Friday, September 21, 2007

Software, Friends, and Happy Feet

Today was super awesome. It started off with me working reaaaaally hard for something, it was pretty tough and I had a lot of trouble trying to figure it out. After a lot of effort, reading, talking to my project leader about the software design, discussing some more intense details with another software engineer... and about 6 hours later... I figured it out!! Computer Programming can be funny sometimes, it can go really smoothly and be fun and, although challenging or needing you to pay attention to a lot of details, it's all pretty sweet and good times. But then sometimes it's NUTS!! Like today, there can be a problem you get stuck on for hours and hours and hours. You can try 100 different things, and still not figure it out. Then you can talk to a bunch of really smart people, they give you some ideas and start some thoughts processing in your mind... and then eventually these ideas connect with all the things you came across earlier and BOOM!! The answer then becomes clear and you scribble at lightening pace on a sheet of paper until you get some kind of idea down. Then, it turns out to be kindof right, but you forgot about 10 more details you need to consider. After more thinking and plotting through then answer in your mind, the scribble on the paper is starting to make some sense, and then you try coding it. Then, there are a bunch of crazy Syntax issues that take another 2 hours to sort out... and then that last time, once you've fixed the last error, and you're sure it's going to work... and BOOM!! It totally works!!

That is an absolutely awesome feeling, and today, after an entire day of struggling over the same problem, I got it figured out about 4 minutes before I was going to give up for the day and go downstairs to meet some co-workers after work. Good times!! That was AWESOME because it was super cool to hang with some of the people from my work, at lunch and so on I seem to pretty much hang out with Matt's friends, who are super awesome too but yep it's cool to hang out with some people that I work with in a non-work atmosphere too. Good stuff. We got a couple of drinks at a place near work and chatted for a while about a bunch of interesting stuff. Cool people and really nice to hang out with them after work.

Tonight I came back kinda late and just hung out for a while, had some food and I just watched Happy Feet. A few people told me they didn't like the story, and that it went from "Be Yourself" to "Don't overfish the waters" in about 2 seconds... you know what, it was still a cute story. I was expecting the plot twist, and it was fine, and actually since I knew it was coming I could see how they were leading up to it. It's not a total tragedy that an animated film for kids tries to make a political point... in fact I think it adds more weight to the film as a whole. Good stuff. The movie was nice, pretty awesome scenes with the penguins flying down the ice and tumbling around and so on. I thought the seals and whales looked pretty scary for a kids movie!! The story had a few unexpected story points and stuff that I wasn't too keen on, and some stuff they just kinda threw in there that seemed to push the story along although it didn't necessarily make too much sense at that moment. The feathers on the birds looked pretty nice and the ocean water was pretty nice. Interesting use of human actors in the movie too, it was a bit crazy to see humans in an animated film, but once you got used to the idea it kinda worked. Pretty cool concept though and kudos to them for pulling it off!!

Anyway off to do some reading tonight.

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