zk_html/diary/2011-09-09-15:35:12.html

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                <h1>Zk | 2011-09-09 15:35:12</h1>
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                <p><span class="tag">blog</span> <span class="tag">fossil</span> <span class="tag">diary</span></p>
<p>I feel like I&rsquo;ve been neglecting this blog and my site as a whole, but it&rsquo;s been for legitimate reasons.</p>
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<p>After running through a few rather interesting interviews (one of which involved rewriting the Java collections API from scratch, one involved a shortest path graph traversal with some added edge-weights), I wound up with a new job the Monday after finals week at bConnected Software in Louisville, CO, where I&rsquo;ve been working for the past four months or so. Â I&rsquo;ve had an absolute blast so far, doing a ton of Grails UI development, and I&rsquo;ve learned a lot about user interface and experience design. Â The company deals mostly with health insurance, which is proving to be a nicely complicated problem to solve, and I&rsquo;ve gotten in at the right time, what with all the legislation surrounding the topic. Â There has been quite the focus on Health Care Exchanges here, and we&rsquo;ve been really working on defining the process of those in terms of both backend and UI/UX.</p>
<p>There have been a few little problems with the job so far. Â The biggest by far is the commute - the drive averages about fifty minutes each way and is costing quite a bit, what with gas and tolls. Â Since I was not a very smart kid over the last six or seven years, I&rsquo;ve got quite a bit of credit card debt to pay down, so I wind up with relatively little money left after paying for the commute and paying down the card&rsquo;s balance. Â Other than that, corporate life is taking some getting used to: seventy hour weeks and business rules especially.</p>
<p>In other news, I did another experiment with rapid prototyping in Django and came up withÂ <a href="http://characters.openfurry.org/">http://characters.openfurry.org/</a>Â which is a good deal more complicated than my <a title="Badger!" href="http://badgerific.com" target="_blank">last experiment</a>Â which proved to be pretty fun. Â I wrote it after watching several furry artists deal with different ways of accepting information from commissioners regarding what they want drawn. Â The result is a site which lets you manage a hierarchy of information about characters, from the characters themselves, to different morphs (basically a combination of species and gender), to potentially several descriptions of those morphs. Â The site will also let you attach characters to different locations - places on the &lsquo;net such as MUCKs and chat clients - and attach images to just about anything. Â As an afterthought, I added a means for activity to be logged so that you could see what the owner has done recently with their characters/morphs/descriptions.</p>
<p>I had originally intended to use this site as a playground for <a href="http://angularjs.org" target="_blank">Angular</a>, a nifty new Javascript library that I&rsquo;m quite taken with. Â I ran into some snags, however, and did not get that implemented in my allotted time span, so it will have to wait, perhaps until this weekend. Â In the mean time, I&rsquo;ve been slowly poking through <a href="http://mbostock.github.com/d3/" target="_blank">d3</a>, the successor to Protovis, in order to provide some visualizations for the site, using this as a learning experience. Â It&rsquo;s proven tougher than I had thought, but definitely a lot more flexible because of it. Â Another new thing I&rsquo;ve been playing with is the <a href="http://goldengridsystem.com/" target="_blank">Golden Grid System</a>Â in order to lay the page out in a flexible manner without having to think about it too much. Â Once I get some time, I&rsquo;d like to get the Angular interface running, and maybe also play around with <a href="http://twitter.github.com/bootstrap/" target="_blank">Twitter&rsquo;s Bootstrap</a>Â to make this a much prettier site than it is currently; though I&rsquo;m partial to minimalist designs, as it stands now, I know a lot of people like flashier sites.</p>
<p>Finally, here are some thoughts from a commuter&rsquo;s perspective:
<ul>
    <li>No one who drives a Saturn is happy to be on the road.</li>
    <li>Most people who drive Priuses and work trucks are pretty predictable drivers - I like that.</li>
    <li>Most people who drive Mazda 3s and 6s, Infinities, and Audis are pretty unpredictable - I don&rsquo;t like that.</li>
    <li>&ldquo;Arrest-me red&rdquo; is a real color.</li>
    <li>Pickup drivers are usually somewhere on a scale from angry to smug SOBs; usually, the older, beat up pickups are smug SOBs and the brand new, super clean, very large pickups are angry SOBs. Â This is not necessarily the rule, though.</li>
    <li>Audiobooks are awesome. Â News radio is depressing.</li>
</ul></p>
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