Last night, I was in Wally-Mart looking around. I came across a nice dining room table set with 4 chairs. It was solid wood (unlike a lot of the cheap ass pressed wood furniture they have there) and looked pretty nice. It was a good price, so I decided to buy it. Of course, this set came in a pretty big box. I took one look at this box and wasn't sure it would fit in my car. So, I went back out to the car, measured everything and decided that it would fit in the car, even if just barely. I went back in, bought the set and had it loaded into my car. Off I went. Later, when I got home, it was time to get it out of the car. That did not go well! Despite the fact that me and the Wal-Mart guy managed to get it in the car, I couldn't get it out! It was too big and bulky for me to manage to maneuver it out myself. After several minutes of trying in vain to get it out by myself, I got frustrated. So, I proceeded to go into the garage, find the biggest damn knife I could find, and tear the box apart, while it was still in my back seat! I was very careful not to slash up my leather seats. After a lot of cutting and ripping, I was able to pull several pieces out of the box and put them in the garage. Once I did that, I was able to make the box small enough and light enough to pull out of the car. Sometimes, being a fiercly independent person has its disadvantages. I really should have got some help with that thing. :) Now to go back to assembling the thing and watching more Tropical Storm Ernesto coverage..
I just wanted to drop a quick note to comment about how happy I am about my buddy Dave's blogging lately. He's been writing a bunch of long, interesting articles that I've enjoyed reading. Let's see some more long guitar articles like the Stairway to Heaven blog! Keep it up man!
Well, I was originally going to title this blog 'Back to School' and talk about what happened on my first day of my latest semester of the guitar class. Things didn't turn out quite that way. It's what happened after class that turned out to be interesting.
I did go to guitar class today, as I planned. I honestly can't say I learned anything in class today. It was the first day of the class and as such, he spent the entire class helping out the beginners and never really got much time for his advanced class. Now I hardly consider myself advanced. I can barely play a few chords... I have a LONG way to go compared to the two young kids who were in the class. Clearly they were much more advanced than I was.
Anyway, class ended and I approached the teacher. I wanted to ask him if he would do a setup on the acoustic guitar that I usually bring to class. He offers to do free setups for the students of his class. All you need to do is pay for the guitar strings. So, I gave him my guitar and asked him if he could do a setup on it. He grabs it, takes a look at it, and suddenly gets this puzzled look on his face as he plays it. He then tells me that my guitar has a serious problem. Apparently the frets are 'popping'. I wasn't entirely clear what the hell that meant. As best I could understand it, that meant that the frets (metal bars glued into the neck) were coming loose. This was causing buzzing when certain string and fret combinations were played. It turned out that my brand new, $500 guitar is defective! Apparently the neck is malformed somehow causing one side of the neck to be straight, and the other side to not be straight. This is something that is pretty much unfixable! He said that he wished I'd shown him the guitar right after I bought it, because it is defective and I need to return it! Unfortunately it's been about 3 1/2 to 4 months since I bought the thing. I don't think Guitar Center's going to take it in return. This likely means that I'm going to have to deal with Takamine directly in getting it replaced. I am going to be out an acoustic guitar for a while. I'm going to bring it by Guitar Center during lunch tomorrow and see if I can get them to exchange it. I doubt it though. If they won't take it in exchange, I figure I can at least get some information and hopefully a box of some kind to ship it back to Takamine for exchange. This was a very dissapointing thing to hear. I don't think I'm out $500 for a defective guitar, but now I have to go through the hassle of trying to get it exchanged. Hopefully this won't be a difficult thing to do. This was the bad news after class.
I did get some good news from the teacher though, after class. The teacher teaches several guitar classes at several different schools throughout town on different days of the week. Some are beginner classes, some are beginner/intermediate classes (like the one I went to today), and some are advanced classes. I mentioned to him that I knew he had a class at a different high school. That class was a more advanced class. It's also a lot closer to my new job. It's maybe a 5-10 minute drive from my new job to that advanced class, as opposed to the 30 minute drive through heavy traffic to the beginner/intermediate class that I just started. It would be much easier for me to attend this advanced class at the other school than the class I was at now. Plus, since it's a more advanced class, I think I'd get a lot more out of it, since this class tends to be more beginner, and I'm way beyond that. I asked if it would be possible for me to just switch classes from this class to the more advanced class at the other school. He told me that I was welcome to do that, just don't let anyone in the school management know. Just kinda start showing up. He told me where and when the class is. This means that come next Wednesday (instead of Thursday), I'll be heading over to his more advanced class. I imagine I'll be there armed with my electric, since the acoustic seems to be DOA. :(
Well, I survived my first week at the new job. Here's some opening thoughts on the place.
On my very first day, I noticed this parking place that was right next to the building. Not knowing any better, I parked there. It turned out it was the owner's parking space! Oops! I got paged and asked to move my car on my first day! :) A little later I noticed that the boss had parked his Lamborgini there... (wow, what a car!)
Today, I managed to destroy a bookshelf... It was located right outside my cubicle. It was the bookshelf where all the programming books were stored. I barely touched it only to see it slowly lean over and then collapse. Everyone got a good laugh at that. It turns out that the bookshelf had fallen apart once before and they had just barely got it back together. The bookshelf was weak and about to fall apart anyway, so it wasn't really my fault. It was one of those piece of crap particle board bookshelfs. Those things are so flimsy. I hate those things.
The drive to work each morning isn't too bad. It takes about 20-25 minutes to get there. The drive back in the evening is a lot more busy. That drive takes about 20-30 minutes. So far, so good.
The people at the company seem nice. They are all very friendly and seem to be all in all pretty cheerful. So far it doesn't seem like a very oppresive place. This is a good sign.
The source code is a monster! This is a tough program to study, especially if you are trying to fix bugs on such a big codebase and you know next to nothing about it. I was able to fix two very small bugs already this week. The boss was very happy to see that. He said he expected me to take a few weeks before I would be able to do that. Of course both of these bugs were very minor bugs. One was a simple typo and the other was a missing scroll bar on a dialog box. A simple 'grep' and I was able to find the location that needed fixing. The third bug that I got was a different story. My usual bug fixing technique is to find some unique string of text in the dialog box, message etc. and grep the source code for it. Then I look at the code around that text and figure out the solution. The problem on that third bug is that it's an error with one of the menus. The problem is that all of the menus and toolbars are completely customizable, down to the text in the menus themselves. This means that a grep really won't work, since there is no guarrantee that the text in the source will match the text on the menu. After asking for some help from the other developers, I think I was able to locate the place where I need to fix the bug, I'm just not sure how to fix it yet. I'm going to work on that some more on Monday. Hopefully I can fix that pretty quickly. I have a LONG way to go before I master this code!
I brought home a copy of the user manual for the program. It's a brick of a book. I'm going to try to do some reading on that book this weekend.
My computer works well and is very fast. Unfortunately, I have a stuck pixel on the LCD screen. It's not that noticable most of the time so I'm just kind of ignoring it as best I can. Even though that computer is really fast, the compiler has a habit of eating the computer alive as it builds.
The developers that I have dealt with so far, strike me as very knowledgeable people. They seem to know their stuff. What I've seen of the code so far looks pretty good. It seems fairly well written. Of course I've just scratched the surface, so we'll see how my opinion changes once I get into it more.
Ok, I confess. I did something stupid that I shouldn't have done and it almost damaged a very expensive guitar.
In a previous post, I wrote about how I'd gone to guitar class only to find out from my teacher that my guitar was defective. It turns out it wasn't defective... It was 'overheated', which was my fault. That guitar class was the first class of the new semester. It was also the first class since I'd changed jobs. Previously, since I lived so close to work, I could easily sneak out of work a few minutes early, stop by my house, pick up my guitar, and head to class. This meant my guitar never spent eight hours sitting in a hot car in the middle of South Florida summer. I left it in the car because I knew I wouldn't have time to stop by the house and pick up the guitar. I did my best to cut down on the heat in the car. I put the guitar in it's case. I covered the case with several towels, and I bought one of those reflective window shades for the front window and made sure that was in the window the whole day, in order to reduce the heat in the car. Apparently, that wasn't enough protection. The heat of the car still ended up warping the neck of the guitar.
After the teacher (mistakenly) told me my guitar was defective, I took it by Guitar Center to get it exchanged. They brought it back to Tom, the guitar tech. He took one look at it and told me the teacher was wrong and it was not defective. The only problem was a slight bow in the neck caused by the weather - no doubt caused by eight hours sitting in a hot car. He made a slight truss rod adjustment to the neck and it straightened out perfectly. Disaster averted.
The sad thing is, I knew that heat was a bad thing for guitars, especially for fairly thin acoustic guitars. I just figured that my attempts at protecting it from the heat of the car were enough. Apparently not. When the teacher told me it was defective, I trusted his judgement over my own, under the assumption that since he'd been doing this stuff for 20 years, and me only 1, he knew a lot more about it than I did. What I never told him that night was that I'd left it in the car all day. I think had I told him that, he would have told me the same thing the guitar tech did - don't leave it in the car! He had warned us before not to leave it in the car but I did it anyway. *sigh*
The next guitar class is coming around fast. Wednesday is the day. This will be my first day sneaking into his advanced class at the other school. Hopefully I won't have any problems there. The question is, how do I handle the guitar issue? Yeah, I could just bring the guitar into work and leave it in my office during the day and just take it with me when I go. Why didn't I do this before? I guess because I'm still very self concious about the whole guitar thing. I am not a good player, so I guess walking through the office carrying a huge ass guitar would be pretty obvious. There's no way I could smuggle it in. I already carry enough crap in every morning - a briefcase, a cooler containing my lunch, sometimes a bag of apples, and now a guitar! What am I doing? Moving in? Damn, you are carrying a lot of crap into work every morning, buddy! I doubt anyone would give me a hard time over it, but I'm still the 'new guy' around there, so I'm not quite comfortable there yet. Gotta suck it up