Feb 1st 1999
I forgot to set my alarm Sunday evening and overslept. I didn’t arrive at work until about 9:30am. I was supposed to pick up mom from the airport around 2:40pm, but fortunately her flight was delayed an hour, so I didn’t have to leave work until 3:40pm. Mom flew back from Dallas, where she drove with dad in a moving truck to move him into his new apartment. He is living in Dallas because of a new job with the FDIC there. He doesn’t really want to be there, but it’s a good opportunity, and he will be eligible to post for a better job here in Atlanta after one year.
I had my new perl program (SPSQ016), new script (SPSU017), and modified SPSU016 script migrated into production today. They will run tonight hopefully with no problems. I added logic to strip out and count all Y2K departure-date tickets. I’ve been very apprehensive that it’s not going to work right, and that will be noticed by Dennis Maher, my boss. I don’t want this to mess up because it was a complex task, and something that I ill hopefully be noticed for. Even though I tested it, I made some last-minute changes, and don’t feel 100% certain that t was a thorough test. I’ll find out in a couple of hours if anything is wrong though.
I got my test back in my English class (World Literature). I made a B- on it. I’m not very pleased with this English class because out instructor is extremely nit-picky about spelling, dates, and other irrelevant information. I’m going to try to drop this class tomorrow. I won’t get any kind of refund, but I don’t know if the low grade I’ll most likely get will be worth the $250 + books + time that I would save. I’ll have to sleep on it.
Feb 2nd 1999
I woke today with the first though, “Did it run ok?” I was thinking about the changes I made to the scripts at work. Fortunately there were no problems at all with my changes. We processed 32 tickets with departure dates after Dec. 31, 1999, so Dennis was worried since we aren’t supposed to be getting any of those tickets at all until Feb. 4th. It turns out that there is a bug in the system that will prematurely age the year of the departure date if it lands before the ticket issue date. Dennis commissioned me to write a perl script to fix this problem on our side. I’m going to try to work with Scott on this so that I can appear to be more of a team player and work with others. I would rather work on this myself, because on something like this with only one task, It seems unwieldy and a waste of time for two people to work on the same thing.
I went to lunch with Cuong Nguen and Paul May today. We went to a Thai food restaurant. It is pretty good food, but I think I prefer Chinese better. I learned that Cuong is one of 9 children that fled Vietnam.
I called Larry and finalized my plans to go visit him and Amy this weekend. I’m going to leave Friday morning and come back Sunday evening. I’m going to take off work on Friday. Every time I think about traveling, I think about Filiz. I stopped by to talk to her and see what she had planned this weekend. She told me that she’s on call this weekend and won’t be able to go anywhere.
Feb 4th 1999
Not too much happened at work today probably because it was a Friday to me. I’ve taken tomorrow off from work because I’m flying to San Diego to visit Larry.
I’ve been working on a perl script to count the number of days elapsed between the Ticket Issue Date and the Schedules Departure Date on a ticket. I had problems with the ticket taking much too long. The problem lies in the Date::Manip function taking too long because of extensive use of stacks apparently. I told Dennis about this potential problem and he told me that we should only apply this perl script to report on the Y2K tickets that we have pulled out instead of everything in production. He went on to say that if we need to do it for all of production, that I could write the date routines in C. I agree.
I was in a mad rush to cram for my two tests this evening. I had a History test that involved writing four essay questions. Statistics was a quiz that took a long time. I hope I did well on that one since it is worth more of my grade than I thought.
Feb 14th 1999
I woke around 9am today and spent most of my day cleaning my apartment. I also put in a lot of time to get linux working on my windows desktop. I ended up getting a ‘virtual desktop’ program called “Desktop Pro” which allows me to have a completely separate ‘window’ in which I can run the Exceed XDM query. This in turn allows me to ‘log on’ to my linux box from this virtual window. Since I set up Gnome and Enlightenment on linux (Gnome 0.99.7 and Enlightenment DR 15 beta), I can now have a fully functional and visually appealing linux workspace alongside my Windows applications.
Mom and Dad took me to Outback Steakhouse for dinner for my birthday. They gave me an indoor grill to cook things on. I hope grilling indoors doesn’t stink up the apartment too much.
I took Dad to the airport this evening because the flights weren’t looking good for him to fly out tomorrow morning.
Feb 15th 1999
I turned 22 today. It was a pretty uneventful day. I made a lot of progress with the C++ program I’ve been working on. Right now I’m trying to figure out how to develop a Master Sales File object class.
Kyle took me out to dinner tonight for my birthday. We went to a really good steakhouse. The rolls and salad was exquisite.
Feb 21st 1999
The week went by so quickly! I spent the first half of this week at work finishing up the C++ program I had been working on so much. I think I’m going to try to write a few things in Java at work to further enhance my skills.
I’ve been keeping my apartment nice and clean and organized. I hope this lasts a while. I washed my car and cleaned out the inside of it this weekend. Hopefully I’ve been able to remove all of the streaks from the inside windows.
Feb 22nd 1999
I got a lot accomplished today at work. I’m all up to date on Y2K tasks, and finished up some other things. Kyle and I went to lunch to Ruby Tuesdays, I had the fried shrimp.
I was supposed to have a Psychology test tonight, but my instructor claimed that his secretary had problem with the computer and couldn’t copy the test. I spent the whole evening trying to get linux to work on delta’s shiva dialup system. I was unsuccessful. I’m going to ask a guy at work named Jerry to help me, as he is able to connect to the delta network with no problems.
