To do list:

1. Organize room, sell half of contents of closet on ebay. Like cards from the old Star Wars card game- would you believe someone would still buy those? Wow, ebaying might be fun. I could skip that whole “employment” phase of life and go straight to crazy-old-lady-ness. Buy and sell antiques, I mean, shoot, there you go.

2. Build a computer. We’ve got all the parts now… and I figure, I’m a CS major, it’s one of those things I’m supposed to know how to do. (I guess I’m also supposed to eat Unix for breakfast, live under a table at an anime convention, hack into someone’s computer just because I can, build a shrine to Halo and make hourly pilgrimages, grow my hair out like a rock star, except longer, grease it every day and ponytail it, hack into someone’s pacemaker just because I can, and make seven million dollars by age 23… *sigh* I’m doing my best here)

3. Skip this one if you don’t want to hear about boring computer crap. So I work for Hyland Software, in sunny Westlake, Ohio. Their main product is called OnBase; it’s a huge enterprise document management suite. Companies use it to manage their databases of scanned and other documents. A user can login to OnBase through a “thick client” or a “thin client,” much like using Mulberry vs. using webmail. The thick client consists of a large executable, like most programs you might run. The thin client includes a group of .dll files called the “core.” The thin client accesses the core through a web GUI. Now, a developer might not like the thin client, for whatever reason, and he might want to create his own GUI. We give him (not him/her… first of all, “him” is gramatically correct; second of all, I don’t think a woman would want to develop her own GUI. Hey Connor, you could make a misogynistic joke here, like: How many women would it take to develop a GUI for Hyland Software’s OnBase? None, they all just use the thin client! ROFL ROFL LOL!) anyway, we give him the ability to develop his own interface solution through a module called “hyland.services”. This module is powerful: using it, a client can run the following commands: Connect, Disconnect, QueryDocuments, GetCollection, GetDocumentData, and StoreDocument; thus, obviously, he has all the functionality he needs. Currently, hyland.services is written in C#; these developers might want it in Java. Because I am an experienced Java programmer, my project is to rewrite this C# code in Java. This is more difficult than it sounds, however, because, using Microsoft’s .NET capabilities, a C# developer can access the Core, which is written in C++. It’s fascinating, really, the Common Language Runtime in .NET allows languages to interact seamlessly like this. However, Java is not a Microsoft language, so, naturally, it is not included in the .NET revolution. This makes it difficult to use certain classes, such as one called “PropertyBag”, which are in the Core. I may need to rewrite these classes from scratch. I don’t think this will be much of a problem, though, because, for example, PropertyBag is really just a glorified hash table. Hah! They thought it was worth giving it its own class, when it’s mostly just a hash table! What jokers. You didn’t skip this one, did you? Serves you right. I warned you. At any rate, the differences between C# and Java are mostly cosmetic, so it’s usually easy to just copy and paste the code. I think C# is a superior language, because it provides lots of easy tools to programmers, such as streamlined get and set methods. However, the world has Java holdouts, which is fair. A popular Java IDE, Eclipse, is available free at www.eclipse.org, and to develop in C#, most programmers use Microsoft Visual Studio .NET, which is expensive.

4. So a summer w/o acting, or improv!… I’m telling you, by the time I get back, you’ll have to feed me lines of code, and I’ll spit out the output in binary through my ears or something. Maybe I should take up poetry: here, I wrote an Ode to Poetry:

Poetry
Poe, a tree!
Oh, it is comprised of a singer most popular during the mid-90’s famous for such hits as “Angry Johnny” and “Hello” (or possibly, the gruesome author of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and other literary classics… but then it’d be Edgarallanpoetry, which it certainly isn’t), as well as one of nature’s most beautiful creations, the magnificent tree!
Anger or gruesomeness, and beauty!
They fit together like butter and margarine, combining into a gooey mess, and why would anyone ever combine them?
Which is really the essence of poetry.

I appreciate your honest comments. But in all seriousness, #4 on the to-do list is read, so I’m going to go read (Catch-22 right now) and then go to bed.

Comments:

Beltonius - May 0, 2005

Wow, crazy, I’ve got a box of SW cards to sell too, and Star Trek cards too for that matter.

Jay - May 4, 2005

I read the whole thing! Yes, the whole thing. Because I love you. Btw, there’s an open source IDE for C# too. I’ve used it and it’s pretty good. http://www.icsharpcode.net/OpenSource/SD/Default.aspx
The address is funny too :). Keep it real.

Love,
Jay