As of Monday, May 17, I am a resident of Las Vegas, Nevada (well, maybe not by local residency ordinances). I’ve already spent some time on the strip, but mostly I’ve just been hanging about in my apartment watching videos on Netflix and playing MMORPGs. I start work tomorrow at the bright and early hour of 8 a.m.

The drive to Nevada was surprisingly interesting with the change of scenery, but I’m sure the drive back will be worse as I’ll have seen it before. I was, in a very weird way, excited to see live cacti for the first time in my life – it’s too bad they don’t have sombreros like they do in Chilis [cue bad joke alarm]. I also saw my first tumble weed, and I saw the Hoover Dam. The damn dam wasn’t as exciting as all the hype would seem to indicate, but now I can say I saw it, I guess.

My apartment is decent, and is very close to my workplace so that’s incredibly nice. There’s even a pool in the apartment complex so I’m probably going to attempt to get out there a bit, despite not knowing how to swim. I purchased a swimsuit at Target – it’s brown with a white floral print – so now I won’t have to swim naked after forgetting to bring my swimsuit from Kansas with me.

Anyway, I’ll be programming in C++ this summer so I’m going to do a little bit of brushing up before I head to work for my first day tomorrow. It’ll be hard not to mix in PHP to the C++ on accident until I get used to it.

As an aside, Mario Galaxy 2 came out today. I’m holding out buying it until I get my Wii hooked up. I somehow forgot to bring my television with me to Las Vegas, so until I get a fancy cable so I can hook up my Wii to my monitor, or purchase a new television, I’m not going to be able to play any console games for awhile.

I’ll see if I can attempt to post more often since I’m here. I don’t know anyone here yet aside from one other intern, so I’ll have some time on my hands. I would really like to attempt a Photo 365 since I’ll be graduating in a year, but the last time I tried that I got too caught up with other things. We’ll see.

By the way, last semester oddly turned out splendidly. I ended up with 4 As and 1 B. I was surprised as I had one very difficult class in which I was expecting to scrape by with C but I guess my hard work paid off. Thanks to all who put up with my whining about the projects and offered assistance when I couldn’t figure things out – you guys are the reason I didn’t have to go and visit a therapist last semester.

I’m starting to really get hacked off at Enthusiast, the fanlisting management script. Multiple times in the past, it has been directly responsible for my fanlistings being on troubled lists. For reasons unknown to me, it has:

1. Not detected that some fanlistings haven’t been updated in two months time, even though it detects other fanlistings with the same problem
2. Tedious upgrades that broke mass amounts of includes… resulting in more troubles lists
3. Not managing things that would relatively be easy to implement (IE, code management – I realize there are “plugins/addons” out there for this, but I hesitate to use them as they don’t really look all that secure)

Enthusiast does many things well. It has been a fantastic time-saver and has allowed me to manage many more fanlistings than I could have done without it. However, it has flaws that so far haven’t been addressed – for whatever reason – and I’m fed up with it. There has to be a better way to do things.

I’ve had a bare-bones admin panel with some very basic functionality written for my own fanlisting management script which I hope will address the problems above. I’m not sure if I’ll ever release it for general use (if I get it finished, that is). I want something that is truly a content management system – I hate having to log in and modify code to add new link codes, change wording, etc. I want it to manage link codes, basic fanlisting functionality, affiliates, and page content. It is very idealistic of me, but seeing as how I’ve got two years of PHP/MySQL programming under my belt (with many more of OOP and HTML/CSS) I don’t think it’s so far-fetched. If I ever get enough time to sit down and finish it, that is.

Here’s a quick post to prove I’m not dead. Here’s the lowdown on what’s been going on in my pretty un-exciting life:

1. Amazingly enough, even with all of the stressful things that occurred last semester, I made it out with the best grades I have ever received while in college. I received four As and two Bs.
2. I went on a trip with my boyfriend, David, to Las Vegas for some relaxation before classes started again. Someday, I’ll have to get around to posting photos.
3. Completely unrelated to the above, I received an offer for a paid internship in Las Vegas, Nevada. I probably shouldn’t disclose more than that here, but I will say that I’m really excited about it.
4. I completely forgot to post a “year in review” post for 2009. Someone remind me, will you?

I’m in another full load of classes this semester so I’ll be as busy as always. I’m way behind on a lot of things, including Q*bee trades, so my apologies to my bee friends… it’s been far too long.

So, being as it has been a mere 2.5 months since my last post, I had better attempt to fill in the gap. The fall 2009 semester has started and I’m already aghast that enrollment for next spring is starting soon (October 30!).

This semester I’m in:
- ANTH 618: Religion in Culture – really, really interesting class. I have found, however, that the majority of students seem to be anthro majors and therefore a lot of the terminology and such flies way over my little CIS head. Not to mention that I’ve been trained the last two years to think of everything in sequence and logically – and things don’t always go that way in class (not that that’s a bad thing). Studying culture is entirely different than computing, that’s for sure.
- DEN 325: Personal & Professional Development – dumb requirement we have to take in order to graduate. Yes, some of what we discuss in this class is worthwhile – but I was told in class that I needed a $400 outfit with a designer purse to get job offers. I’m not kidding.
- PHYS 114: General Physics II – getting the class-with-a-science-prereq out of the way. It sucks, and quite frankly I probably won’t use anything from this class afterwards. I’m also not really digging the abstract-ness of the concepts (flux! Henrys! DANGEROUS ELECTRICAL CURRENTS!)
- CIS 501: Software Architecture – I’m really enjoying this class. We hadn’t really been taught previously how to lay out programs before coding and although it was awkward coding from diagrams the first time, I can definitely say that it’s a time saver and makes things so squeaky clean it makes my nerd knees week (say that ten times fast). We’ve been using StarUML to draw up the diagrams, which is a free solution for those interested.
- CIS 308: C/C++ Programming – I’m actually retaking this, as I had dropped it halfway through last semester. I should have this bitch knocked out though because I’m having an easier time this go around. I still hate C, however. If the devil went down to Georgia, C would be in the back seat with a baseball bat smacking little old Grannys’ mailboxes and kicking puppies. Srsly.
- STAT 325: Intro to Statistics – This has been pretty easy so far and I actually had my first exam tonight. I’m pretty certain I did really well but as always I’ll only know for sure once I see my grade online.

My course load has been pretty bad this semester, but not nearly as bad as fall 2008 (I shudder at the thought). That’s one of the reasons I haven’t been around here… the other reason is severe stress in other areas, namely some personal issues with family members that I won’t detail here. I don’t really foresee things changing until Christmas break, but at which time I’ll likely be working 40 hours a week again so who knows. I’m not making any promises.

The photo isn’t random here, these are just some books I’ve been poking around in lately. I haven’t got very far as of yet but I’ve come to the conclusion that you can’t claim to be knowledgeable about religion unless you start probing around in areas you previously had overlooked. I’m hoping to pick up some other religious materials soon… preferably over those I’m not too acquainted with, like Islam, Buddhism, etc. Any recommendations would be nice – although I would prefer ones that at least try to be academic – I’m not amused with Crocoduck reasoning.

Anyway, I’m still active around Twitter (@heatheronnen) and Facebook (I don’t add you unless I know you, but you can try if you really want to) if you’re interested. Hopefully it won’t be another 2.5 months before my next post…

Oh, and for some reason I’ve suddenly fell in love with Fleet Foxes.

Since late May, I’ve been experimenting with patio gardening. I’ll just say up front that I have almost no real gardening experience and so everything has been a trial-and-error thing. It’s been going pretty good so far except for the blight (I think) that my plants caught recently. I’ve been spraying them with a baking soda/soapy water/Miracle Grow concoction and it seems to have helped (I hope!). Anyway, I wanted to share some information about how I’ve been germinating my seeds in less than a week (and in some cases less than 24 hours) after “planting” them. Read the rest of this entry »