{"id":31,"date":"2006-06-17T17:03:07","date_gmt":"2006-06-17T23:03:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/2006\/06\/17\/some-updates\/"},"modified":"2016-09-09T17:24:25","modified_gmt":"2016-09-09T22:24:25","slug":"some-updates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/2006\/06\/17\/some-updates\/","title":{"rendered":"Some Updates"},"content":{"rendered":"<h4>Updates<\/h4>\n<p>If you&#8217;re really masochistic and check my blog every few days hoping for an update, you <em>may<\/em> have already noticed a few subtle changes to the right navigation bar on here. I hope that&#8217;s not the case, though, so I get to entertain you with a brief walk-through of these changes, and how they relate to my recent life.<\/p>\n<p>The first, and most obvious change, is the addition of a little blurb about myself near the top right. Although I still did kind of like the setup over at <a href=\"http:\/\/p14nd4.blogspot.com\/\" title=\"p14nd4.blogspot.com\" rel=\"external\">p14nd4.blogspot.com<\/a> a bit better, there isn&#8217;t a good interface in <a href=\"http:\/\/wordpress.com\/\" title=\"WordPress\" rel=\"external\">WordPress<\/a> (the software that powers my blog) to show this information, so it&#8217;s just kind of hacked in there at the moment. I think I&#8217;ve heard of a plugin to do something similar, but again, sort of a hack anyway. Most of you probably already know the info I took about a minute to put up there, but I might be getting a few otherwise unfamiliar visitors in here soon (more on that later, if I have time), so I thought it might be nice. Yes? No? Feel free to comment.<\/p>\n<p>Moving down the list, there&#8217;s a new section heading &#8230; <q>Pages,<\/q> which contains a new &#8230; er &#8230; page, <q><a href=\"\/blog\/projects\/\" title=\"Projects\">Projects<\/a>.<\/q> As the page itself also explains, I wanted somewhere to put some of the things I&#8217;ve worked on over the past year (at least, I think that&#8217;s as far back as any of the projects go so far). I hope to expand this a bit at some point to possibly include some other projects that, while less interesting for the general reader, could be immensely helpful to a few select googlers in the future. Admittedly, this section is virtually useless right now to anyone who isn&#8217;t at least slightly interested in computer science \/ programming. Sorry.<\/p>\n<p>Continuing on, I&#8217;ve added one more link to <q>My Stuff<\/q>: <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelittleman.net\/\" title=\"TheLittleMan.net\" rel=\"me\">TheLittleMan.net<\/a>. A very select few of you may remember back to late 1999 when Chris Bates registered this domain for his freelance web design service, which I joined for a period as well. More importantly, though, this was the home of what immediately became my primary email address, so when Chris dropped his web design service and didn&#8217;t care to keep the domain name, I quickly offered to pick it up. Since about 2003(?), I&#8217;ve owned the domain for the sole purpose of keeping my email address, which I host on my own server, but had no web page there. I finally decided to change that late one night this spring, by making it a nice-looking <q>portal<\/q> of sorts, and a good place to hold my r&eacute;sum&eacute;. In addition to a .doc and .pdf copy of the r&eacute;sum&eacute;, I coded up an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thelittleman.net\/resume\/resume.html\" title=\"David Hedges' R&eacute;sum&eacute;\">xhtml+css version<\/a>, was actually pretty fun to make, too. I doubt many of you are as <q>into<\/q> xhtml\/css\/standards as I am, but I&#8217;m pretty proud of the results of both of these pages. Particularly with the r&eacute;sum&eacute;, I organized pretty much everything just as unordered lists (&lt;ul&gt;), and did fun formatting with css &#8212; this is my understanding of how xhtml and css are <q>supposed<\/q> to be used &#8230; organize content using the semantic meaning of various elements\/hierarchy, and do all display\/rendering configuration only through css. P.S. using a &lt;ul&gt; for an inline, comma-separated list is awesome :). (And yes, I know I&#8217;m a dork.)<\/p>\n<p>Last on the list (literally and figuratively) is a new option to choose between different site themes. To be honest, I mainly added this because the syntax highlighting on some terms in the projects section isn&#8217;t optimized for a black background. The Classic theme seems to be the best for reading the code, but you&#8217;re now welcome to use whatever theme you&#8217;d like &#8212; for the entire site. (It remembers your setting in a cookie.)<\/p>\n<h4>My Life<\/h4>\n<p>As you should know by now (having read my info at the top right), I have graduated. &lt;Monty Python&gt;yay&#8230;&lt;\/Monty Python&gt; I ended up really surprising myself by having the best grades of all of college during my last, and most intensive semester (I&#8217;m rather proud of myself &#8230; please excuse me while I commence a little bragging). I was taking 20 credits (6 classes) of all upper division computer science (well, and inet, which is part of the computer science and engineering associate program), including a graduate-level course in <q>Data Mining<\/q> (csci5523 &#8230; the co-professors of which also happened to be co-authors of the textbook) and three different internet \/ networking \/ programming courses, and I pulled off a 3.75, which put me on the Dean&#8217;s List =D. (I also took engc3029w during <q>May term<\/q> &#8230; a three week, three-credit course that met four days a week for about four hours &#8230; and got a very solid A in there.) It was a good way to go out.<\/p>\n<p>Since then (well, and somewhat before that), it has been my sole purpose in life to find a <em>real<\/em> job. Of all the programming I&#8217;ve done, I think I&#8217;ve decided that I like network\/socket\/client-server programming best, and my language of choice is C. If I were to use those two criteria to limit my job search, though, my options would be pretty severely limited, but a man can dream&#8230; I&#8217;ve probably sent out nearly a dozen r&eacute;sum&eacute;s and cover letters so far, including my Opera application (eeeee!), and while I&#8217;d love to take a break and just wait for a dozen high-paying job offers to come rolling in, I&#8217;m not sure that&#8217;s the most appropriate course of action. (My lack of income is starting to hurt, as my [newish] bike was recently stolen, my desktop computer died and needs some replacement parts, I had a dentist appointment without dental insurance, and I still have to pay rent through the rest of my lease (July 31) &#8230; not to mention a new apartment after this lease expires.) Regardless, I&#8217;m confident that something will pan out &#8230; even if it means taking some underpaid support position for which I&#8217;m well qualified, but doesn&#8217;t utilize my expensive education. Bottom line, though, I <em><strong>can&#8217;t<\/strong><\/em> move back to my parents&#8217; house once my lease is up &#8230; so it&#8217;s anything vs. joining the ranks of the homeless =P.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, that about wraps up what&#8217;s been going on with my blog and the last month or two of my life, and I have to shower and be ready to go about five minutes ago, so for all of you anxious blog-checking fans out there &#8230; until next time, enjoy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Updates If you&#8217;re really masochistic and check my blog every few days hoping for an update, you may have already noticed a few subtle changes to the right navigation bar on here. I hope that&#8217;s not the case, though, so I get to entertain you with a brief walk-through of these changes, and how they [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":296,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31\/revisions\/296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.p14nd4.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}