HK → UK → US → ?
CNN runs a very good article – Matthew Perry, a good thing on ‘Wing’ – about how The West Wing is as good, if not better, after the series creator and producer, Aaron Sorkin, departed from the series since last season.
I was worried that the dialogue quality would suffer but that is not the case, and I enjoy this new ‘style’ just as much. It is not better or worse, just different.
After being in the work force for over 6 years since I left college, most of my family and friends still do not have a clue what I do for a living. This is especially true for my current job in the U.S. Even my wife can’t tell her friends exactly what my job is.
I don’t blame them really as first I am not the best communicator as far as describing what I do. It does not help that my job as software engineer contains technical terms and something non-physical, namely software. It wasn’t like I was selling software, or fixing hardware. I was programming software, and now I am not even programming for over a year and a half.
So what do I do everyday in the office? Well, as the project technical lead I was involved in the project, which has to do with online banking, right from the beginning. Thus, I was working on-site with the client to gather their business requirements and worked out what can be done and what can’t.
Then I was instrumental in laying out the overall design of the system and acted as the repository of requirement information during the development phase. This was especially important as my company is based near Portland, Oregon, while the client is in New York, NY. During all these time I was the primary technical interface with the client as I work on-site. And now as the project is near the end of the testing phase, once again I am in Oregon helping to speed up the bug fixing process.
The project is due to be launched to the public in early January 2004 and not a moment too soon. On one hand it would be so satisfying to see the labour of my last year and a half comes to fruition. But at the same time, this project has been one of the most difficult and stressful job I have ever did in my life. The lack of support from my own company and a inflexible development team make it almost impossible to work with the client, who is pretty accommodating. If it were not for my desire to follow through with my work and see it to the end, as well as my current immigration status, I would have left the company long ago. There are plenty of people in New York who will appreciate my skills and expertise.
Anyway, this is what I do and I am not ashamed to say I am pretty good at it. All I want now is a company that value me.
The move from iBlog generated blog to this TypePad hosted blog is 90% completed. About half of the entries in the old ‘Techie’ category is still to be imported and some of the comments are also missing. But this is my new blog home so please update your browser bookmark as well as RSS feed URL.
And let me know what you think about my new blog home 🙂
I’ve just heard from my wife that one of our best friend is pregnant and should be expecting their first baby next summer. So Leah and I are going to be ‘aunty’ and ‘uncle’! Scary huh?
On a separate note, I haven’t been able to blog this week till now as I have been working long hours (~60 hours in 4 days). So all I have been doing is work and sleep.
I was on my way from NYC to Cincinnati in flight when I had what I call a “light bulb” moment. One of the main complain of iBlog generated HTML is that it contains the font tag, which is not XHTML compliant (in strict mode, but OK in transitional mode). This is trivial when compares to the inability for us iBloggers to control our blogs’ appearance via CSS completely.
As a software engineer, I am trained to learn and understand the intricacies and interactions between multiple software sub-systems and the consequences as each sub-system is modified. Thus, it is not unusual for me to connect multiple pieces of seemingly unrelated information into a solution. And this is how the solution of the font tag came to me.
One of the options in iBlog Preference is “Turn Off Font Styling In Preview” and I always have it set to “No”. Of course I want to see how my blog entry looks like when I do a preview in the browser! Not so. If this option is set to “Yes” then iBlog will not emit the font tags along with the font size for the blog entry when it generates the HTML files into the Sites folder for preview.
Then to extend the reasoning one step further, when iBlog publishes to the web site it simply copies what is in the ~/Sites/iblog/ folder to the web server. Nothing special or magic is done here. Also the upload mechanism (.Mac, FTP, WebDAV) is irrelevant here. Therefore once iBlog is instructed not to emit the font tags for preview, those font tags will also not appear in the blog after the HTML files are uploaded.
Obscure solution but logical once it is understood. This particular option can be better labeled to explain its function. May be labeled it as “Use Custom Font Style and Size” and moves it inside the same area as the font style boxes in the middle of the Preference sheet.
So now I, and other iBloggers, can control the font styles for the blog entry text through the use of stylesheet. About bloody time too!
Lost in Colonisation 