I have surprisingly kept busy over the last month. But I think my time of not going to school or work is going to come to an end very soon. I have started applying for jobs. The most annoying part about this process in this area is not being a US Citizen. Companies like BAE, Lockheed Martin etc. that actually do things that would be interesting in the controls world need me to have a citizenship so I can get security clearances. So I think I shall be mostly applying to more commercial software based companies.

Besides this, my to-do list is actually getting some work done on it. Finally getting some work done on this website (yes, yes Ms.Zanuzzo … I AM working on it). Coil Guitars will get a refresh I think. I am not getting a good vibe from its current state, so that should be interesting.

In other news, more meeting of Internet friends happened this last week. I met up with a couple of guys that I mostly know from online gaming and some brief work on a mod. They came down to D.C. to see Obama’s inauguration, so we figured we’d meet up. Red shirt is Matt Reynolds and the one with the questionable scarf is Paul Hiller.

All three of us before the Lincoln Memorial

World War II Memorial

Bird near the reflecting pool.

Cool structure outside Air + Space Museum

And with that, till next time…

Still on this stupid laptop. It’s quite annoying once you start needing things like Photoshop, Flash etc. The website has actually had a lot of work done on it. I am still trying to tweak the layout and menus.

I am apparently moving back my stuff on Tuesday, so two more days of not having my beloved PC and two monitors. Bleh. I guess I should praise this laptop a little though. Been 4 years and its still working like a mule. And it manages to run Photoshop fairly ok if that’s the only thing running.

Oh well.

Yup. I am now officially a Computer Engineer

In the past week that I have had off, I have been starting work on some personal projects and some projects that I had to put aside to concentrate on graduating. Right now, I am working on (in no particular order):

• Mod for Half-Life 2
• Tangelo Web Framework
• This website
• Coil Guitars website
• MCPS dev (as usual)
• Job Hunting (for a regular 9-5 job)

Updates about most of these items will soon follow. Still need to get my computer back from campus so I can play in photoshop (currently on laptop).

Cheers,
Aditya

It has been a while, but PIXEL.FACTION has gotten another do-over. This time I have gone with a design that will focus as much as it can on my work but also include some space for this blog. From now on, lostincake will just point to this blog dealie. That way I have just one site.

As for content. Screenshots are being prepared, applications are being finished up, a certain someone is graduating etc. Stay tuned.

It has happened. After about 2 years of faithful service, my A620 has kicked the bucket. I bought this camera for about $240 and I can’t say I have made many better purchases in my life (other than the $30 bucks I forked out for my Columbia wrist-watch which still works fine to this date after about 5-6 years of abuse…) As someone tinkering with photography this thing was a dream. It was fairly fast to turn on, had a buttload of manual settings and best of all … A SCREEN THAT SWIVELS. I was told I would never really use the feature and that it’s mostly a gimmick, but this is the one reason why I am not too impressed by “better cameras” that have 10 billion megapixels. What’s the point if you can’t easily take a picture of yourself and a friend? The ability to swivel in most possible directions let me take some pictures I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise - like when taking a picture over a crowd of people (don’t have to be 8 feet tall…) or using my body for support as I take a picture with the camera against mah belly. The unit is also built like a brick. I carried this thing around on the construction site WHILE working on the solar house… while dragging myself in dirt under the deck of the house and it’s had its experiences with gravitational forces of the unpleasant nature.

I am planning to step up to DSLRs and maybe learn more but this thing will be sorely missed.

The following are some of the last pictures it took before it had futile negotiations with fine sand on the beaches of San Diego.

R.I.P.

Well.. after a long stay at dreamhost, I am now moving to hey.nu. LostInCake is now on Hey.nu and Pixelfaction and related stuff will soon be over on hey.nu too!

As for other news… Heroes Season 2 ftw!

It’s been 3 weeks since I started work. And I have to say, I don’t really like working in corporate jobs. For the following reasons:

1. Can’t wear jeans.
2. Can’t wear sneakers (although I wear my nike’s and they haven’t noticed).
3. And lastly, and most importantly, half the people there don’t seem to give a shit about what they are doing.

I know it’s always cool to stick it to the man or w/e but it’s kind of depressing when you are sitting in a cubicle and you hear people calling home to tell their kid to finish his homework, or schedule their tennis games for next week. People drag on work for weeks when they could be done in about half of one. There isn’t a lot of intrinsic push… I wonder if its just government jobs or other places that I imagine to be different. Like people at google, or MS labs, do they do the same shit? i.e. just do work so the next time the boss comes around to check on you, you have something to tell him?

Eh. Atleast it’s paying. I am getting paid about 10/hour but atleast I get to play in software. They didn’t put me in testing (which btw, sucks monkey nuts… giant hairy monkey nuts). The dev team I am part of is working on something fairly cool. We are consolidating a bunch of old spreadsheets that people use to get things working around here into one central system where you have a web based dashboard of some sort to know where people are in their projects across the teams. We are also providing web services for maybe a client application to connect to if needed. We are mostly using AppFuse . Pretty cool stuff. But as I said, when you go out of these small teams, the rest of the like… 60 people on the floor basically seem to want to get to the end of the day as soon as they get in. Hope it doesn’t turn me into that sort of person…

Terps Racing is coming up very soon. Going to Cali for about 2 weeks. The first week I will be at competition and the second, I shall be spending some time with my cousin in San Diego…doing nothing! Should be fun. Oh and Kosta is here! Well… I haven’t seen him yet. He apparently got screwed over by the airlines … surprise surprise… But we are supposed to be hanging out on Monday. I should start some sort of list where I check off names as the meet the people from hey.nu. So far I would only have checked Sari, but soon, Kosta… hmmm…

Well … that was a tad bit long.

Well. It’s here. Officially. I can’t believe it’s been a year since last summer, where I was basically working full-time on solar. Feels like all of it happened yesterday.

Either way, exams are finally done. Speaking of which, the exam I thought I had tomorrow was apparently yesterday. So I come home from the 324 exam in the morning and guess what I find out? My 446 exam is the same day… After about half an hour of studying, and barely staying awake during my second exam of the day after about 2 days of not sleeping much, I am done.

And summer brings good things. First, I have a job! Even better, 2 jobs! I will be working at my dad’s workplace over the summer. $10/hour isn’t a great rate but they are a big corp. company so it shall look good on me resume (hopefully). The second job will be partime-ish with MCPS. They pay me a lot more ($25/hour :D) and I actually like what I do there, so my evenings shall be dedicated to them. It might kind of busy but atleast these things will have set time-limits per day. So after 8 hours per day, I am done with ACS and I can go back home, no questions asked. And after working for 4-5 hours for MCPS in the evening (I can work from home) I can stop and do something else. No more continuing things into the late nights on hairy schedules!
Over the next month or so, I shall also be working/finishing up the Coil Guitars website along with my own. And perhaps work on some of my programming projects.

Oh, and Kosta shall be visiting! And we might be able to bug sari in NYC! w00t.

Should be a fun summer (finally)

Seriously hate this class… But on the bright side, the final exam is two days from now. On the not so bright side, there is a chance I might not pass… REALLY REALLY hope that wont happen. Don’t even care about a grade in the class right now… just wanna pass the course and get done with it.

Was watching Ghost In The Shell - 2nd Gig again a little while ago - awesomeness. The Major is actually wearing clothes this time around. She’s actually a lot more attractive when shes fully clothed in her suit for whatever reason. I guess she just looks a little weird in her “fancy” suits from episode one. They also show a lot more of the emotional side of things… even for the Major… Need to finish re-watching it after the exams…

Upgraded from 2.3.1 to 2.5.2… It’s … different. In a very good way. Wordpress finally feels a lot faster.

But that’s really not as important as…

I am sorry. What did you say? I couldn’t hear you over the FREAKING AWESOMENESS of this movie. Why is it so awesome? Look at the picture… It’s a guy in a robotic suit. It’s got glowing eyes. The dude has a freaking ball of energy in HIS CHEST. What… can not be awesome about this?

And honestly, there wasn’t anything bad with the movie. Yes, a bunch of it is very hard to believe in the real world… but it’s a marvel comic - it’s supposed to be fantastic. Throw into the mix Robert Downey Jr. and you now have an awesome comic flick. Not good enough for ya? How about if they throw in Gwyneth Paltrow? Sounding better? Well it should. She looks … well … as good as she usually does. Definitely recommended.

Yesterday was awesome for several other reasons. One, I finally got a haircut… lost about 2 pounds… it was a lot of hair. Second, Team Fortress Free Weekend! Anyone who’s wanted to try the game out can try it out on Steam for free for the weekend (till tomorrow afternoon or something). And I have to say, it’s a lot of fun. There is not one class that stands out… they are all loads of fun to play. It’s a you-die-you-respawn kinda game so it never really gets that stressful. You are mostly just goofing around.

This weekend ended being a little pocket of free time for me so I will probably work my ass off on the guitar website and perhaps work on my own website in little chunks.

Me want. Well… they can shove the blaster up their asses (actually, it looks kind of … wrong). The actual toy looks awesome though… mmmm.