I woke up a bit late this morning.

I skip the shower.

I brush my teeth and wash my face.

I change and head outside.

It’s cold outside. It feels like winter is upon us.

I go to Potbelly’s for my morning bagel. They are out of bagels. I leave and go upstairs to work.

In my cubicle, I work on completing my project.

I chat with some friends in between. I miss them.

I almost miss lunch again. I get Potbelly’s. I eat my sandwich and read my book. I go back to work.

My project is finished. I work on the next one. It involves Ruby. It was a bit of a brain buster. I figure out a vital function. I leave the rest for tomorrow.

I leave and head out to the bus stop on Dearborn and Jackson.

I take the bus north to the Newberry Library. The author of The Time Traveler’s Wife is doing a reading from her new book, Her Fearful Symmetry.

I get in line with my copy of her new book. The lady in front of me has one copy. She wants to get another copy. She asks me to save her spot. I do. She leaves and gets another copy. She comes back.

She soon changes her mind and wants a third copy. She asks me to save her spot. She leaves and gets another copy. She comes back.

I pay for the book. I find a seat in the room. I’m early, so I read The Time Traveler’s Wife some more.

Audrey Niffenegger soon comes. She reads the first chapter. SPOILER: The main character dies in the first chapter.

She does a Q & A. One question is if she follows a writing regiment like Stephen King. Her answer, “Stephen King is a real writer.” LOL. I want to ask her a question, “Was there anything you cut out or rewrote in Time Traveler’s Wife?” I’m not sure if it’s polite to ask such a question, so I don’t ask it.

Another question is what’s her favorite book. She makes a ‘book club recommendation:’ Was by Geoff Ryman. I like anything Oz related, so I wrote it down to add to my list.

Afterwards, I get my copy of Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Tearful Symmetry signed by Ms. Niffenegger. I’m all giddy cuz I get easily starstruck.

I take the bus back home.

I make pizza on naan bread. It is yummy.

Then I write a new blog post. It goes like this…

Ionburn had been dormant for a long time, but I had been working on it for a while. It’s now updated. When you first go, it may look the same, but hang around for a minute and then you should notice something. There were more features than what’s there now, but I’m still working the bugs out. I made that one from scratch so I hope you like it.

JayNCoke got a total makeover as well. I made that one myself; and I’m really proud of it. I really want the site to be a sort of online portfolio more than a blog. I had to incorporate some nifty javascript fade effects as well as some full-on AJAX navigation. Also on the home page I created a sort of “lifestream” to pull my various web activity and put it in one place. There are several sites that do this to varying degrees, but I thought it’d be a cool project to do on my own.

So that’s it for now. Like I said before, I got some posts in the works as well. Hopefully I can keep my promise and update regularly now. If not, someone please remind me with a nice kick-in-the-butt.

Today was UMBC’s Career Fair. It was brutal, but I think my overall experience was positive. And I only say brutal in that there was a lot to see and do—I didn’t think it was gong to be that intense.

Yesterday, I actually went to the Career Center on campus and had them do a critique of my resume. I am REALLY glad I did it. I wasn’t all that confident in my resume to begin with and I had no idea how to build on it; but they really did have some positive stuff to say about it. The biggest help though was their resume writing page on their site, especially the workshop. My old resume looks so dinky compared to the monster that I have now. hehehe. But I think the best thing I really got out of it was creating my objective. When they helped me come up with one, it really stuck with me and I focused on that throughout my day at the fair.

So back to today. With my new and improved resume, wearing my traditional business attire (blue shirt, tie, black slacks), I was psyched and confident to hit the career fair; and that mood stuck with me throughout the whole time. How were the companies? Actually, to my surprise, the big ones that I initially were interested in didn’t give me the impression that they were really actively looking for new employees. It was the smaller, local ones that really won me over. It’s because they had this passion in their voices when they talked about their company… and they showed more intense, sincere interest in me.

An interesting, but positive, reaction that I got a lot was when I answered when my ‘expected date of graduation’ was. Right when I said that I finished last year, they had this surprised look on their faces: a little bit of that “wow I didn’t expect to see someone like you” mixed in with “oooh I’m really glad to see someone like you” look.

Another cool thing about the fair was the free stuff! A lot of the companies had giveaways, I guess to attract people to their booths. Let’s go through the haul: 7 pens, stress ball, foldable frisbee thing, 2 key lanyards, sudoku video game keychain, ruler with built-in calculator, mini desk light, mini binoculars, mousepad, cap, bag, and assorted mints and candies. I later found out that Xerox was actually handing out USB drives… dammit! lol I regret not just hitting every booth, no matter what field they were in, and just grabbed the free stuff. I was just so tired, but I also had ran out of resumes to give out. So, to those reading this and going to job fairs: bring LOTS AND LOTS of resumes! I mean it!

I am REALLY REALLY REALLY hoping to hear from some of the companies that said they were going to contact me this weak. And I hope I can get some interviews lined up by next week. I have been getting more and more excited about taking time to do traveling now that I have the time and money.

Okay, so for future reference (hopefully not for me, but maybe as tips for others):

• Bring a LOT of resumes. You should be able to obtain a list of the companies attending, so make sure to print at least 50-75% the number. You just never know what you will find there! And make sure to have it critiqued by someone.
• Bring a backpack or messenger bag. Something to carry the free stuff!
• Bring a folder to hold all the fliers, papers, and cards you will be collecting.
• Here’s something I didn’t do, but I REALLY wish I did: right after you talk to one of the company reps, whip out a notebook, write down the name of the company and what follow-up actions you need to do. I am confident that most of the people I talked to will be contacting me, but a couple had wanted me to look at their site and apply online rather than them taking the resume I gave them and using that to match me to something they might have. Kind of a pain.
• Bring a friend. I was lucky enough to have one come with me who helped keep me positive throughout the whole thing.
• Don’t be skeptical of a particular company because it might not particularly be in the field that you are interested in… you just never know what they have to offer. My case in point: a bank was represented there that happens to be the bank that bought out the bank I work for (and now the reason I’m looking for a new job). I just felt like stopping by there to see what they had, and surprise, surprise… the rep there remembered me! He actually worked for the Shriver Center and helped me get my internship that eventually landed me my first job. But that wasn’t all! He was actually there to recruit for a software engineering position! In Maryland! Seriously, I thought all technical jobs were going to be housed at their main office in Pennsylvania, but geez, this was a big surprise to me. So give all the companies a chance!

The career fair was a LOT of fun! Who knows, I might actually do it again next year, even if I do have a job then. It’s free and it never hurts to see if there’s something better out there…

I also wanted it to handle Google video as well, but they haven’t implemented an API yet. So, I had to do some slight hacking and managed this:

If it’s working like it’s supposed to, you should be seeing a thumbnail of the video that you can click and view the Google Video. The thing about this is, I can’t look up video data based on its unique ID. I had to work around that and do a search on the video title and format and parse it to and from XML. Basically, this is done by appending ‘&output=rss’ to the search results URL. So, ta dah! Google Video is now supported here… well, just barely.

I managed to get this far:
[youtube]FGvlNdtNTj4[/youtube]

You should be seeing a thumbnail image that you can click, and the Thickbox pops up with the YouTube video embeded in it. When I wrote this post, I had the YouTube video ID between some [youtube] tags. So the plugin finds that and replaces it with the image. It is REALLY in its crude stages right now. I’m having problems having multiple XML parsers in one page (basically it’s conflicting with my YouTube Videos on the sidebar), so I need more time to figure that one out.

I also managed to spruce up my favorites gallery. That one was a little bit more tricky to use. I made use of the wordpress link management system and made a SQL call to get them. So basically I’m using the link table with the YouTube ID, movie title, and movie thumbnail URL as columns. If you see the code, you’d know it was a hack job. Bleh. To that end, I added a whole bunch more videos to my favorites.

Edit: It looks like the changes I made somehow has Thickbox and Lightbox in conflict as well. Therefore the flickr plugin on my sidebar ain’t workin.

At first I tried to do it with Javascript, but I found that a security measure prevents me from importing XML docs from remote servers. That lead me to PHP; ah, my beloved PHP. Once I figured out how to parse the XML doc, I just had to find a way of utilizing the information. The next step: creating a PHP class. This has nothing to do directly with the API, but I hadn’t created a class or done any OOP in PHP before. A couple hours and voila: a random favorite YouTube movie bar on the right and a YouTube section that will automatically update when I add/remove movies on my YouTube profile. Basically, this saves me the trouble of maintaining that section at all if I do any modifications on my YouTube lists. Hazzah!

You should check out some of the movies at the Multi Level Moves site. Especially those of founder, Joe Eigo. That frigger is unbelievable with those insane flips and jumps. Oh yeah, he’s Phillipino. Just like me! Except he kicks ass, literaly! HAR HAR HAR. But seriously, he’s just so cool, like Bruce Lee cool. You’d have to see it to believe it.

Now I don’t know about you, but I had actually read books when I was a kid, and the Chronicles of Narnia were a rare favorite of mine. Nothing like the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe to fulfill a childs fantasy’s of traveling to whole new worlds through a damn closet. And now I hear that Disney’s going to make the movie. I wish they at least mentioned that there has been a movie made from the books on PBS. I remember parts of the movie, but it’s been so long… I should probably go out and buy the dvd if it’s out there. Either way, I look forward to seeing Disney making a decent movie for once. They’re really getting pitiful in the animation department and the loss of Pixar doesn’t help any. Boo.

Oh yeah, Ebaumsworld has got some new movies, one of which features a crazy asian arcade game played by a skilled asian guy. You’d have to see it to believe it. And you also gotta check out the mini monvie, Home Base, it’s just too fucking funny for words.

Okay, it’s 9 in the morning and i gotta go to work. C ya biatches.

Simply Calvin and Hobbes is just simple, and it’s got some pretty decent info and pics. But my favorite feature from it is its article on Calvin Ball. Remember that game? How could you? The rules are always different! I want to play Calvin Ball so bad now!

Calvin and Hobbes at Martijin’s is an EXCELLENT resource for all things Calvin and Hobbes. They’ve got a pretty extensive strip search if there’s a particular one you were looking for.

Lol! I just saw this great Grim Reaper movie on Newgrounds. Nothing like a spinning card of death to choose how you wanna die. It spurred me to actually see the other movies he’s done. I tell you, they are to DIE for. The first episode has the Grim Reaper sorting out a plane full of people who are about to crash and die into their respective religions and tell them how their afterlife will be like. I definitely want the one that one guy made up. ;D The second episode is just as hilarious as the first, as the Grim Reaper tells you of some of his favorite reaps. And damn… that Island of Mandango is looking pretty cool right now…

I actually HAVE been working on my project now. I probably worked on it for like 5 hours yesterday after I got back from class… I got it to the point where it compiles, but I’m gettin seg faults! Bad! Bad! I’ve also worked on it for like 2 hours today, and got some of it worked out… but it still gets seg faults. Hopefully when I get back from work I can get it finished tonight.

Speaking of work. Off I go!