Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Things are bad

That is the best way to say it. This is the worst things have been in several months. Almost everyone around me is having issues and problems which are spilling over into what I am doing, just as a couple of the things I am doing are falling apart.

This weekend is the big charity fundraiser my parents are involved with. There is a lot of stuff for them to do. I spent five hours yesterday driving around and picking up donations and sample pictures for the event. I drove to Dana Point to pick something up only to discover the person was not there and I had to wait a couple of hours.

I am involved with planing a retreat this weekend at church. I have to create a program for the weekend. I am also dissatisfied with my talk, which means I want to rewrite it. Only half as many people as we expected signed up.

My latest class for digital signal processing is a disaster. The instructor and the textbook use version 3 of the software we are learning. However, almost everyone in the class including me has version 4. There were significant changes between the two. Entire menus have been removed and file structures changed. Most of the experiments are not working for me. Even when I am looking at the final code of other people in the class and their write ups that explain how they solved any problems I cannot get the software to work for me. There are so many settings so many places to make changes almost anything can go wrong. Even if everything is set correctly, the program might decide to not work until after it is restart. Many of the other people in the class have experience working with this stuff as a job or have a masters degree in a related area. I have never even seen assembly code before or taken a computer hardware or software design class before. I am also a week and a half behind with the work. The instructor is useless.

On a happier note, last weekend I was in Arizona for anther State and National Park hiking trip organized by Larry. When I get all the pictures I will make a post or two detailing it. At one point on the trip Larry said "I can't wait to read Chris's blog post about this." As some context, at that point we were lost in the woods and the sun had set an hour earlier.

Until I make the post, you can look at the five albums Eric put on Facebook about the trip. Anyone who is my friend should be able to open the albums on Eric's pictures.

3 comments:

  1. Sorry about your class. I am jealous of your car excursions. All I do is sit at a desk inside a cubicle and work like a drone.

    P.S. I know how fucking godawful frustrating it is when you are trying to make software do something that it is not. It makes me want to pick up the monitor and throw it at the wall and jump up and down on it in good old fashioned monkey rage. I recommend you not do this to your own computer. Maybe someone else's, though.

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  2. I tried to respond to this post weeks ago, but Blogger was being typically stupid at the time I was writing.

    In terms of job stuff, if you've had trouble applying places online and through sites like Monster, Indeed, and even Craigslist, it might not hurt to try and get in touch with a recruiter. They can often be as inconsiderate, uncaring, and aloof as the majority of people hiring out there, but they might be able to find you interview opportunities that you might not come across on your own. By recruiter, I mean someone who works for other companies as they look for new people to hire. You definitely don't want to meet with someone who is going to bill you for anything.

    Also with regards to job stuff, you've been taking classes, doing community and church work, and have been keeping your mind sharp through reading. Those are all things that you can talk about at job interviews and if they don't help in an interview or in applying, those type of activities will still help down the road.

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