MarkDrago.com » Work

Change

Mark — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:00:34 +0000

Today is my last day working at Bascom. I’ve been working there full-time for nearly six years and a year before that as an intern. I’m very grateful for the past seven years. It’s impossible to list all of the wonderful experiences and opportunities I had while at Bascom. I can say that I worked on fulfilling and challenging problems as part of a great team with the support of inspiring management. I’ll always remember the friends I made and the fun we had at Bascom. I had a number of pranks pulled on me when I was out of the office (bathroom cubicle, solo cup cubicle). I also participated in my share of pranks (1, 2). Office bocce was also created and perfected at Bascom. It’s a period of my life that I’ll remember fondly for the relationships, the awesome work we did, and all of the things that we accomplished as a team.

Time moves on and things change.

My first day at Yodle is just a few days away.

You Can Get Only What it is You Want

Mark — Thu, 20 Jan 2005 14:20:48 +0000

“I can’t tell what kind of life I’ve led today. All that’s known is what’s debatable again.” — Mates of State – Ha Ha

I’ve bought way too many CDs recently. They’ve all been pretty good except for the new Saves the Day CD. I was a curious cat and I got killed. Some of the CD purchases were to recover CDs that I used to listen to a lot with Jamie that got lost in the shuffle. I’ve found myself with a lot of time on my hands since we broke up and there are worse things that I could be spending my time and money on than music.

Brandon and I are going snowboarding today. We’re going to Jay Peak. It’s only four miles off of the canadian border. It should be a fun drive and a fun weekend. We’re staying at this place called ‘Grampa Grunts Lodge’. It costs $27.50 per night per person. You can’t freaking beat that.

Work is going pretty well. I’m pretty psyched about the project that I’m going to be working on for the next month or two. It’s a really big piece of the puzzle and I basically get to write it all myself. It’s very important that it come out correct and well designed. It’s basically what we base the business on, so I can’t fuck it up. :o)

Alright. I’m off to the mountain. It should only take us like 8 hours, although it took us 14 hours last time because we drove through a blizzard. Lets hope there aren’t any avalanches or tsunamis or anything like that.

None of Us is As Dumb As All of Us

Mark — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 02:25:40 +0000

Steve got me a thinkgeek gift certificate for christmas. I’m most likely going to pick up this photon light thing. But, I’m still not sure what I else I want to get. I would really like to get this poster, but I don’t think I actually have the balls to put it up at work.

Speaking of work, I’ve been tasked with rewriting the part of our product which actually does the content filtering (that is to say it keeps kids away from porn). For many reasons this is pretty exciting. One of the main reasons it’s so exciting is that it’s going to be written in C. I don’t get to write in C all that often, and it always has its own set of ups and downs. Plus, this piece of software is like the cream of the crop over here. I mean, the whole product is based around this one piece. Most everything else basically configures it and puts a nice GUI around it. I’ve decided to base it on glib as well. This should make my life a whole lot easier and make the lives of many future developers easier as well. Using glib should also make it easier to use DBus if we decide to go down that road. Right now we’re just using sockets to get data from one place to another, and it would probably be beneficial to wrap that all up nice with DBus. It’ll also be nice to not be writing a web GUI for a little while. It gets kind of tiring when everyone wants everything to be just a little different. I won’t have to worry about any of that during this project. I’m sure it’ll go well. I’ll take a day or two to get knee-deep in C and then I’ll be on my way.

I got a new pair of sneakers. They fucking kick ass. They’re asics onitsuka tiger something-or-others. I love it that they’re called ‘onitsukas’ because it sounds like ‘on it sucka’. I’m such a fool. I told everyone at work that they’re made for playing office bocce.

Oh, and I stopped biting my nails. I don’t really know why, I just noticed that my nails were kind of long one day.

Alright, I’ve decided to go with these 2 t-shirts [1] [2] from thinkgeek. I’ll have to thank Steve the next time I see him.

Software Engineering Practices

Mark — Thu, 30 Sep 2004 04:19:53 +0000

So, I took this software engineering course in my senior year and never really realized how important that class was. I mean, I understood all of the things the teacher was telling me, and figured that they were all good ideas, but never thought of them as being absolutely necessary. That is, I figured you could do a reasonably good job without them. And, when I say “good job”, I don’t mean “create a good product” as much as I mean “create a good product that gets released in a predictable amount of time and doesn’t turn into an unmanageable beast.” I always figured, as I’m sure many programmers do at first, that things like spec documents were a luxury. Over the last few months I have come to learn otherwise. I really hope I still have the PDF of the documents my group and I created in that software engineering class. We did a damn good job and it would be great to use that document as an example and a kind of template in future projects. I’m sure we’ll be done with our current project soon, but it probably could have been done already if we had taken some more time and decided *exactly* what we were building before we started. And, no matter how much anyone tells me, I will always believe that is possible. Small changes are inevitable, but hitting a moving target with code is impossible.

Fighting with Microsoft Technologies

Mark — Fri, 17 Sep 2004 11:53:03 +0000

I got home this morning and noticed that my house had been covered in toilet paper. My brother is on the volleyball team at his high school, and we’re pretty sure it was the girl’s volleyball team that did it. They did a pretty good job, and my brother is going to have some cleaning up to do later on today.
We didn’t have a very good day with Microsoft technologies at work yesterday. Mike spent most of the day fighting with the update for Microsoft Office that fixes a hole in their JPEG rendering library thing. I understand their wanting to make sure that you purchased the copy of Office by having you put the Office CD in your drive during updates, but that is terribly inconvenient. First off, if you’re going to do that, it has to work all of the time. One of the machines in our office still doesn’t have the update because we couldn’t convince the updater that we actually own the copy of Office that was on the laptop. Of course we do, and still had the CD to prove it, but the updater wasn’t convinced. Besides, how many people really have all of the CDs that they’ve ever used to install software? We have an entire filing cabinet devoted to this stuff, but I don’t think that is common practice. It’s probably better to let users of pirated copies get the updates than to put your real customers through all of the hassle of finding their old CDs, having that only occasionally work, and wasting a whole lot of someone’s day updating all of the machines in the office. I also had a run in with Internet Explorer. I guess that isn’t much news. Sometimes I feel like my job is just to get neat things to work in Internet Explorer. I spend a lot of time doing it. It might take me 1 hour to get something to work in Firefox, then I have to spend 3 hours trying to get IE to do the same damn thing. We ended up with something pretty neat, so I’m happy. But, it did require a little bit of hackery to convince IE that it could do what I wanted. Luckily, Firefox’s numbers are up. The market share is either 8% or 15% depending on where you hear it from, but everyone is reporting that IEs market share is down and Firefox’s is up. So, if you haven’t switched your browser over to firefox yet, stop wasting your time on the web and get it now.

We can get through anything

Mark — Tue, 17 Aug 2004 04:16:53 +0000

I read this post by Dave Winer a few weeks ago called, What is Stop Energy? It’s all about people that want to get something done and other people who come up with all sorts of reasons why it shouldn’t get done. Just to be fair I should probably link to this response by Simon St. Laurent titled, “Stop Energy” is important stuff. They’re both pretty interesting reads. I tend to agree more with Dave than with Simon.

I didn’t get out of work until 11:15 tonight. That kind of sucked. I stay until around 9:00 on a normal night, but the time kind of got away from me tonight. It’s pretty hard to dive into a piece of code that you know isn’t going to be fun to debug when its 10:00pm. So, I spent the last hour or so of work forcefully removing ‘bgcolor’, ‘width’, and ‘cellpadding’ attributes from our interface. I’ll see what breaks tomorrow and fix it with CSS.

I’ve started trying to eat better than I have been. I’ve really been eating like crap recently. And, I don’t mean Burger King, Wendy’s McDonald’s kind of crap, I mean Checkers and White Castle kind of crap. White Castle is a whole other kind of crap that I prefer not to think about right now. So, I went to the health food store with Jamie the other day and bought some Gardenburgers™ and some Oat Bran bread. This whole thing really isn’t because I think I need to lose weight or because I want to have more energy or whatever. It’s more of a will to eradicate any kind of weakness that I see in myself. And, when I say weakness I mean more than just physical weakness. I figure that by taking a firm stand against my desire to eat White Castle, I’ll be able to work on both my physical weakness and my weakness to temptation at the same time. With that said, the guys at work got White Castle for lunch today, and I had a Gardenburger™ BBQ Chik’n sandwich, dried fruit and a cup of apple juice. Yipee!

While staying so late at work tonight did kind of suck, the night was saved because I was able to really enjoy my ride home. I let ‘The Movielife’ kick my ass for the 25 minute ride back to Jamie’s house and it was great. I’m pretty upset that they’ve broken up. If anyone reading this knows who ‘The Movielife’ is and knows of a band that is similar and is actually still making music, let me know. I’ve decided that I don’t have enough time to find good music on my own, so if no one helps me, I’ll be stuck listening to the same 4 Movielife records for all of eternity.