p-bot

Found this great article over at A List Apart… it’s like they violated my brain and dumped everything into an article.

A few points in the article really summed me up:

• You are no longer emotionally invested in your job or the work you’re doing.
• There is a clear disconnect between your personal values and what is expected of you.
• A significant amount of your day is focused on tasks that are not fulfilling on a personal or emotional level.

Now I just need to work on rectifying the situation i’ve sailed into. That’s going to be the hardest part due to my working situation in the USA, but it’s not unachievable. I just need to “change my situation”.

Did this one last night.

Mexist and I did some GPS n3rd art last night in SF’s Sunset district… more to come…

Digital logic = 0 (false/blows chunks), but bike rides to Ocean Beach on a beautiful day in the Bay = 1 (true/is the sh*t!)

Photo by: Mexist!

It’s almost halfway through the semester of my course and I’m starting to lose focus big time. Experiencing one of those, “what the hell am I doing this for?” “do I really want to do IT/Internet?” “what am I going to do with my life?”

I think I would like to own my own business and open a little store selling cool books, music, t shirts and art. I really don’t envisage myself writing assembly language or Java for that matter in the future.

Being a slave is dead.

Anyone out there have any knowledge of binary multiplication, binary with fractional components and data representation of floating point formats?

Just hit week 5 of my university unit i’m taking this semester and it just destroyed my brain. I was doing pretty well up until now, actually managed to write my first assembly language program for the Motorola 68k processor… nothing special, just moving some numbers around the data registers.

N3rd.

After being f’d in the a by Qantas when I flew back to Sydney for Xmas ‘07 (to the tune of about $2800+ us), I felt like i’m stickin’ it back to the man by taking advantage of their super cheap fares.

Got myself a return flight from SFO –> SYD for $615 us…. pretty damn amazing!

Will be tearing sh*t up in the old ‘hood from 19th June – 1st July.

I’m currently in the US on a L1B working visa which gives me 5 years total to work here. It’s been almost three years already (hard to believe) and time is slowly running out.

I had been given the a-ok from work to have their lawyers start my greencard application process late ‘07, giving me some leeway to get free from my restrictive L1. The preparing of documents etc took 6 months alone and my actual ‘priority date’ from the US Dept Of Labor (the day they received the app) was 17th July ‘08.

There are three stages to gettng a GC… the first stage, where i’m at, is called PERM, then after approval moves to the I-140 then onto the I485, which if approved is essentially the GC. It’s a seriously long and tedious process, even if everything goes to plan, unfortunately I hit a bump.

Today I was notified by the lawyers that my application was ‘randomly’ chosen for an audit, a process that will add at least another 12-20 months on top of my lengthly wait. It really blew me out today, very depressing and I really don’t think I can wait this out much longer. (FYI, my L1B allows me to only work for the company and I cannot move to another company. If I change jobs within the company, my GC app gets pulled, adjusted and moved to the back of the queue.)

So yeah, a pretty fucked day today. I need to tart seriously thinking of my future and where that’s going to be.

Today is the first day for what seems many, many months that I’ve been able to walk out of the house in the morning without a jumper (sweatshirt for the Americanos). Such a nice feeling, viva la spring!

Homework

Over the last year or so I’ve been pretty actively taking units at Open University to step toward a Bachelor Of Technology. I never went to uni, so this is a real eye opener for me.

I’ve taken a few units per semester before, but this semester (only two weeks in) I’ve already had to drop out of one…

I took both Programming 1 (Java) and Computer Organisation. Last semester I had received a HD in Intro To Programming, so I was fired up to complete Prog 1, which covers a little of the old ground but steps up the game very quickly. I also decided to take on Comp Org, which sounds relatively harmless, until I opened the first chapter. First chater was all about data representation, ie: decimal, binary, octal and hex, how to convert between them all. I had to go back to my primary school years and learn how to do long division again (helpful in converting decimal to binary and working out totals in various base numbers. This course works up into low level assembly programming (uber geeky/hardcore), so yeah, this is a *crazy* subject to take on with anything else. I have got my hands full with this and with my work and long commute it’s making time to share with my other unit, life and health a bit tough to manage.

Which did I drop? Prog 1.

I thought, even though I had a head start in Java and I could get through this without too much stress, it would be better to get the hardest subject out of the way first… devote an entire semester to focus on blasting this subject out of the water. And even though Comp Org freaks me out to no end, i’m perversely interested in this subject for whatever reason i’m still trying to figure out.

Even though I think this is the best decision and gives me better chance to get higher marks (albiet slowing down the race to my goal), I’m not feeling the best about having to drop Prog 1… feeling dumb. I’ll get over it.