Joel Hainley

Ok, if you’re reading this then you’re at the new url for this “blah-guh”. Which is useful because I deleted all the files at the other URL. So..uh…welcome.

Went to the client site today and worked for about 10 hours, one of the people I needed to see was on vacation for the day but that ended up working out as it allowed me use her computer to do some focused testing that I wouldn’t be able to do if she were around.

We broke for lunch around 3:30pm and went to a placed called the Natural Cafe ( i think that’s what it was called ) they had a bunch of healthy sorts of things. It was pretty good, however one item they had on the menu was a Tofu Hot Dog, i almost ordered it just so I could see it.

Back for a couple more hours of work, and then we headed out for dinner at a place along the water in a harbor. ( It’s hard to get one’s bearing when it’s dark out and you’ve never been there before. ) I had a really good bowl of clam chowder and some hallibut.

We drove around a while, went up state street ( upper and lower ) and then i headed back to the room to crash.

One rather surreal thing was at about 6:15 I was working and the door opened and about 10 mentally challenged people came in. The ones that looked at me looked a little confused, most didn’t pay any attention, the proceeded to clean the entire building i was in and then left. It couldn’t have taken more than 7 minutes, very odd.

I drove down to Santa Barbara today, and checked into the local Holiday Inn for a few days to do some work for a client down here. Unfortunately, I was a bit behind on a proposal I needed to get out so I walked over to the grocery store picked up some food and went back to the hotel room to spend the night working on the proposal and then trying to get to the bottom of a javascript bug that i’m having problems with.

I need to figure out a way to do proposals better/faster I have a helluva time getting them done in a brief enough period of time. ( well brief enough for my tastes ). I want them to be accurate and well thought out, but it’s hard sometimes to spend a lot of time on something that you know is going to be shopped around and end up being used to get some other guy to go cheaper.

It was kinda nice to spend some time just driving along looking at the sites, heading south looking at the ocean stopping to look at the water for a bit, having a leisurely lunch, getting into town towards the end of the workday and spending a couple of hours getting some work done.

Hopefully I’ll have more interesting things to say tomorrow..but don’t hold your breath

After my entertaining visit with the Diablo Valley College counseling center last time, I made an appointment to talk to a regular counselor ( not a drop-in counselor ). On the appointed day, I arrive, check-in and wait and eventually I am called by a counselor back to her office.

Upon arriving in her office, she introduces herself, asks me to sit, and opens a folder with my transcript in it. We talk about that a bit, and then she asks what I wanted the counseling appointment for. I tell her what I was told in the last meeting, and that I need to get some old records cleaned up at LMC ( which is another community college within the same system ).

She looks a bit baffled and tells me that I’m at DVC and not LMC and that I would need to talk to them.

me : “i was told that this was a rather common thing and we would be able to get it worked out here, that i wouldn’t have to go to lmc to take any more classes”

counselor : “well I don’t know who told you that”

me : “the lady with the messy office, around the corner”

counselor : (raising her voice) “well, if she knew all the answers, why don’t you go get her to help you and leave me alone”

me : “now wait a minute, i’m just going on information that your organization gave me, you’re the professionals here, I’m just trying to get this figured out, i was told you could deal with this”

counselor : “i don’t know who you think you are…blah blah blah blah blah blah” ( she went on for a few minutes and attacked me personally at one point. I let her run out of steam, i just wanted to get this all figured out so I can get on with life, when she finally finished…

me : “are you done?”

counselor : “excuse me?”

me : “do you feel better?, can we continue?”

counselor : (her jaw hit the floor, and she tried to stare me down, it was rather cute, I met her gaze and she continued to sit there staring, so i leaned in a little, she turned bright red ) “do you want to get an appointment with a different counselor?”

me : “no, i want you to do your job, and help me figure this stuff out”

We went back to work and before i left she apologized for her completely unprofessional behaviour. I accepted the apology and left. She ended up being rather useless, but she did show me one particularly useful thing, the counselors at DVC rely heavily on a website ( she didn’t answer one question that she didn’t get off of the website ) that is available publicly, When I got home I was able to dig through it and get some answers that she couldn’t answer when i met with her.

Overall my experiences with the DVC counseling center have been comical, i’m going to try and get the information I need from somewhere else…perhaps talking to UC Berkeley counseling would be a better place to go to get the information that I need.

blog movement..( that is almost obscene )

I’m considering moving this blog to the root on this domain. I have a bunch of stuff that i’ve put up over the years but anymore all I really do on the site is post stuff to this blog.

This site will never be much more than content,( i won’t have fancy “towers of hanoi” demos ). So in some ways it makes sense to just move things over to being “blog centric”.

Not sure when this will happen, probably in the next couple of days, so if you have an rss aggregator..be prepared to update it to the root on this domain soon.