This is a bit late, but something that’s been quite deserved.

John “Cash” Carpenter and Darwin Gilmore presented 3 limited performances from August 7 to August 9, 2008 of both a magic show and a theater performance, dubbed the Magical Realm of Edon. Stephen Blaschke was director and choreographer. In a nutshell, this performance had to be one of the most visually stunning and exciting presentations of illusions I’ve seen in quite a long time.

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As I had mentioned I was going to do a little bit ago, I have converted my blog from Serendipity to Wordpress. I find it easier to use, easier to configure, etc. In any case, I apologize for the way it looks, but give me a bit of time and I’ll have a nice style applied to it.

Well, it’s been nearly a full 2 months since my last entry. Obviously, I’ve been a bit busy. I’m sure my friends would like to hear about what I’ve been up to, so here’s a couple of month’s worth of information in one post.

School

November and December were rough months in terms of school. Lots of things all around me started piling up at once. In particular, a project went horribly awry at work (Cleopatra, for those who are familiar with this project) requiring me to jump on board and spend a complete weekend from dawn to dusk working on unit tests. This was shortly after the whole Phoenix, AZ impromptu trip that I needed to make (read my last post to understand what’s been going on here). After this, the College of Architecture project really started ramping up and demanding a lot of my attention, which caused me to pull a lot of extra hours that I wasn’t planning on spending.

Past this, final school test preparations and studying was in order. Unfortunately, I didn’t spend nearly as much time as I would have liked this semester studying for my classes. My math class got the worst treatment of all, which essentially was me ignoring the homework most of the time and then cramming about a week before the test. This went well for the first test, as I made a 73, about 5 points above average on the exam. However, the second test didn’t go very well at all but was more because the professor was being _very_ in terms of how he wanted answers formatted. This caused me to get a 58 on my second exam, which really concerned me because I got my grade about a week before finals. The final exam went better than I thought it was supposed to go, but my final grade was not indicative of this. I received a D in the course, which means I have to take it over again.

However, the positive side was that I thought I was going to get a horrible grade in my ECEN325 course, and turned out with a much better grade than expected: a B. This is not bad considering I was sitting well below the standard deviation of students before the final. So, I don’t have to worry about retaking that course. The only thing I have to worry about is the 3 foot mount of paper that’s sitting on my office floor. This is no joke: I have a 3 foot stack of paper on the floor from this class _alone_. And Melissa says essays kill trees- classes in general kill them.

CIS

Most of the winter when work was in session I have been busy working on the College of Architecture web site. Many of you probably don’t notice a difference in it right now, but that’s because there isn’t any publically viewable differences. Instead, it’s all how it processes files on the backend and what new tools are now available from the backend. The problem with this was we didn’t write the backend system - it was a developer that was forced from his position unwillingly. So, rather than him leaving a nice plethora of documentation behind for his application, he left with telling me as much as he possibly could with the application and I was expected to learn how it operates and figure out any problems with it. When we tried to deploy it the first time, I ran into numerous unexpected errors and problems which forced us to abort the deployment. Instead, I spent a couple of 50 hour weeks trying to figure out what was necessary to be able to get the application ready for launch. Once that had been determined, I spent a lot of time both documenting the system and fixing what was missing or broken.

A wonderful birthday to be had, December 3rd of this year held the date of Dickens on the Strand at Galveston, TX. I was accompanied by my wonderful fiancee, her best friend and a couple of our other friends, Brent and Lori. We had spent the night in a hotel close to downtown Houston and made our way down the long but not so treacherous drive that is I-45. Once there, we were blasted by furious gusts of cold wind which gave chills down everyone’s back. But, once through the gates, we had a good time watching everyone in costume, including taking lots of pictures, which I have graciously posted here:

http://www.chrisweldon.net/photos/Dickens/index.html

For those unfamiliar with Dickens on the Strand (and those too lazy to go to their website), Dickens is set in middle to late 19th century Britain. The festival is considered a global festival, so many individuals were dressed not only in british-style clothing, but also Japanese, Indian (no, not native american), etc. There were plenty of bums (as you can see in the photos), but also plenty of others out of period.

In addition to seeing all the elegant, sophisticated, and cute costumes, we also managed to go aboard the Elissa. This was a sail ship (yes, really old fashioned boating) that was a trading vessel for many years, that was recently given an overhaul to keep it alive. I took many interesting photos of it, but I think for anyone going to Galveston they should drop by and check it out for themselves. Oh, and for those looking at the photo of the ship through the window: Yes, that is a Carnival Cruise ship almost a 100 yards away from this boat. Scary sight, no?

Anywho, please give me some feedback if you like the pictures or not. Thanks!

As I sit here administrating the CS: Source server during the 12th hour I’ve been working for the IEEE LAN, I feel multiple things.

Happiness

A lot of people turned out for the event, and everyone seems to be having a good time. We already finished the Halo 2 tournament and gave out the prize. Now the CS: Source tournament is heavily underway and people seem to be enjoying themselves. It was a lot better than I had previously thought it was going to be because I was having numerous issues with getting the game server setup and running.

PAIN

My legs hurt. REALLY REALLY HURT. Lack of sleep plus helping to lug massive amounts of equipment around has caused extreme pain.

Okay, so now that I have a chance to blog about what I thought of the conference overall, I figured that I would do it and get it out of the way before I forget and/or run out of time during the week to do it.

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Well, I’ve been at the Zend/PHP conference in San Jose, CA since Sunday. The tutorials began on Monday, and with the beginning, I recognized a HUGE diversity gap. There were plenty of Americans, Canadians and Britans who were speaking English, but as I sit here typing this there are 3 individuals speaking French (could be Canadian and not French individuals, don’t know specifically). Additionally, there is a lot of Hebrew floating around. I had forgotten on the first day that the Zend company is headquartered in Israel, so this would explain the Hebrew. It’s different - OSCON was nothing like this.

The conference is going well thus far. The two tutorials I attended were “PHP Development Best Practices” and “Extending PHP”. I think when I first signed up to take Extending PHP, I was thinking it was something other than writing extensions. I had attended a seminar at OSCON about writing extensions, and I was thoroughly unimpressed. It was quick and didn’t really catch my interest. However, the speakers giving it this time really caught my attention, despite their assumption that everyone in the classroom knew C. Nevertheless, although I was not understanding half of the lecture, it does make me want to learn C so that I can go through and create PHP extensions for my business (and possibly TAMU).

I got to network with several individuals at a ZCE & Speaker only party on Monday evening, and it was quite intriguing. I learned about ExtremeBlue (a very unique programming challenge for students) from 3 IBM representatives (2 from the UK one from Canada), and finally met Paul Reinheimer - the individual who trained me online for the PHP ZCE Certification. Additionally, I got to talk to several individuals with superior cameras (D200 and SP-D800 flashes) and I’m totally envious and know what I’m going to upgrade to. I also got to talk with Chris Shifflet who seems like a real laid-back individual, but quite intelligent when it comes to PHP.

In any case, the first Keynote of the day is about to begin. Gotta run.

This past week I went to Piscataway, NJ to visit IEEE headquarters and converse with my peers from all over the United States. The event: IEEE University Partnership Program Summit. The goal: Allowing us to express concerns and needs from IEEE, network with peers, and learn much more about IEEE than we knew in the past.

If you would like a short scoop on what happened (and see something I actually said), check out this article from IEEE. I’ve got a more in-depth article from IEEE internal pages, but I need to make sure that its okay to post it before I actually do.

Also, I’m going to post my review about the event when I have more time. Project deadlines, midterms, and administrative responsibilities have been killing me lately.

For those people who weren’t aware (because I didn’t put this on my calendar) I was in Piscataway, NJ this past weekend on “business” with the IEEE. The purpose: University Partnership Program Chair Summit. By now you’re wondering WTF is that. Lemme start with the basics of IEEE, then I’ll explain the UPP.

Day 3 ended the tutorials and began the sessions - the events that the majority of people showed up for. Keystones also precluded the days events, and the first Keynotes were rather intriguing. I heard talks from one of the leads and founders of SixApart, the company responsible for such things as LiveJournal, etc. In addition, Mr. O’Reilly gave a talk on how opensource licenses are out of date. With lack of further explanation of why he believed this, there were many members of the audience (including the other Keynote speakers) who were questioning that statement.

The sessions, left much to be desired. They were approximately 45 minutes each (some actually spanned an hour and a half - though those were rare). As such, 45 minutes hardly gave enough time to thoroughly explain the concepts being presented, but for some of the sessions it was just enough time. For example, the first session I attended was on how this developer used Ruby on Rails to create an MMO in about 45 minutes. The game, is called Unroll - found at llor.nu. It’s a rather simple game, but he explained the concepts behind the creation of his game, rather than explaining some of the methods he used - such as showing code examples, tips and tricks, etc. As such, I left with hardly an understanding of how to use Rails to create a game of my own, but his game is at least open source, so I can download the source code and figure out what I need to then.

The other sessions, which included a combination of PHP, Ruby, and Rails were rather uninteresting for the most part. I took notes in some sessions, but many I’ll have to find the slides in order to benefit from attending them.

However, despite how uninteresting some of these sessions were, I admit that I did take out a lot of ideas that I plan to integrate for my business and CIS. Such things include code caches, such as APC, using IDE’s for development and then running traces on the code to further be able to determine where slow-downs in code occur. I also found a couple of other interesting software items people were using on Macs that I have found quite awesome.

BTW, the Exhibit hall resulted in me getting lots of goodies.