Time flies even when you're not having fun! What an interesting work week it was, starting out with me initiating a conversation regarding fair practices at work, and how to be more efficient. I explained the need for documentation once again so that others can save time -- of course your coworkers are too lazy to read the real documentation, what do you expect? So this turned into him blaming me for not doing any documentation the next day after I had completed the documentation. Sorry, but I just explained this to you, and now you are blaming me? He obviously doesn't have a good short-term memory. Perhaps the pain in his stomach from his 16-year-old daughter hitting him in the stomach which precipitated the need for a visit to a doctor brought about forgetfulness. I'd like to believe my own reasons, but this same incident has happened at least twice.
He also wanted me to take Thursday and Friday off this week which I conceded to since I can tell he really didn't want to pay me. The main reason I believe was because the person at the client company that approves all of their business decisions with us is taking a vacation those days as well. I'm kind of against this idea of forced vacation without pay. I used these days to do a lot of applying to new jobs on the internet, as well as doing some research on some companies in the UK where my brother will be for the next year.
On Tuesday, I went to Marc's apartment for a little former/present employee of HotJobs.com party. I got to see some people I haven't heard from in a couple years get drunk, and I met some new people as well. It was kind of nice except one of the guests stayed until 2:30am talking until he sobered up a bit. I kind of wanted to sleep... it brought back memories of my roommate at Harvard freshman year, William, who talked to this girl in our common room until 4am. The walls are pretty thin so it was difficult not to shut the conversation out.
This week I saw Fight Club, Training Day, and Evegeny Kissin: The Gift of Music on DVD. They were all pretty interesting, but I think I've seen enough movies with this "crossover" plot as they called it in Fight Club. It's nice to have that sort of surprise effect in movies, but not every other movie that you watch because it's no longer a surprise.
I started playing Neverwinter Nights single-player after finishing Warcraft 3 single-player. It reminds me a lot of the older Forgotten Realms that I used to play with my brother on our Commodore64. Fortunately, it runs much faster than a C64 -- as I recall it would take 20 minutes just to load the game.
Tomorrow's another day at work, must get some rest before then.

It's been a busy few weeks, haven't had much time at home to update this page. I've watched a few movies since then in theatres and on DVD: The Sum of All Fears, Minority Report, A.I., Donnie Darko, some Leonard Bernstein biography, Bandits, and The Others. Most of them were pretty good, so it was time well spent for me. I started subscribing to Netflix, and am hoping to get about 10 rentals in per month to make the $20/mo. fee worthwhile.
I've been eating lunch at work mostly at Subway, trying to pick a different sandwich each day. A lot of the choices look too plain, but at least they have decent quality meat and bread for a relatively low price. Probably not the healthiest food, but I can't seem to find anything better in the area.
I have a number of complaints about my current job and am actively seeking some other employer. The president is quite unprofessional and the work environment sucks. The room itself is about as big as my friend's 1 bedroom apt common room in NYC, and my employer simply talks on the phone all day, while I attempt to write code or weed through existing code. Often when he talks on the phone, he places the blame on us, claiming that our competence is limited by the low salary he pays us. Or sometimes he will create some fantastic story about why something fails to function properly. We of course have no QA employee, and no time to check our work as he likes to have every job rushed. He also does some other things that make me really want to quit, but I want to keep this short.
I'm really angry about what he did to me this past Friday -- giving me a huge load of work to do at 4:30pm, claiming it had to be completed that day. I didn't get much of a chance to look over what I did, I just approximated how many nested tables there were and inserted some random template code. I told my boss he was being a little unreasonable, but didn't really complain too much about it because I was busy doing the job. After I "finished", I submitted my timesheet, and my boss handed me a paycheck and shortpaid me an hour. That just doesn't strike me as the kind of person I want to help earn money.
Afterwards I went to go watch my brother play in a little recital at Mannes as part of some short week-long music camp in NYC. I saw one of my friends' youngest brothers there playing violin. He attends the high school I graduated from a while ago and also goes to Juilliard Pre-College. Most of the performance, the only thing I noticed was how the piano was really bangy due to the acoustics of the room, and it was also wide open, drowning out the violin.
I also started playing some new computer games. Warcraft 3, America's Army: Operations, and Neverwinter Nights. Warcraft 3 single player is nicely done, not sure I like the multiplayer. America's Army is really buggy because the login server is down all the time, and Neverwinter Nights is a little more pixelated than I thought it would be, it looks a little more like the old Commodore 64 Forgotten Realms series. That's all for today, I need to get my resume updated and apply to more jobs.

I ordered some equipment for my computer which arrived this past week. I installed a DVD-ROM and CDRW drive and am setting up my RAID 0 array with two 40GB drives. Installing OS and all programs from scratch, it will probably take me a while to find all the CDs. I'm hoping for a nice speed improvement from them as I was previously using an old 5400rpm 5GB and 7200rpm ATA/66 40GB hard drive with FAT32 filesystem (from when I installed Win 98). The RAID controller is a nice optional feature on my motherboard, so I figured it would be nice to switch to NTFS and use the RAID capabilities. I ended up spending a lot of time trying to get it to work because the driver was really difficult to find. I also ended up frying my old 6GB boot drive which is ok since I think I got everything important off of it.
I also finished reading Rainbow Six which was a pretty interesting book. Lots of killing going on, kind of like the computer game Counterstrike. I haven't tried the Rainbow Six line of computer games yet, it didn't seem as fun. Gotta get some sleep before I have to go to work.

Rode my bike today, for a pretty short time -- maybe 90 minutes. Had to wait until the evening when it got cooler but it was too dark to ride for too long. There were two overflow streams from the canal flowing across the trail and were pretty deep so my sneakers and socks got soaked. I thought it was kind of strange that a deer right along the trail wasn't scared off when I biked by it -- usually they just run off.
On Thursday I watched Sum of All Fears with my brother in NYC. It was ok action-wise but they overdid the "spies know everything" theme, leading to a really dumb ending. I don't have much else to say about it.
I've started some miscellaneous projects at work, none of them that interesting. I'm setting up a mySQL database and some CGI scripts to enable a membership section on the Welch Integrated site, including e-mail link verification, session IDs, editing preferences, and password e-mailing. I'm mostly finished, but there are some annoying problems I need to fix. My employer is also forcing all his workers to take one day forced vacation next week to conserve money.
Trepp doesn't seem to be happening as the headhunter is probably lying to me about really getting on their case about the third interview they talked about. I'd expect that he would at least be able to get some answers from them after 6 weeks or so. Other than employers that require extensive background checks (i.e. the NSA), I would expect some sort of answer within a month.
I'm still actively searching for a real programming job or something more stable and well-paying than my current job. Spending 12-13 hours away from home every weekday for 8 hrs of pay is not ideal. However, the train ride gives me the opportunity to sleep or read.
This past week I also finished Bag of Bones by Stephen King. Well-written but it wasn't as interesting as The Green Mile. I think maybe his books end too abruptly with some really strange endings, well for me at least. This week I'll probably start reading Rainbow Six, I'm just choosing books at random that my brother left at home (though Bag of Bones was something I bought at the airport).
Anyway, I should go to bed soon. Maybe I'll wake up in time to catch the end of the World Cup game with USA vs. South Korea.

I started working this past week at a very small company in NYC called Welch Integrated Inc. My job there involves UNIX administration, PERL programming, and some miscellaneous web-related jobs. So far I have been setting up accounts in virtual domains, reconfiguring apache conf files (I'm really growing to dislike httpd.conf), modifying PERL scripts, and fixing HTML. Although it isn't the ideal start to a career in programming, I get a little exposure to some Linux administration beyond what I would really use on my own Linux box.
I also had lunch with Anup and Peter, my old blockmates at Harvard. We went to Subway because there aren't many other places to eat in the area around my work. It was surprisingly crowded and almost as expensive as the other deli's around that I've visited for lunch. Adding a new item in the hobbies section, should be done by the time you read this.

I decided it was a good time for an update. Made some small additions to the hobbies section of my webpage since the last update. Whenever I decide to work on my webpage, I am always diverted by my desperation to find a computer-related job. Having been unemployed for nearly one year makes me feel like I am wasting time as I haven't focused my energy into studying for graduate school or developing some marketable program. In the meantime, my brother got into Oxford Business School and will be attending this fall.
I watched Antitrust on DVD today -- it was kind of geeky. The plot was ok, but I didn't like how they advocated open source as the solution to "beating" corporations with near-monopolies. I liked how the movie depicted the programming community though, a little more realistic than most movies such as Hackers and Sneakers. It also reminded me of my Networks class at Harvard, as well as one of my friends from Harvard who went off to start his own P2P filesharing network company.
Anyway, I have an interview tomorrow for a part-time job so I need some sleep. Hope it goes well, as I'd really like to have a job by this summer.

I've been working on a few things lately including programming some advanced Javascripts, progressing a little bit on my Java skills, and touching up one of my PERL parsing scripts. I also watched A Beautiful Mind at the theatre across from my house a couple weeks ago, it was an interesting movie. To me, the acting seemed less stellar than most critics have rated Russell Crowe in this movie. His demeanor was not very convincing to me... maybe it was his lines.
My job situation is pretty stagnant, I almost never hear back from the companies I've applied to. I'm hoping I can land some temporary job, even part-time to pay off some of my school loans.

Today, I worked out a little cookie functionality with this news page (see top left corner!). Although the functions I wrote are pretty extraneous in the practicality of this section, I had fun working on it. The only way I see that this could be useful is if I arranged the news items from oldest to newest, because you could just scroll down to read all the unread items rather than have to scroll up after reading each entry. Since not everyone likes using cookies, it would be easier to leave the order unchanged.
I was a little disappointed that we are going to have a long winter season, I wanted to go out and ride my bike more often. Hopefully there will be more periods of warm weather soon.

As promised, I'm updating this section more often than my previous website (ccho v2.0). Today was my 24th birthday. I had a small party with my parents, aunt, uncle, and cousin at my house. My cousin bought me a couple items from the gift shop at the Franklin Institute, where she had gone on her field trip -- an oversize pencil with its own sharpener attached, and a small plastic case displaying an example of potential energy converting to kinetic energy. It's hard to explain what it is exactly, but it was an interesting toy.
I don't have too much to post at the moment, I've been editing journal articles for my father's sister, looking for a job, watching Knicks games (they're starting to win a few games), and got to go biking as it was rather warm yesterday. I'm thinking of starting some projects to keep current with my programming, but I still need to filter out all the ones that would take years to complete. For now, I think I'll try and touch up the unfinished portions of my webpage.

I'm finally finishing up the new version of my webpage. I started this past summer, as the previous version was partially incompatible with MS Explorer as I used Netscape-specific JavaScript to create some special effects. I haven't the opportunity to release this version earlier as I have been busy job hunting, and spent a lot of time developing the sub-sections of the webpage. As you will notice, I am not completely finished with the site, but I will be working on it more frequently than the previous version of my site.

Hope you enjoy the new site, and feel free to drop me an e-mail, especially if I have not heard from you in a while. Don't forget to bookmark it, as I plan to update it regularly.

• 01/22/02 - Release Date of ccho v3.0