Yarr, so work at HP has been good; I’m enjoying my time there. I’ve worked from home a few times, which has been nice: there’s nothing quite like coding in your pajamas and getting paid for it. I’ve mainly been writing PL/SQL queries and programming in C#. I was apprehensive about the job to begin with because I knew I’d be working in Windows, and that’s unpleasant for me. It still is unpleasant, and I get pissed off at Windows at least a couple times a day. I get most annoyed when I want to do something simple, like right-click on a file or switch tabs in Firefox, and it sluuuuuuuugs along, sometimes even freezing the screen such that mouse cursor movements aren’t even shown. My response is always “really? it’s that hard to show me the right-click menu and be responsive about it?”. It’s a decently fast computer, and I know the thing would be snappy in Ubuntu.

Anyway, I digress; C# is actually a fun language. I got thrown into it because I needed to implement new features on an existing C# web service. I was reading about the lambda operator and predicates yesterday. It’s not as pretty, syntactically, as Ruby, but it’s still cool.

Whereas in Ruby:

I’ve been working in Visual Studio 2008 and overall I like the IDE. Intellisense is very convenient and VS’s debugger is great. However, that hasn’t stopped me from banging my head on simple-seeming problems, such as collapsing all method definitions and then expanding all regions as soon as a file is opened. I’ve posted a question on Stack Overflow about it, if you want to help out.

I’m at my parents’ house with Jon, wrapping up the last of our travelling around Kentucky. We visited his family for three days and have been visiting mine for the past two; we’ll head back to Lexington this evening. I’ve taken a lot of photos of the new kittens at my parents’, as well as my mom’s flowers, so I’ll post those when I’m back on my laptop with a fast connection. I’ll also post some photos from graduation, too. Ah, right: I graduated from college!! I got a B.S. in computer science, a minor in mathematics, and I graduated with honors and cum laude. Now for a summer of work followed by more school to get that tricky Master’s degree…

I watched the movie Hero today with Jon because my dad told us, although apparently sarcastically, that we had to see it. He and my mom just hated it because of the flying around and lack of realism when they expected a historical drama. I liked it pretty well, though I would have preferred the version with sub-titles instead of overdubbing since the voice acting was a bit hokey. It was a gorgeous movie, and it makes me want to rewatch Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, which I don’t remember much of at this point.

Oy, what a week!  I’ve worked at Lexmark every day since Monday, getting things finalized there and today was my last day.  My manager took me out to lunch with about twelve coworkers, which was very pleasant, getting to sit around and have a real lunch with these folks, instead of just grabbing a chicken sandwich and working while I eat.  Then I rushed over to campus for an exit interview with the CS department, since I’m graduating.  And speaking of, that’s this Saturday–eeee!  Kathy’s having a graduation party that I’ll be attending, along with Jon and apparently a crap-ton of other people.  We’re going to have tasty Thai food and a chocolate cake, plus drinking afterward I think.  Then come Sunday, Jon and I are going to visit his extended family for a few days, which is exciting and a bit nervous for me since I haven’t met his grandparents or brother yet.  After that, we’re driving down to my parents’ place and I’m selling my brother a TV and stand that I don’t want hanging around my place, plus giving my mom a cabinet which she’ll probably use for plants because she uses everything for plants.

Also!  I got high speed internet yesterday and now I can connect Animal Crossing City Folk to the intarwebz, so all y’all with a friend code can add me to your friend register.  Here’s my info:

My name: Sarah
City: Daplo
Code: 3051-4270-0430

I start at Hewlett Packard on May 18, so I’ll have a nice week off between graduation and working.  That’s the week I’ll be visiting families, but also I hope to hang around the apartment and play Wii games, haha.  Tonight I’ll be going over to Kathy’s to mow her yard in exchange for doing a couple loads of laundry (the new place has no on-site laundry, bleh).

Last night after I got the snazzy ‘net connection, I got my PC install of Jaunty all upgraded and now I’m using KDE 4 instead of stupid old Gnome.  I’m quite tickled with it because things work nicely and it’s all pretty and customizable.  Here’s a screenshot for you: