when I have to have my thesis done today. It needs to be signed off, approved and completed by May 25th. If I don't want to participate in graduation I can have till June 15th, however my parents may be coming out for graduation. May will be a busy month. Now I just need to go find a second reader for my thesis project. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 13th, 2007
8:37 pm	Classes are done It's so odd to say this, but I'm all done with classes. It's been a long time coming. Woot, just wrote my last class paper and presentation. Now to just finish this thesis... (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007
2:00 pm	Happy New Year Happy New Year everyone. Bhroam and I spent the week off at home just chillin since I was recovering from the cold I caught on our vacation, and he got it. We spent new year's eve at home playing wow which yeah is kinda lame, but the fireworks were cool. We still aren't fully recovered yet, but are both back at work today. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 29th, 2006
11:08 am	Is there any reason my body believes it's acceptable to be waking up at 7am regularly? Especially when I go to bed at 1am. This morning it decided to rudely wake me up by having my shoulder cramp up. Current Mood: sleepy (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 27th, 2006
11:22 am	Puerto Rico and our return to civilization So Bhroam and I got back from Puerto Rico late Friday night. Puerto Rico was ok, it rained a lot, but I did get to see some family I haven't seen in a while, and we got to do some sightseeing. We spent the week with my parents which was the point of the trip. I don't think I'd ever want to live in PR though. I haven't been there since I was 14 so I don't really remember if its always been like this. The island is in pretty bad economic conditions: the government is basically bankrupt, the politicians would rather stick to party line than actually try to find a resolution, the unemployment rate is high, and the cost of living can be comparable to almost that of the bay area, but salaries are horrible. Here's an actual concrete example, my sister pays $1300 to live in a small apartment, and my nephew who has a college degree gets paid $5 an hour to work as a veterinary technician. So when we arrived at home Friday night, Bhroam and I were hoping for a peaceful weekend of WOW playing. Well such was not to be the case. We had no dialtone on our phone line when we got in. Our dsl was up, but very spotty. So we played WOW, but getting DCed pretty regularly. We did learn one very important thing, it is very bad to get DCed right as your AV is ending. Not only do you lose all your bonus honor which is bad in and of itself, you end up in limbo. This happened twice, once to me and once to Bhroam in different AVs so its reproducible. Basically your body is in IF and other people can see your sprite, but all you see is this blue sea. You can't log out, you can't move, your character screen has you all white. Now even if you forcibly shut down WOW and try to log in again you can't get out of limbo. It required logging into WOW from a different computer to get out of it. I also learned that you can get into a BG after it has ended (I'm just loving finding all these BG bugs). On Sunday I waited about a minute before accepting to go into a WSG and ended up in WSG after the battle had ended, so I couldn't do anything.(hey at least I didn't end up in limbo again) I had to wait till the 2 minute BG timer ran out, and of course wasted my waiting 45 minutes in the queue. So when we called PacBell on saturday morning, they did a line test and claimed our phone line was fine and it was most likely a problem in our house. Well we tested the box outside our house and it had no dialtone, so we knew it wasn't an internal problem. We were given an appointment from 8am - 7pm on Monday. I was however very pleasantly surprised when the technician actually showed up at 8:30am, and managed to fix our line within an hour and fifteen minutes. I wasn't looking forward to working from home since our A/C is broken (the weekend wasn't pleasant without A/C). Now I just need to convince my body that really we are back in the west coast and it should behave as such. I had figured staying up till 2-3am every night over the weekend would do the trick but no. Yesterday I wanted to eat dinner at about 4pm, and today I woke up at about 5:30am (even though I thankfully fell back asleep for a couple more hours). My work is doing the whole power conservation thing so it's turning the lights way down -- it certainly isn't helping me stay awake after my not sleeping well. (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 8th, 2006
4:50 pm	School's Out!!! Woohoo!!! School is FINALLY over. I've been burnt out all quarter, so its a big achievement to have 2 major projects and presentations all done. Now I just need to convince work that when I say I'm working on my thesis over the summer that really means I will not be working full time. My boss keeps not wanting to believe me. Current Mood: accomplished (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 3rd, 2006
10:51 am	Reason no 42 why I hope grad school to be over soon I don't like spending my birthday coding. I did get a nice call from the parents though... (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 1st, 2006
1:53 pm	My chair is out to get me So next week is the last week of the quarter and I've got a project due on Teusday the 6th, and one on Thursday the 8th. So I've basically been living in my office at home coding like crazy. Last night, right as I'm about to get up and go to bed for the evening, my chair sinks about a foot. It seems that the chair's hydrolics decided to give up on me. It's just really bad timing. *grumble* Current Mood: annoyed (Comment on this)
Monday, May 15th, 2006
1:12 am	Level 60 Melliandre (my hunter) made level 60 yesterday on WoW. *happy level 60 dance* Current Mood: chipper (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 10th, 2006
5:44 pm	Snow !?! So let's put this in perspective -- about a month ago I was at school and a lot of people were wearing shorts because it had been a warm winter. Today, I drive home from school and the ground is covered in snow. I've never seen so many news vehicles parked at the summit before. Picture proof of this insane weather below. (Comment on this)
Monday, January 23rd, 2006
6:36 pm	Dog Park We like taking Gable and Audrey out to the new dog park in Campbell. It's a really nice park, and its actually quite popular. It just opened 1-2 months ago. Unfortunately we were trying to take them there yesterday and there was a sign that they are closing the park for 2 months because the grass wasn't holding up. You'd think they'd have thought about this when they decided to put grass in the park. The big dog area was a huge mess, the small dog section actually looked ok. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, January 17th, 2006
11:51 am	Disneyland We went to Disneyland over the weekend. They had very cool decorations for their 50th anniversary stuff. A nice exhibit on the 50 years of Disneyland. In all we had a great time. Haunted Mansion was still bastardized with the Nightmare Before Chrismas display which was very good -- but I still like the original better. It rained on Saturday which meant it wasn't very crowded. It was more crowded Sunday and Monday but the longest wait we did was 30 minutes for Space Mountain. At California Adventure they have a nice broadway style Aladdin show which was very well done for something done at an amusement park. We ended up going on all the rides we wanted to and it was lots of fun. I needed a nice relaxing break with no school and no work. We drove back yesterday and it wasn't a bad drive except traffic through LA (and insane drivers on 5). When we went to pick up the doggies from doggie day care it turns out that Audrey (the miniature dachshund) got bitten on top of the ear Saturday night by a jack russel. She's doing well though. The vet used surgical glue to glue it back together. The daycare took very good care of her, took her to the vet right away, and spoiled her more than they usually spoil her. And the other dog was banished from coming back to doggie daycare. Current Mood: relaxed (Comment on this)
Thursday, January 12th, 2006
11:39 am	School School's going well this quarter. I a) believe I'm getting the hang of this going to grad school thing, and b) work's actually being limited to 20 hours a week. I don't have classes on Tues and Thurs so I go into the office. It makes things a lot more structured for me and my work. I'm not attempting to work in the middle of classes. School work hasn't seemed that bad yet this quarter. It's most likely for a couple reasons. First of all I'm not taking 2 seriously programming intensive classes. Secondly, I'm sure things will be picking up in a couple weeks. I want to go to Disneyland this weekend (want to see all the 50th anniversary stuff) -- we'll see if it happens. It depends on Bhroam's work. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, December 6th, 2005
7:10 pm	Finals and research My compilers final was easy -- finished it in about an hour. Since I had time, I figured I'd stroll over and talk to the professor I was most likely to do research for my Master's degree. I'd been debating who to do research with. I had two options: 1) NetApp would love for me to do research in the storage systems group since they pay UCSC money to do research and 2) I've always had an interest in web application frameworks, and a lot of academic research hasn't been done in that subject. After a conversation over the weekend about research, I decided that I was going to do research in something I felt passionately about because in the long run this is something I'm going to be thinking about constantly for a long period of time. Not that I'm not interested in storage systems, I just don't have the same passion about them. So I went and spoke with Jim Whitehead who's really the only professor at UCSC that does web related research. We had a great conversation for over an hour, and he gave me lots of stuff to go read and think about. I'm actually really excited to be doing some research. I now feel like a real grad student -- I've got a cube in actually a pretty nice lab (with a window even), and have problems to go think about. I better get back to studying -- still have my systems programming exam tomorrow. Anyone interested in getting some sushi tomorrow night in Mountain View or Santa Clara? Figured I'd celebrate surviving my first quarter at school :) Email/IM me if interested. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 29th, 2005
4:08 pm	Javascript So the last time I had to write large amounts of cross-browser javascript was about 5 years ago. Back then IE was very forgiving (in comparison), Netscape and IE differed greatly in their javascript of anything remotely interesting, and it was impossible to debug. In the last month I've been writing a serious amount of cross-browser javascript. Currently I've been testing it in Firefox and IE. My latest findings are that a) firefox is considerably more forgiving than IE, b) they don't differ in what they support as much as they used to and c) if the bug is in firefox its much easier to debug now. It is still very difficult to debug javascript in IE, but the MS script editor and MS script debugger help some. I did happen to spend about a day fighting with a firefox bug around popups however -- the bug was in the browser and not my code. Just my random musings of the day. (Comment on this)
Saturday, October 22nd, 2005
6:03 pm	Computers suck So my AMD athlon xp has been running hot (about 55-60 degrees), so while at blue bone pc picking up a hard drive (for backups) I decided to get a better cpu cooler. The cpu on my motherboard is in a kind of awkward place (when isn't it), and it took me about 30 minutes of poking and proding to replace the cooler. Voila I finished my master piece and tried to turn my computer on. It would turn on for 15 seconds, and then turn off, repeat. I did manage to have to play with the power supply a bit while attempting this, so I suspect I managed to kill it in the process. A trip to fry's later tonight should inform me of this. Sigh.... Somehow I don't know where my day went and I've got midterms and programs and such due this week I should be working on. A few weeks ago we adopted Audrey a 10lb miniature dachshund who is trying hard to console me about my computer woes. She cuddles well :) Current Mood: disappointed (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 27th, 2005
6:06 am	The evils of aspartame So finally after a very long week at work I'm on vacation (sitting in a hotel in seatac). Most of you are asking why I am up at 6am during said vacation -- and that's a good question. Yesterday for lunch I believe I drank some light soy milk with aspartame. I didn't really look at it -- and it didn't taste funny so I drank all of it. However, about 30-45 min later I felt dizzy and had a migrane (I'm allergic to aspartame -- gives me the symptoms described earlier). I've never actually had 16oz of a drink with aspartame in it -- and considering I now feel hung over despite the lack of any alcohol last night -- its someting I don't plan trying again. I gave up on my evening and went to sleep at 10pm. Of course the extremely expensive hotel food that wasn't that good didn't sit well in my tummy -- so that added to the overall misery. I've decided today's a (well I was going to say bright, but this is seattle its cloudy out) new day -- we're going to visit with some of Bhroam's friends and family today and take a bus to vancouver tomorrow morning. I'm going to try to scope out some oatmeal or something else that sounds safe for breakfast. Current Mood: blah (Comment on this)
Friday, August 19th, 2005
11:48 am	Happy iPod So after waiting for 35 minutes after my set time at the apple genius bar, the genius behind the counter looked at my ipod for 10 seconds, said, yep you're right the scrollwheel doesn't work (he didn't even reset it), and hands me a new one. Happy day. Plus its Friday, so I'm generally excited about that. Current Mood: cheerful (1 Comment |Comment on this)