Blogging for more than a year..

It's been more than a year since I started this blog. Wow. When I started the blog, I was working on finishing off the Shopgreen site, a site that was very well tested and laid out, but got no love (it really was kind of a dry project) from the higher ups.

A year ago today, I had just started on the CNN Trivia project for Red. Wait scrap that, I was waiting to get started on the trivia project and still working on shopgreen site while waiting for the 'producer' to figure out what to do. That project pretty much soaked up my time from July until it eventually finished after some delays in October, but was still ready for the re-launch of the Cnn site.

After that project I basically sat around for 3 weeks until I was let go the week of thanksgiving. Thanks, assholes. After that, I was annoyed with the whole prospect of having to work for another crappy non-engineering company and took the month of December off.

I started looking again in January, and with no work and no interviews beyond one at the beginning of the month, I started to get worried about paying to bills and actually applied for unemployment. But the interview earlier in the month panned out and I was able to tell the employment office that I didnt need unemployment after all.

February started with OpenID.. a crappy configuration hell project which made me doubt my skills as a python programmer due to bug after frustrating bug, most of which were in the repoze.who openid implementation. But at least I learned a ton about wsgi.

March brought the end of the OpenID project as it turned out OpenID didnt really provide what the tech lead wanted after all. At the end of the month I started on the Asset Admin project which entailed finally having to give up avoiding javascript/html/css. I've actually become rather good at it, but I'm still not entirely enthused about having to work on js/html projects.

In April I finished the first portion of the Asset Admin, the Playlist Editor, but due to work overload on the tech lead, it was never released. I completely rewrote Playlist Editor 5 times due to having to learn js/jquery at the same time, but in the end I was proud of the result. At the end of April I started on the second part of the Asset Admin, the Media Picker which was basically a continuation of what I had learned from Playlist Editor.

During May I continued working on the Media Picker, updating Playlist Editor as I learned more javascript/jquery tricks. Around this time I took the plunge into really understanding CSS. I got the two sub projects looking pretty good. I finished Media Picker and started on the last piece, the Asset Editor towards the middle of the month. I worked hard to make it so that the Asset Editor could be used anywhere (with Playlist Editor or Media Picker) and still look the same (no shifting of images or changing of heights).

But in June, the whole backend project which the Asset Admin was an administrative front end for was basically canceled through a decision by the parent company to allow serving of media through youtube and facebook etc. Everyone scrambled around looking for work until we started work on the current project which I'm not too keen on working on, the dashboard project, which is basically just a nice display of a bunch of CEO porn (aka random statistics about various things that are applicable to the company).

Non work related, I played soccer! From February '09 to August '09, I played soccer with the team we had at Red. Not since I was 17 in high school had I last played, but I was still one of the better players on the team. Surprisingly, one of the most artsy guys at the office was the best player on the team. We played for two seasons in which I had the most goals for our team the first season (3: headed the ball over the defender then blasted it in, the penalty kick, and the loose ball calm shot) but only got one second season (left footed shot!) That being said, we were a pretty sorry bunch with more than half the team having never played soccer before. Most scores were around 8-0 or some such.

In August, for the end of soccer party, I got drunk for the first time during an epic 14 hour pub crawl. Just a bunch of guys from the soccer team talking and drinking. Good times.

In October, the trainer I had been working out with for the past year finally opened his own gym. I trained with him in the gym as he was still building it; before the pull up bars were up, before the rubber mats were down. Previously we had been working out at one of those small gyms that big apartment complexes provide as an incentive to move in, but nobody really uses. And before that we were at some place in Monrovia which was owned by some guy who reminded me of a shorter smaller version of Mitch.

In November I got drunk for the second (and probably last) time during another pub crawl for JR's birthday. Wasn't as great as the first time as I ended up getting sick at the end of the night and had to crash at JR's place.

In December I did almost absolutely nothing.

In January I managed to find a job while continuing to save tons of money.

In February, my gf got a roborovski hamster (Hammie). A neurotic and seemingly suicidal hamster that is bascially crippled by fear. After a few weeks of having the hamster hurl itself from great heights to escape us, the gf got a second hamster. This one is a much more hamster-y hamster which we named 'Cookie'. Cookie lets us pet her and is very aware of heights and is generally adorable.

In April, for my birthday, the gf bought a second damn dog on complete impulse, chopped all her beautiful hair off, put on 15lbs, and was a complete bitch. The three weeks after my birthday she was basically the most unfriendly and bitch that I've ever known her to be. On several occasions I was bound and determined to call it quits, but I remained calm and kept telling myself that she was just going through some rough times. She eventually came out of it.

And so there's a year.

Windows Key remapping

So today I wanted to remap more than just capslock -> lctrl. I searched around a bit to try and find scan codes for registry hacks but didnt find much. I did find, this little tool, which is great but you need to make sure that you're editing boot mappings and not user mappings.

Go to Mappings-> Show and select 'Boot Mappings' to ensure that you're editing the right keys.