Vermont Lasmarias

 
It's late...I spent the last few hours cleaning up my Outlook (just installed MSOffice 2003). Thanks for helping me buy it Erika!

But yup, was reorganizing my Outlook backups of past (200 megs combined of backup.pst), couple thousand of emails (junk + pertinent emails). Took me 2 hours...should have spent time cleaning. :( But I'll clean a bit more, wake up early, and clean some more. Clean clean clean and organize!

It was cool rereading the old emails though, I got to remember who I was back then :)

posted by Deal Hunter at 1:42 AM

 
Hi Erika! (In case you are reading this, I'm finally writing!)

So what am I doing? I'm waiting for you to arrive at the Skytrain station. While doing so, I'm on a mission right now trying to find how to integrate my phone calendar with outlook (or any software application that does that), hotmail, and any other scheduling thing I can get my hands on (meaning to say that my schedule is always in sync, and viewable at anytime). I also found out that the your hotmail scheduler can be shared by anyone with hotmail. This hotmail can also be hooked up to office. Now, if only I can hook this up to my phone, and I'll be super-duper-whopper-grande organized! :D See you soon.

-Vermont

(sigh, if I can't find the software to buy, I guess I would have to write my own.......)

posted by Deal Hunter at 10:14 AM

 
Wow. Today was really weird. Where do I begin? I'll jump to the later part of the afternoon, 5:00 pm. After a hard week of coding, I decided to treat myself out and go for dinner. I saw my friend Gabriel online so asked him if we could meet up later after we finished work for a quick bite. After hitting a sushi joint, we walked past World Vision with their "sponsor a child" table set up. My older brother Vincent already sponsored a child and when he chose a child, he was praying that the child will have the same birthday as his son, Asa (December 19, 1999). Well, God answered that prayer and they sponsored a child named Laura, also born December 19, 1999. Anyways, I think God was calling me out, and what I felt inside was that if I saw a child with the same birthday as mine on the table, I would sponsor that child. So, I told Gab, hey, lets go back to that table. I wasn't really serious about it, cuz you know, its only a 10/365 chance that there would be a child w/ August 5 birthday (10 cards, 365 days). On my seventh card, I see August 5. I was like, "what the!?!?". Well God, since I said I would do sponsor that child, I ended up doing it. On initial look, I thought it was a boy as the hair seemed short, but upon reading the card, it was a girl. I really wanted a girl, since being a guy, I'm partial towards girls. It was really cool though, since in her picture, she had this serious and confident look to her. She reminded me of me in someways, and I guess I sort of fell in love with this child in a fatherly way. Daddy's little girl I guess? Big brother? Who knows. All I know is that 4 hours later, I don't think I regret my decision, and seeing her, I find ... motivation to do my best. I'll put her picture at my work place. She really does motivate me. Rabina, my sister? My sponsored child? I've found motivation to push myself to be the best for you ... praise the Lord =). I can't wait to write letters to her. I'm excited!!
posted by Deal Hunter at 12:13 AM

 
So I am reading an XML book right now. It's called:

XML in Action
Web Technology
by William J. Pardi


The boggling thing for me is that this was written four years ago, 1999, when I was a senior in high school. It brings back memories. That year when I entered my senior year from my junior year, my high school, Burnaby North Secondary School (BNSS) switched from old Intel 486 DX266 MHz computers to Pentium 2 300 MHz computers. That was a big difference and big upgrade. I was quite proud then to see my school so "technologically inclined". A cool thing was that BNSS also switched from using Turbo Pascal 4.0 for DOS to Visual Studio 6.0. Little did I know about Computer Science (SC) back then, I was so unaware of what was happening to the technological world being trapped inside the walls of high school. I did not know what XML was, what Visual Studio 6.0 would bring, where the technological world was going -- I really did not know much about the real world.

The cool thing, is that as if over the past year (2002-2003), I've been filled with revelations, of the sudden realization of what I really am studying, what I am learning at school, and so forth. In college, they stuff you with so many theories, you don't see much practicality of things. You see "uses", but don't really know how things are so interconnected. Your first two years, you learn baloney concepts, that probably shouldn't be focused too entirely on. What you need, is how the operating system works, how the architecture of the computer works, real programming skills and the underlying concepts, before going over data structures like linked lists. As I read all these books, I begin to understand why things are what they are, why things are going a certain direction, the revolution of the Internent (a perspective that goes beyond the "shallow" Information Highway), the attempts at subduing the internet, and so forth.

I guess, the point of this BLOG entry, without going to anymore detail because it would probably require a lot more paragraphs to explain my entire point, is that it's really cool to "understand" things, especially things of the past that you go through but didn't really have a clear picture. For example, everything that my high school provided, I did not know their importance until now, the power that BNSS afforded us students, the ability for us to create and explore new worlds -- this potential went primarily untapped because it was so new back then, but upon this realization, it feels great to be part of this, to say that hey, I've been developing with VS since I was 16, or that I've been doing HTML since I was 14, and now, at 21, I'm doing things and have done things like .NET, XML, DirectX, MFC, ATL, and so forth.
posted by Deal Hunter at 3:49 PM

 
This is my first weblog. This is quite interesting, I mean, the overall layout of the user interface as I type this weblog. What is a .pyra extension? I wonder what the used to embed all these cool looking forms. Very interesting. Testing with a link: Google.com
posted by Deal Hunter at 10:22 PM