Today's DJ Mystik song is New York City Boys.  Because I just booked a flight to NYC and back from July 17th to July 20th.  Tim's up there this summer for an internship and I'm gonna visit him.  It'll be soon after he turns 21, so we'll actually be able to go to the bars together.  It's gonna be fucking amazing.

You know what else is fucking amazing?  This summer, that's what.

Seriously, this has been one of the best summers of my life.  I am probably going to jeopardize it by saying that, but whatever :).  This is the best summer I've had since I would spend the whole summer at my grandparents.  And it's probably actually better than those summers, since I'm free to do what I want, and I have lots of friends around.  This is the summer that last summer would have been if I hadn't been waiting for LJ to get back the whole time.  (More along that line later.)  And not moving around from apartment to apartment.  And hung out with people more...

So what's been so great about this summer?  Well, for the most part it has been work, KoL, TV Shows, movies, and drinking.  And really, what do I need other than those things?

There was a three day weekend where me and Nick went to visit Shawn in Chicago, which was epic.  We hit up four clubs in three nights.  At least Shawn and I did; Nick was worn out by Sunday night and stayed in.  The first night we went to Skybarr and Maxxbar.  Skybarr had awesome techno music, and Maxxbar was more hip-hop.  After we were done clubbing we went to this pizza place and this ex army person or something started an argument with us cause he thought we were laughing at him.  He said "Do you think this is funny?" to us like 20 times.  We were trying our best to not laugh at him.

Saturday night we went to Club Vain.  Nick decided to take some shrooms before we left so he had himself a good ol time watching the lights, haha.  Shawn and I just enjoyed ourselves as usual, and I got to kiss this cute Latina girl.  I actually started dancing with her cause she was standing by herself on the wall and I asked her if she wanted to dance.  (Yeah, I was slightly drunk at that point to even ask :P).  When we started kissing her friends said no though, lol.  It was still awesome.

Sunday night we went to Crobar, which was this really upscale place that played House music.  DJ Antoine played that night.  I hadn't heard of him before, but he was awesome.  Shawn and I danced for like four hours straight; we were exhausted by the time the club closed. 

When we weren't clubbing we sat around Shawn's apartment watching movies and stuff.  We saw He's Just Not That Into You, and I teared up a little in the end haha.  They laughed at me, but I blamed it on the fact that I was tired ;).

My mom and I went up to Chicago one weekend as well, just for a day.  We did some shopping and saw Up that night, which was really good.  I got me some new shoes for upscale clubbing which I'll be able to take advantage of in NYC.  It wasn't as good as the weekend with Shawn and Nick, but it was nice to hang out with my mom.

Let's see, what else has been happening.  Been playing poker once a week on Monday nights, which is nice.  I was doing that during the semester too.  We play with a $5 buy in, and I usually get in 3rd place or something.  I've gotten 2nd place the last two nights though, it's been really nice.  I've also been hanging out with Laura once a week for the most part.  We schedule a time each week to see each other, cause we're both really bad at calling each other to hang out lol.  I need to see Ali at some point too.

Been going out drinking a lot.  I said that I was gonna let my tolerance go down some this summer, but it hasn't been going to well haha.  Last time I wrote I wrote about how my drinking group had all graduated and how that saddened me.  It still does somewhat, but I've been out drinking with some new people.  This guy named Phillip from Dtella, and one of my coworkers have been out with us multiple times.  This past week I went out with this other guy named Dave from Dtella (not the one I go out with all the time) and his friends.  It was sorta weird at first cause I only knew Dave, but then I got enough alcohol in me that I didn't care lol.  Got a few hours in of dancing or so, which was nice.  Kim has turned 21 now, and I've been out with her a few times as well.  Mike is turning 21 soon as well, so that's gonna be another person to go out with next semester, and Tim as well.  I don't think I'm gonna have a problem finding people to drink with, haha.

Speaking of Dave, the one that I usually do go out with, we've had some pretty lulzy bar outings this summer.  One night we went to the Cactus on a Friday night, cause we thought our favorite bartender was gonna be there working.  He wasn't, but it was all good.  Dave didn't want to get really drunk that night, but I bought him a shot of Petron and that all went downhill for him, haha.  We met these random guys that we hung out with for a bit.  It was a weird night for me, because I got this notion to approach any girl that I could on the dance floor despite getting rejected over and over.  I must have gotten rejected like 9 times.  Towards the end I actually danced with this really cute girl for a bit, but then she had to leave :(.  At that point I looked around the dance floor and realized there weren't any single girls left that I hadn't tried for yet, so we left.  It was pretty epic.

Then last weekend we went to Jakes to just chill and have some drinks.  I'd been at Jeff's house the night before drinking the night before, so it was going sort of slow for me that night.  We were just sitting there chilling and this guy came up to us and was all, "What are you guys doing sitting here alone without any girls?"  Turned out it was some former football player for Purdue, lol.  I bought a round of shots for us three and another one of his friends that came over.  Dave and I headed to Where Else? soon after that, and I ended up running into a coworker.  He bought me a shot, and me, him, and his roommate danced for a while.  It was a great night.

Speaking of Jeff's house, that was an awesome night.  Jeff called me the day before and asked if I wanted to come down because his sister was throwing a party, and I ended up going.  I drove down there with Kim.  The night was full of drinking beer and playing beer pong.  Jeff and I were partners and had a three game winning streak at one point.  We kept taking our shirts off cause it was so hot, lol. 

Jeff and his sister were teasing me about one of his sister's friends.  Last time I was there I got drunk and was going on about how I thought his sister's friend was cute.  Then I got even more drunk, and was chilling in Jeff's room with him and Kim, and I called out Christi's name (Jeff's sister), cause I was gonna tell her I thought her friend (Allie) was cute.  Jeff stopped me though and went to tell her himself.  I was like, I'm gonna hate myself in the morning for this.  But I didn't, because I was drunk, and I can't regret anything I do while drunk :P.  Well, at the 2nd party I still didn't talk to Allie any.  (Yeah I know, my history with girls named Allie is a pretty bleak one.)  Which is well, pretty much what'd you expect from me haha.  I'm not the go to a party and talk to random girls type person, and I was busy playing beer pong for much of the night.  That and going outside to lay down by the lake.  It had been raining so it was wet, but I laid down in the grass anyway and played Miley Cyrus on my phone and watched the stars.  I was considering sleeping there, but then Jeff and some other people came looking for me and made me go back to the house.

So yeah, it's been an awesome summer, and there's still about 7 weeks of it left. 

My stance on girls this summer has been simple; I'm not even trying.  After last summer, and dealing with Rae at the end of this past semester, I just want nothing to do with it.  And not trying has been one of the key factors that has made this summer so amazing.  I just go out and have fun with my friends and at the end of the night I have nothing worrying me.  I mean don't get me wrong, it's not like I don't check out all the girls when I'm out, but if there is any chance to actually try for a girl I'm not taking it.  Such as trying after Allie :P.

I've tried this not trying attitude before, but I think this is the longest I've kept it up and the best that it's gone.  I know that part of it is an excuse  for not trying because I hate failing so much but hell, I'm happy as fuck so I don't care.  Rae and Mallory put a pretty big dent in my morality, since that was the hardest I'd tried since LJ and they both turned out pretty badly.  Yeah I realize that dating can be a long process of trying out a lot of people but psh, I can pass for now.  Nothing is going to get in the way of me and this summer.  Once the semester starts up I might try again (so far as trying actually goes for me), but not until then.

It's been sort of annoying though, cause not everyone seems to understand me not wanting to bother with girls right now.  I guess my whole talking about girls constantly doesn't help, because I haven't turned off that part of me, but that's just who I am.  That won't ever change.  But, I think some people see my not wanting to bother solely being a way to avoid rejection, and that's not true.  Actually, me not caring this summer was what made me be able to come out of that night of rejections at the Cactus with a positive attitude, whereas it usually would have ruined my night. 

The whole, "You won't ever get anywhere if you don't try" thing really annoys me.  Going after Austin was one of the few times I've really tried for someone and had it succeed.  In the past ~1.5 years there's been LJ, Mallory, and Rae.  (And I'm still kicking myself over not getting Jessica's number that one night, haha.)  So really, I'm putting in a lot more effort than I did throughout college, but it's still not getting me anywhere.  So, if I have a choice of making a lot of effort in summer in the chance of something working out (or just getting burned multiple times), or just not bothering with it at all, I will take the 2nd choice.  There's no room there for disappointment in the end, and if I'm happy I'm happy.  I don't plan on dying anytime soon, so I still have plenty of time for girls later :P.

Nick at least understands me - we were talking about it last night.  So does my mom and my dad.  (Yes, my dad.  I've spoken with him a few times this summer believe it or not.)  I'll take the two oldest people that I've told about my stance on girls this summer supporting me as being confirmation that I'm doing the right thing :).

Well I guess that's it for now.  It's a four day week, w00t!  I'm gonna go code or play some NES or read or something now.  Actually, I think it'll be reading, cause I don't do enough of that anymore.  Till next time.

Today's DJ Mystik song is Indian Summer cause I'm too lasy to find something.

I really have no reason to be updating this but I want to.  Don't know why.

I saw Britney in concert.  It was amazing.  It was full of teenage girls and gay guys.  Rae was supposed to go but ended up not being able to, so it was me, Fer, Fer's boyfriend Jacob, and Fer's friend Marianne.  I didn't charge Marianne for the ticket since I was gonna give it to Rae.  I think Marianne enjoyed herself, which made me happy at least, but she never actually thanked me for the ticket.  Which bothered me, and I don't know why, because I don't like being thanked for stuff.  The next day was sorta meh...I was out of the loop since Fer and Marianne were best friends and Fer and Jacob are dating.  The night at the cactus was awesome though, and I walked home in some kickass pouring rain, so it ended up ok. 

If you can't tell, I'm a little out of it.  The way these sentences are coming out is pretty much how my brain is functioning right now. 

Hey it's summer!  Remember how last summer was my first summer on campus and I was so stoked?  Except I was dating LJ at the time, and by the end of the summer I was counting down the days for her to come back and it sucked.  Well, this summer is last summer except no girls.  Just work, drinking, friends, and awesomeness.  I couldn't be happier.  Seriously, I can do whatever I want with no regrets this time.  This might be one of the best summers of my entire life.  And then school will start up again and I'll see how I feel on the girls thing.

Friday night I went out with some dtella people to drink.  It was awesome.  We sat and drank and watched baseball.

Yesterday I drove to Indy to Jeff's house for a graduation party.  It was so odd, but fun.  Odd cause I was able to drink around his family.  I couldn't do that around my own family since nobody drinks except my uncle.  Although he's been sober for 2 months I guess.  My mom knows I drink now but not how much.  Anyway I digress.  I got there and had 3 beers and then me and Jeff played beer pong against his sister and one of her friends and won.  Then we played Jeff's dad and this guy named Paul and won again.  Which is awesome, cause he can play beer pong with his dad haha.

Something about a girl I don't wanna write about :P.

Ok, this is the real reason I wanted to write this entry, so I will try and be coherent.  So this year has been a lot of me going out to the bars.  Jeff and I started this last year, and then Shawn and I went out a lot this year.  Shawn left and was sort of replaced by Dave.  Masterbob was there for a bit, but then he left Purdue.  Then Zak broke up with his girlfriend and immediately fit into the group.  Fer would come out with us some, and Jeff as well when we went to Chumleys.

I don't know what's gonna happen next year.  Jeff, Zak, and Fer have all graduated.  Shawn is already gone.  Dave will be here, but he has a girlfriend now so it's not really the same.  Jason turned 21 but won't be out as much next year cause he won't be on campus.  I thought it'd be ok, cause I'd meet other people old enough to go out and we'd just cycle.  But with Jeff last night it hit me that no, it's not going to be the same.  I'm really going to miss the way things were...  Probably won't be out every Thursday like I was this past semester.  I guess all good things come to and end, and I knew it was coming, but damn. 

But you know what, this is the price I pay for staying on campus.  My friends are going to cycle.  At least people are close enough to visit.  I didn't know what this past year had in store for me either and it was mostly awesome.

Eh whatever, next year is next year.  Right now it's the summer and I have 3 months of some of the best days of my life ahead of me, I believe.  It's ok for me to look forward to stuff now since I'm actually happy.

Yeah I'm sorry.  Short worthless incoherent entry.  Oh wait.  My project is over!  Took 3 days to get implemented, and there are some database issues I gotta deal with tomorrow, but whatever.

Good night.

It's rant time.  No DJ Mystik song because I have too much of a headache to deal with it.  I've had a headache since about 2:00 PM this afternoon.  Why?  That's the reason for this entry.

Since September I've been working on a pretty large project at work - the Purdue Sales & Tracking System.  It's going to replace the current Point of Sales system that Purdue uses to sell software to students/faculty.  There have been a number of people working on the project since it started (which has created its own set of frustrations that I don't even want to touch on), but for the most part I have been the one in charge since the beginning.

This project is going live next Monday.  And it's making my life miserable right now.

The coding for the project is pretty much done and has been for 2-3 weeks.  I was stressed out for a while not thinking that the project would get done from a technical standpoint, but there ended up being plenty of extra time built into the time line for me to get everything completed.  I thought that this was really all I needed to worry about to be able to have everything finished on time.  If only.

Three months or so ago at one of our weekly team meetings, my boss alerted out team that large projects were going to have to start going through production readiness and change management as part of the regular process of doing a project.  I didn't really know what that meant at the time, but I wasn't too worried about it as I was still trying to finish coding things.

About two months before the project was supposed to launch I had the first production readiness meeting.  This was a fairly straight-forward meeting where we just went over some project details, and some people asked me some security related questions that I was easily able to answer.  Soon afterwards I had the first security scan for the site scheduled.

This is where things started to take a downturn.  These penetration tests as they call them search the site looking for vulnerabilities and then create a report with the list of problems found, assigned priorities of high, medium, or low.  I had a scan done for each access level of the site, which turned out to be overkill in the end, but oh well.  When the results came back there were 6 high level problems identified.

Of those 6, two were ones that I actually could deem significant.  Two of them didn't even concern the site I was building, and the remaining two were what I considered false positives; things I know aren't actually a risk but the scanning software isn't smart enough to figure out.  Since I needed to get these things 'fixed' though, I emailed the person that did the security scan and asked them for help on figuring out the issues.

I never heard back from him.

I was still trying to finish up some coding things at this point, so I didn't follow up and try to get my questions answered.  Figured he'd get back to me eventually. 

The coding finally started to get to a point where it was done and I was able to breathe a sigh of relief as I was running out of things to get finished.  At least I thought I was...  There were still some loose ends though, like the PCs that were going to be running the windows applications we'd produced that I needed to test things on.  About two weeks back I sent my clients and email with some questions and just general information on it for them.  One of my questions was answered almost immediately, but I didn't hear anything back on the other ones.

Things started to build up in this fashion.  I scheduled the final production readiness meeting for last Wednesday and never got a meeting invite for the time.  Last Monday I finally started calling the client to get some of my questions answered, mainly getting a password to the test machine I had, which ended up being a pain in the ass to get working.  (The password that is.  And I take the blame for this one.)  I also scheduled the change management meeting for this Wednesday, which is the last of the official meetings I have to go through before the project launches.

Last tuesday I think it was I got an email about the final production readiness meeting asking if I had any documentation to give people.  I'd asked my boss about this sometime and he'd said it just required the final versions of the documentation we gave them before.  So, I worked on fixing those up and sent them to the people the next morning.  Well, it turned out that it was actually some other documentation that I needed that my boss had forgotten about.  I scrambled to try and get that done before the meeting on Wednesday, but it just didn't happen.

The meeting went ok, but they still needed that documentation and they requested another security scan.  Which sucked, because I told them I'd fixed the problems from the first scan, which was only partly true.  The person who'd done the scans and never gotten back to me was in that meeting too.  He asked me to send him a note after the meeting so he could schedule the 2nd scan.

I sent off another couple of emails after the meeting.  One was to the security scan guy, requesting the 2nd scan, and pointing out the seemingly false positives again.  The other one was to the clients, because I had some questions I needed answered from them for the documentation I needed.  I had a meeting with them that afternoon where I pointed out these questions as well.  I also discussed our plan of having the project launch after hours so as to not interfere with normal business hours.

I still don't have answers to those questions I sent them.  And I emailed them about it again today.  I received and Out-Of-Office message from one of them saying they're gone till Wednesday.  And we are supposed to have a meeting between the three of us tomorrow...

Then enter the web admins.  For the most part, I don't have trouble with the web admins, but they have been driving me crazy lately.  For two things.  The first is a page we needed to have up alerting users that there was going to be downtime in the application.  The current app was written in something called websphere, which is completely outdated now and nobody is around to edit it.  Which means we couldn't just edit that page and put up a notice.  The solution they came up with was the following:

Set up the F5 (load balancer) to redirect to a page made by me.
The page made by me would set a cookie and send the users back to the F5.
The F5 would always check for this cookie; if it was found then it would go to the shopping site.  If it wasn't found, it would go to the page I made.

Ok, it seemed a bit of overwork, but it didn't seem to be too much work on my part.  And it was supposedly better than trying to edit the websphere project.  Friday during my usual hungover/tired/don't wanna work period I set up a page that wrote a cookie on our dev site and sent an email notice off to the web admins.

I got a reply this morning asking if I could move the page to production so that they'd have something to work with in prod.  Didn't really see why this was an issue, but I didn't want to argue, so about 2 hours later after getting access to the deploy tool we use to send stuff to prod, I got it set up.  A few hours later I get an email saying the cookies didn't work right.  They also noticed that I was still storing login information for the database in the site (more on this in a minute).  And they also noticed I hadn't pointed the site to the production database.  Which I'd honestly just forgotten about, since there is nothing in the production database right now, and the page I pushed to prod didn't even need database access.  So whatever.

The cookie problem was something about domains that I really didn't understand, but I think I got it fixed, sort of.  I sent off another email at about 5:15 before going home to take a nap.  (To their credit, the web admins and the DBAs have always gotten back to me quickly about stuff).

We'll see how that ends up tomorrow.  The database login stuff though...oh my god.

So when we first had the site/database set up the web admins set up a data source for us to connect to the database with.  Well, turns out you can't use a data source and the SQL Client class that is part of .NET.  By the time I figured this out it was too late to rewrite stuff to use ODBC connections.  Not to mention the fact that ODBC connections are outdated and crappy, so I didn't want to use them anyway.

There were two ways to fix this problem.  Have a username/password stored in the application to connect to the database.  I was fine with this, but the current project leader at the time didn't want it that way.  So I found another solution, which was to use a trusted connection.  This required no username/password stored anywhere.  Everyone wins.  I told the current project leader about this, and he sent the information off to the web admins.

Well, the web admins didn't want to do this.  Or the DBAs didn't.  I don't know who it was, but I know that about a month later we finally just got a username/password to use, and I put it into the web.config file.  Everything was fine and dandy until last week when the web admins told us during a meeting that they wanted all connection string information in a file that didn't reside on the web server.  I told them ok, as I didn't think it would be that much trouble.

Well, it's a pain in the fucking ass.  This is the one time I can think of where ColdFusion would have actually been easier to use than ASP.NET for something.  It's possible to have multiple web.config files in asp.net, and have one be in a data directory.  I did it on my personal PC.  I can't for the life of me get it to work on the webserver.  For some reason the application thinks that the root directory for the site is C:\, when it should be D:\.  If I explicitely type in the whole path it won't find it.  I emailed the web admins telling them what the issue was I was having.  I also told them that according to msdn, you can't access the web.config file or anything in an app_data folder from a browser, as that's what they're made for.  They of course ignored me and told me again they'd like it separated.

What really pisses me off is that if we'd just gone with a trusted connection like I fucking suggested in the first place, then we wouldn't be having this problem.  Seriously, setting up a trusted connection would have taken like a day from what I could tell, and could have been done in the time it took for people to argue about not doing it.  And now they're slapping this stupid new requirement on me at the last minute, and well, it's probably just not going to get done.

All of these things mean I am not a very happy person right now.  All of this having to deal with other people is driving me crazy.  Plus, my allergies are on one of their kicks right now and I feel like shit.  (I woke up yesterday feeling awful and made myself to go the doctor to make sure it wasn't the flu, because I knew everyone was going to say it was swine flu if I didn't.)  I have like 3 actual working days to get this stuff done, as I have things going on Friday, and I don't know how I'm going to make it.  I'm probably going to end up in the office over the weekend doing last minute stuff, although I don't even know how that'd help since there wouldn't be anyone else around to answer my requests.

What this does is make me rethink my stance on the business world right now.  Don't get me wrong, I for the most part really like my job.  When I'm allowed to just do my job that is, which is coding.  This project management bullshit is not for me.  There is a reason I was in the wrong path within my major for two years, and it was because I didn't want to do this crap.  I don't want to manage people, I don't want to fill out stupid paperwork.  I want to be a codemonkey, in all sense of the word.

Of course, project management isn't totally awful if people actually get back to you on stuff like they need to.  But I'm quickly learning that this doesn't happen.  You have to be able to do things yourself to get things done right, and the only way to do that is to have your own business.  That's the only way you can have completely control on how things are handled and not have to depend on other people.

I've toyed with the idea of owning my own business for years now.  Mostly for the same reason - I didn't want to have to rely on other people.  I don't really know what sort of business I would start, something IT of course.  I just know, or at least hope, that it would be better than the situation I'm currently in, which I don't ever want to go through again.

This would mean going back to school for some stuff though, and that also has its drawbacks.  The whole me hating life all of the time thing.  Not really ready to go back to that.  But as Keith has pointed out, it would probably be worth it and mean I'm happier in the long run.

Nothing's going to happen soon though.  I don't want to go make some life-altering decision as a knee-jerk reaction to me being in hell right now.  That would be stupid.  But it's time to seriously consider following this course.  I can only take a few more weeks like the ones I've been having lately before I lose it.