Jeremy's Blog

I think it’s become painfully obvious to me and everyone who actually still reads this old thing that blogging isn’t working out for me. It was a nice thought, at first, but I’ve gotten too busy with work and other life activities to actually maintain this old thing. I’ve disabled user registrations and will be disabling commenting on all entries.

I’m going to put something else up in this webspace (jeremyprivett.com) which will probably be better than a blog. My goal is to aggregate all of my web presence into a single feed and present it here, as well as details on projects I’m working on and what I’m doing on the work-side of life, be it with Highwinds (as much as I can reveal, anyway), Omega Vortex, or otherwise.

Thanks to all of you who followed along and kept me company while I was actually doing this. You all can find me on other places on the net, if you want. I’m @jeremyprivett on Twitter. I still hang out on Anfiniti and it’s pretty easy to find me on Facebook.

It’s been a long time, I know. At the risk of giving myself nothing to blog about for another month, I’m going to do a quick catch up of everything that’s been going on lately.

At the beginning of October, I got a chance to go visit Ruzena again. As always, we had a really good time. I was in Houghton for Homecoming and got to be there for all of the festivities, including the Homecoming Banquet and Dance. I think the food was better last year, but it was still good. The dance didn’t quite go “as planned.” The first half was kind of lame, so we ended up migrating to the basement where a group of us had our own little mini-dance, which was far more entertaining. Ruzena and I got to watch our first fireworks show together and became “siamese twins” because we were huddled so closely together because of how cold it was outside.

Omega Vortex has been feeling the situation with the economy with potential clients bailing, citing economic problems. I’ve taken this as an opportunity to look for another job, and I believe things are looking good on that front. I’ve received extremely positive responses, but a few details are still being worked out, so I won’t say more than that for fear of jinxing things. Omega Vortex isn’t closing, we’re just going to be cutting back like any other company does, during a recession. We’re closing extraneous divisions in an effort to concentrate more on our core business. Because of this, we’ve closed the website temporarily because it was only up to facilitate some of the divisions we’re closing. This is giving us an opportunity to go through with our redesign plan and get a new look in place for the re-launch. We’ll have more news on that front sometime soon.

I’ve been doing a lot more gaming again, lately. I’ve given some thought to cross-posting some game reviews on this blog and the blog at Anfiniti. I’m not exactly up-to-date with the latest games and would also be doing some retro-reviews, so my current hitlist consists of Call of Duty 4, Call of Duty: World at War, Assassin’s Creed, Mirror’s Edge, and a few other things. In case I’ve never mentioned it before, I’m always interested in playing games with new people. You can find me on Xbox Live, Xfire, and Steam. For Xbox Live: Atrophius, for Xfire: atrophius, and for Steam: siguel. Maybe I’ll have a PSN name or a Wii Friend Code to share, sometime in the not too distant future.

Things have been extraordinarily dull, lately. I should be moving to Phoenix soon, so I think I’ll start taking opportunities to get out more and explore. I think I’m missing out on a world of inspiration because I rarely leave my desk. Maybe hanging out with Dutch again will get me back on my feet and moving forward. After almost two years of living with or around people that actually do what I do and are willing and capable of having ideas and such bounced off of them, I think my creativity started to die off when I lost that immediate access to people like me. Programming and all of the processes surrounding programming and software development is exciting to me, except when it’s not. When I don’t have people that I can talk to about it pretty frequently, I usually end up resorting to more reading than coding to try and make up for that lack of interaction. Hopefully, being in a new work environment will help.

That’s about all, for now. If I stop letting myself be lazy or distracted, I’ll blog more. Maybe even about interesting things. We’ll just have to see …

This is an interesting position for me. Before recently, Omega Vortex has just been a small group of close individuals who all knew each other and have worked together before. Now that we’re expanding and I’m having to actually interview and hire people, I’ve been able to experience what it’s like to be on the opposite side of the process. I’m used to being the interviewee or the person applying and sending in a resume, not the guy interviewing or receiving the resume. I don’t claim to be an expert on interviewing people or sifting resumes, but here’s my list of things that’ll immediately get your resume tossed out of the pile. (continue reading…)

I was reading today and came across something that seemed contradictory to what I’ve learned over the years. At the same time, it just made a lot of sense.

Programmers don’t throw away code enough. When faced with a hunk of code someone else wrote, which doesn’t appear to be quite right, or is misbehaving, the proper action is to figure out what it’s supposed to do, and its interface, and then scrap it and start from scratch. (I’m not talking about rewriting whole programs here, just sections.) Instead, people try to handle the corner cases, or hunt down where the leak is. Just stop, think for a little while, get the structure well posed, then write that.

We were bit by this problem at OV recently. Instead of trashing pieces that were there in order to make them work, and writing them based on the original specification, we attempted to bend them into place in order to “save time”. Needless to say, that didn’t work out so well. Not only did we not save time, we used up too much.

Next time, I think it would be more appropriate to go with my gut feeling. Instead of trying to bend the immalleable, we should strive to replace the pieces. Sometimes code is just so bad that it’s not smart, safe, or sane to leave it in place.

I’m certainly losing my sanity, about now.

It’s been a while since I’ve actually posted an update, so I thought it was about time to, since there’s a lull in the chaos here at Planet.

I’m currently half moved in to my cousin’s place, now. I’ll be sharing an apartment with him and his girlfriend for the next year. I love my parents, but I really don’t feel right living at home after being on my own for so long. Once everything gets settled and I can get my desk and stuff up there in my own room, it’ll be a lot better.

I’ve been working at Planet AT&T as a Sales Rep for almost two months, now. Using it as supplementary income to allow me to cut back on consulting work at OV while other projects are in development. It’s a brain-numbingly easy job, but now that I’m living in Jacksonville it’s a bit of a chore to come in to Gadsden to work. Not to mention with gas prices rapidly increasing, it’s starting to get to the point where I don’t make enough to justify the expense of coming here. After my hourly pay goes away in the next week, it’ll get even worse. The job is entirely hit-or-miss commission, and we don’t make a dime off of 95% of the business we do here, bill payments and pre-paid cards. Chances are, I’ll quit soon after the hourly runs out. I found out they use PHP on their intranet, though. I may take a stab at getting a job there doing PHP stuff. We’ll see.

In other news, I’ll be visiting Ruzena in June, so I’m excited about that. By then, it’ll be six months since the last time I’ve seen her, so I’m really looking forward to seeing her again. I’ve missed her a lot. Six months is really too long to go without seeing each other. Hopefully, I can get things together so I’ll be able to move up to that area, within the next couple years. It’ll be nice when I can just go see her whenever I want, instead of having to plan out trips, make sure they’re okay, spend money on tickets, and only get to see her for a week at a time.

As for Omega Vortex, things are moving along steadily. We’re about to start a plan of expansion over the coming months that includes hiring new developers, unveiling new services, and announcing key partnerships and acquisitions. We’ll be announcing and releasing a new product soon, making some changes to our OmegaFlash solution to bring it back under the umbrella and prepare it for Omega Matrix integration, as well as prepare integration points for the rest of our upcoming Educational Suite.

Well, that’s a pretty cumulative update for what’s been going on lately.

Oh, after about only three freaking weeks, I finally have my laptop back … And man is it good to be back on a machine that has more than just 512 MB of (shared — so it doesn’t even come out to that much physical system memory) RAM.

I’ve got a lot of stuff to setup, so I’m cutting this short. Hopefully, Ruzena or I will blog more soon.

The previous entry was Ruzena reacting to my overreacting. Things really aren’t as bad as I made them out to be, to her. It’s just a simple matter of moving with the times. Personally, I really want to continue using PHP. If that’s not what happens, fine. I’ll move forward and do what I have to do to be successful.

I scared her a bit, because I was scared. I didn’t really know what to think about some of the things I was hearing and it freaked me out a little. Of course, I share everything with her, so it scared her too.

One of the things that makes me happy about her entry is the extra emphasis that was given to the fact that we are a team. She and I do things together and we’re always there for each other. We take care of each other and will continue to do so, as time goes on.

Of course, I also like that she’s thinking about the future and considering the family we hope to have and how all of this will have an effect on that, too. But, everything will be okay. Things really aren’t as bad as I thought. It’s just my state of depression, at the time, was amplifying things to make them seem a lot worse than they really were.

Thanks for being there and taking care of me, sweetheart. It really means a lot to me.

… and that’s all I can say about that. For now, anyway. Let it be known that Shaun Shepard is the best Designer I’ve ever met in my life, though.

I’ll scuttle off now, before I say too much.

I got in from the office at about … I think it was sometime around 8:00 PM … this evening and ended up passing out after I finished eating my dinner. Woke up a few hours later, as you can tell. It was a nice nap, but it made me realize how much my body is screaming for relief from the crazy schedule we have at work, right now.

I took a moment to sit here and reflect on how much progress has been made and how much has been done since I came out here almost a year ago. I’m really, quite frankly, astounded with everything …

(continue reading…)

I’m really starting to get disappointed in PHP IDEs. Because, I find one that works really well that I love (Zend Studio) but it falls short in respect of two things. The first being the lack of the ability to add support for other source control systems besides CVS and SVN. Second being the lack of built-in support for Unit Testing.

PDT (the Eclipse plugin) is very project-based. It offers up a lot of features that Zend Studio offers, with the added bonus of being built into Eclipse. And Eclipse has a plugin to support the Source Control System we use at work. Eclipse also has a plethora of other very useful plugins, like Aptana. PDT, unfortunately, offers no code inspection support for files outside of projects. That’s a bummer, because I have to jump in and out of various files in various locations that may or may not be apart of any project. So, PDT is missing ZDE staples, but has the benefit of being an Eclipse plugin, meaning I can have my source control integration.

Enter PHPEdit, which I’ve never used, but just learned that it’s going to solve the other problem, in an upcoming version. But not the first. I probably won’t use PHPEdit, except maybe to play around with, but the Unit Testing support is intriguing. If Zend Studio or PDT could get this in, that would be great. If Zend Studio could get this and alternate methods of adding source control support, that would be even better. I’m still waiting to see if PDT will be able to replace Zend Studio or not. Lately, I’ve been using them rather interchangeably, but I’m really wanting to move back to Zend Studio… Time will tell, but I wish these IDE developers would get it together.