Monday, May 26, 2008

Procrastination - the story of my life

I must be the biggest procrastonator in the world. I hate to do homework. Yes I said homework. I am in college and have been off and on since 2002. I've taken my fair share of breaks over the years. I usually can only take about a year of it then I need a six month break. I still haven't seen the point of a degree. It seems to only be worth the paper it's printed on.

What I mean is who can really be a programmer on the leading edge of specific development languages by going to school. I have friends who have Bachelors in Computer Science and couldn't program "Hello world" but here I am with no college degree and have been programming professionally for about 2 years now. I say professionally for two years because I really hadn't proved myself till then. I had made some small things here and there but until I took on a couple projects that other more well known programmers had failed at is when I really proved myself to my peers. I also made a name for myself when I just took on a development team for an ASP.Net website and took off making leaps and bounds for customers.

So this brings me to where I am today ranting and raving about a stinkin' degree. I've been developing this website we'll call as "BIAS". At the beginning I stayed up many nights trying to finish the core to really prove what I could do to make it a product we wanted to stay with. Well I not only did that, I fed their thirst and they wanted more. Everybody within my team loved it. Now Friday I just finished up the administration section and then threw in a curve ball with a nice report that wasn't expected. I think I have a couple things in the admin section to go back and complete like the user's profile upload image page but that won't be used for awhile and was really just a way out there feature. I need to code the IFrame to make it work correctly.

Tuesday I begin working on the configuration section and that's where the controversy will start. What I haven't told you is there are two other programs, one legacy program with many years of following and a new high cost development team project that are basically trying to do the same things I am doing. The only key there is I can make changes in a day what takes them weeks after all the red tape. One thing I learned early on is make the change and ask for forgiveness later. It always works out in the end especially when the customer is happier.

So back to my weekend procrastination fest. Here I am on a earlllllyyyyy Monday morning doing homework again not getting anywhere. Sometimes I wonder if I have ADHD or am just lazy. I think I will take my Provigil tomorrow and see what happens. I always seem to be able to focus better when I take it. Anyway the class is Human Biology and what I think is useless unless you are going to become a doctor or chemist. Really what do I care about how the liver and kidneys filter blood except how it filters my beer out of my blood. So now I know how to get drunk and stay drunk longer by saturating the liver down.

On a good note I got a new cell phone on Friday after the first one died that I received Monday. Now for the story. Well the Friday before I broke my other cell phone, a Motorola L2, which was a piece of junk. After using it for over two years I had began to become fed up with it. So Saturday I order myself a refurbished AT&T Tilt from their premier website. Paid for the over night shipping so I would get it Monday. My wife was at home at the time so she opens the box and the back cover has a tab broken off. No biggy, I'll deal with it and call them this week to send me a new cover. Well Thursday afternoon I had to take my wife to the ER and while me and the kids were in the waiting room the damn screen goes white like all washed out. I tried a soft reset, a full hard reset to no luck. Well when we got home later that night I called up AT&T, same number on the box, so after being passed around about 4 times and working with 3 or 4 different sales people they go me a new phone sent out. Guy on the phone told me three to five days delivery. I'm like great. I got a nice three day weekend here to deal with a broken phone. Well Friday my new phone shows up out of the blue. It even looked different when I opened the box. Like all shiny and new.

I've been playing with my new phone this weekend customising it to my likings along with my wife liking the Palringo IM I installed on it. Now I've just got a few more items I would like for it then I think I will be happy.