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I started a new job at Penn State Harrisburg about a month ago.  It’s been going fairly well so far.  It’s not perfect but the steps forward out way the steps backwards when compared to my previous employments.  How much I can shape things is yet to be determined.   I am hopeful but not overly optimistic.

The great thing is there is so much to do and it appears that there is space for steering priorities.  The more I can steer my own priorities the more motivated I typically am.

So far it feels like I am cleaning up messes left by previous employees.   It amazes me how far some people can make it in their careers and not have the talent they should really have to be doing what they are doing.   Especially when it comes to technical skills.

This may be good for me.  I am hoping to use my own technical skills and other skills as well to create opportunity for myself at Penn State Harrisburg.

One thing that will take a little getting used to is the monthly pay-check.   I kind of like the idea but it will takes some adjusting to.  I’ve been trying to run a tighter ship budget-wise lately.   Mint.com has helped with that some.

I’m going to stick to using string paths, as opposed to hashes, for fragment caching (storing the page in pieces basically).  Especially when you have multiple parameters outside of the basic controller and action.   I am using a per page parameter as well as a page parameter.  Lots of cached fragments to manage in those cases.

It’s been rough disecting exactly how Rails manages cache.   I had the exact same hash going to my cache, expire_fragment, read_fragment functions, but expire_fragment wasn’t working.  I suspect routes are factored in there somewhere and I don’t have the time to figure it out exactly.

Lately I’ve been learning a lesson.   That lesson being, it’s nice to do things entirely the correct way, but sometimes you just got to get more done.

I used to like Circuit City a lot. Best Buy came to town here in York. I like having both choices actually. My problem with Best Buy and Circuit City is the level of knowledge the associates have. Most of them aren’t deserving of pay higher than minimum wage. I find myself buying more and more online after doing my own research. Occasionally one of them will have a better price than what is available online, but that’s not very often. I shop for what’s the best value. I’ll consider the ethics too. Like, where the product was made, or how the retailer treats it’s employees. As well as, how honest the marketing is.

I’d like to consider the ethics more often. However, if you choose to do so it feels like there is not much ethics out there.

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The Crowd at the Lost Ballroom, originally uploaded by Anthony Topper.

I took this picture with a video camcorder, a Sony DCR-SR100. I had forgotten the compact flash card for my Canon Digital SLR. I was using the “Nightshot” mode, which makes the photo super grainy. I used filtering to blur away some of the graininess with Picasa.

I liked the composition among other things.

Welcome to my new and hopefully soon to be improved blog. Say, “Good bye blogger.”