// Create the variables
        var timer1 = null;
        var timer2 = null;
        var originalMsg = “”;
        var changeMsg = “”;

Hmm… I thought to myself, that’s a tough one. I’ve never come across that problem before. And sure enough when I tested it, it broke my application all sorts of ways. But then something another co-worker said to me that got me thinking was that it was sort of like writing to a disk. You don’t just write all your information straight to the disk. The disk is waaaaay slower than the computer’s RAM at reading and writing, so there has to be something to hold that information. Now when you’re writing in C# you almost never see this because it’s handled for you, but adding some sort of cache to hold the information and checking to see if the receiver is ready for it made the application work correctly and as expected.

Way to go for buffers!

I spent the better part of Sunday evening and some time at work today going through and cleaning up the mess, and there’s still no guarantee that things are as they were (I did everything short of reinstalling everything from protected backups.)

The long and the short of it is, several months ago I was naive enough to have one password for all my internet sites. I thought, like most, that if I had a secure password I shouldn’t have to memorize dozens of different passwords. Unfortunately, I was tricked into putting my MySpace information onto a bogus page, and from there the hackers got into my Yahoo! mail account and started spamming people. Worse, they got into my PayPal account and tried to transfer several hundreds of dollars into their own personal bank account.

I don’t suppose the law ever got up with them, I thought the issue had been resolved and I had, like a good boy, changed all my passwords to a new, constantly changing and very random password choice. No one should have been able to hack my passwords again. But guess which password I forgot to change? That’s right, because I never actually type in a password for my FTP account, I forgot to change it. Welp, I guess those people took their revenge by using that password to compromise my site. Hopefully they didn’t get a hold of any of my other passwords, because if they did, they’d have access to…. well, just my site… since I’ve changed everything else to something different.

Let this be a warning to you! Password theft is real… be careful where you put it.

To big, the user has to scroll back and forth to read content, too small and the user sees way too much space around the edges of the site. And monitors are so many different sizes now. We know that users can use Blackberry’s and iPhones all the way to 30-inch monitors (I would love one of those by the way).

Recently I was working on a website prototype for a student run radio show, and was forced to give up my long held belief that you should always design for the smallest commonly used monitor size, which is 8 x 6. But after going around to different sites, including Apple, Microsoft and dozens of others, it’s become clear that they are all choosing a website based on a 10 x 7 site. They don’t even collapse all the way if the site is smaller. So if you don’t have a high resolution monitor, your S.O.L. and will have to scroll back and forth.

I realize that monitors will continue to grow in size, but I suspect that 10 x 7 is the last standard that people will live with for browser sizes. That’s because anything else puts way to much information for any person to read.

After looking at dozens of sites, I’m convinced that most sites have too much information coming at you or flying at you, or blinking at you. They don’t make it clear how to find content and everything ranks as being too important.

In my new design, I made a site that was very simple and elegant and classical while keeping a solid professional feel to it. I even added a few bits of fun to keep it interesting.

I really hope my client likes it as much as I do… but of course, that’s part of the game. He might hate it every bit as much as I love it.

For instance, while there are things you can do with HTTP, the support there is lacking. You don’t have nearly as much control as you need to make things work. I can’t, for example, get the file size, or pick out just the header information from my documents. There is no support for partial downloads, or even the ability to recursively download or upload a directory worth of files. Their FTP support is even more lacking in depth. If I want to get the sizes of a batch of files, I have to recursively go through and get the file size of each and every file on the list. There is no way to resume or suspend downloads. There is absolutely nothing beyond a partial implementation (and a very convoluted implementation) of the interface.

After spending almost a week working on the system, I am left with the impression that the best way to work on this system would be to write my own FTP client library! Of course, I am loathe to do that, especially when anything I do will be copywritten and owned by FedEx right now, and there’s no guarantee that I’d be hired back. I don’t like doing work I’m not going to A) profit from or B) at least be used for shameless self promotion. Of course, writing this from scratch would take up a lot of my time at work. In fact, it would be horribly silly for me to do this, since there are doubtlessly other projects for which I would be better suited to writing.

But, since now I have convinced myself that writing the library wouldn’t be a complete waste of my time, and since I *might* even get some credit from my supervisor for writing such a library, I think I’ll go ahead and take on this responsibility until someone comes up and asks me if there’s something else I’m supposed to be doing.

After all, what’s the point of being an intern if not to A) not make a profit and B) be slave labor with no promised future?

This is sorta hard for me to do, I’m not the kind of person who just wants to walk up to someone really important and talk about my life. God, if my boss’s knew what I did on the weekends, they’d probably never want to be seen in public with me, much less hire me. So I can’t talk about my personal life (especially in a conservative company environment) and I don’t like playing sports, so that’s out too. I mean, if you don’t know how to play golf in this town, it’s like you don’t even exist. I know how to play sports… like softball, tennis, even golf… i just find absolutely no enjoyment out of them.

So here I am, with no way to converse with someone without making an ass out of myself. So I must resort to talking about my work. Well I have all these great ideas, but corporate life doesn’t lend itself well to new ideas. If I said “hey, let’s do everything in Java” they’d immediately point out that department A or B wouldn’t like it because they have their own pet projects. So I guess talking about new work ideas are out, though showing that I know about their existence is probably a good thing. Maybe I could talk about the work I’m doing? That seems the safest bet for making good conversation that’s relevant, but then I appear too one dimensional… it’s so hard to make a good impression overall I don’t know how people ever succeed.

So in other news, I found out that I’m really really special. Most of the other interns got their positions by who they knew in the organization. Someone’s aunt, or friend of the CIO or someone high up helped them get the position. I got the position strictly on my own merits and achievements. That makes me feel really really good, and at the same time makes me want to kick myself for not taking the inititive sooner and getting my computer science degree when I had the chance.

Speaking of chances, let’s talk about that. I’m about to get unceremoniously dropped from school for taking too many credit hours and not having a degree to show for it. How sucky is that? All those times I had to drop classes for one reason or another have finally caught up with me. Now I have to face the music. The reality is, I’m amazed I’ve made it this far in school. I really am. I have one degree and am on the verge of getting a second one. I don’t doubt that I will succeed in anything I do, but given all the obstacles I have had to overcome, both mentally and physically, I should give myself much more credit than I actually do.

Alright, so to sum up this month… life is good, things going well, can’t really ask for more from FedEx than what they’ve given me, and I really hope this leads to a job opprotunity, if not with them, than with another company.

I really don’t know what to expect or what to do

I thought you guys might be interested in seeing where I work, so I am posting some pics as well!

This is the outside of the building

This is the World Technology Center for FedEx

This is my little corner of the world… a cubical.. isn’t life almost perfect?