ask-mark.com no. 2

More work == less sleep

Mark Ordonez — Sat, 26 Feb 2005 08:10:44 +0000

Back in the day, I would spend hours in the CNS with my fellow Physics students, banging my head against the wall as I tried desperately to understand such things as relativistic electrodynamics, as if I had really understood all the intricacies non-relativistic electrodynamics, or even electrostatics, in the first place. The large white boards in the CNS were great for scribbling long, convoluted equations and sketching out field lines or potential graphs or whatever else I could come up with. I would leave campus around midnight when they kicked us all out of the CNS at closing time, only to come home and stand at my much smaller white board wondering if I was the only one in my class of five who didn’t get what was going on.

While web programming is admittedly easier to me than physics, it is still a time-consuming task that becomes even more so when design (both the design of logic and flow, as well as layout) is not well thought out before the coding starts. As I chug along on my first e-commerce project, I have been starting to feel as if I’m back in school and this is just a huge project assigned to me by Dr. Anderson-Freed for one of her web courses. Anyways, it’s 2am and I should really be getting up to bed. Thankfully, my new Sony SDM-HS75P 17-inch LCD screen came in early this afternoon, so my eyestrain from staring at a computer screen has been minimized tonight

What do you do when you can't sleep?

Mark Ordonez — Thu, 24 Feb 2005 13:19:29 +0000

I can’t sleep. Yes, it’s just before 7am, but I tried going to sleep around 12:30 this morning, and I recall looking at the clock and seeing that it was past 1:45 and I still couldn’t sleep. At some point, I did get a little sleep, but then the alarm went off and I haven’t been able to get back to sleep since. I’ve tossed and turned until I decided then that I should just get up and do something. What to do is my next thought.

I thought about working out, playing DDR, playing GTA:SA, working on a web project for a new restaurant, and watching last night’s episode of Alias. I’ve convinced myself that watching last night’s Alias might put me in some hot water with the Mrs., so I went to the computer (of course). First thing, I’ve checked my e-mail. I got an e-mail from a student I’m mentoring at HEHS. His project seems to be moving along quite well, despite his difficulties of doing online research at school (Websense is forever a plague on getting things done).

Then I went to Apple.com to see the info on the new iPod upgrades that were snuck in without much announcement. If you frequent any tech sites out there, you’d already know about the upgrades because it seems that regardless of how quietly Apple snuck in the upgrades, every tech site seems to have reported on them.

While looking at Apple’s site, I went to look at the mini. While looking at the mini, I saw this how to on using your iPod to make the switch to Mac. Ingenious! btw, I know of one mini for sale.

Saturday night fever

Mark Ordonez — Sun, 20 Feb 2005 08:00:01 +0000

It’s well past 1am and I’m laying on the couch with my laptop on, guess…my lap. I’m watching Maverick (which I’ve never before seen) on TBS after coming home from a long day at the IHSA Girls State Gymnastics Meet. I’ve changed out of the shirt and tie Chris’s parents got me for my birthday and into my shorts and T-shirt (yes, shorts!). I finished eating a Taco Supreme and Caramel Apple Empanada from Taco Bell, and Chris is asleep fighting a bad cold that she probably got from me. My Dr. Pepper is sitting half empty (or half full) just out of reach. The movie’s over, and it was pretty good despite the television editing.

Oh, the end of Boyz n the Hood is on HBO. This was a damn good movie, even though I was twelve when I first saw it and didn’t quite understand just how good of a movie it is then.

43 Gmail invites

Mark Ordonez — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 14:48:22 +0000

Following Hersch’s lead, here’s what my Gmail shows me:

I had fifty invites earlier, but I just sent one, two, three, four, five, six, seven of them out. I don’t feel like feeding these invites to the spooler, so if you want one, kindly post a comment with one good reason that I should send you an invite. Leave your name and e-mail address in the appropriate fields. Your e-mail address will not be posted with your comment, but I reserve the right to one day post e-mail addresses with comments. I do not intend to do that, but since I have no privacy policy on this site, I’ll just leave it at that.

Surprise!

Mark Ordonez — Sat, 12 Feb 2005 14:27:04 +0000

I was listening to Eric and Kathy when I was getting ready for work Thursday, just like I do every morning. Earlier that morning, they were talking about this guy David Holder who was featured in the RedEye. This past week he was seen in front of Wrigley Field with a sign that read, "Help Please, In Love … Need $$$ for Ring!"

Just before I turned off the radio, this woman calls in and was wondering why she heard her name and her boyfriend’s name on the radio. She didn’t hear everything that Eric and Kathy were talking about, but she heard something about being in the RedEye. That’s right, this was Kristy Valdes, David’s girlfriend, and she had no idea what David was up to for Valentine’s Day. At this point, I had to get in the car and drive into work.

On my way downstairs and out of the garage, Eric and Kathy had Cynthia talk to Kristy, making sure she wasn’t listening to the radio, while they searched for David near Wrigley. They couldn’t find him, but they did finally get a hold of him on his cell phone. David was pretty upset about the whole RedEye article about him. He knew someone was writing an article about it, but he didn’t know for what paper or when it would print.

This article sort of blew the cover off of his plan, which was to buy an engagement ring for his girlfriend, with hopes of propsing on Valentine’s Day. The ring he had in mind was one in which Kristy had previously showed some interest. He also needed $2,500 to get it, which he didn’t have because he only works a part-time job at a messenger company. David also volunteers forty to fifty hours a week at a HELPS ministry run by Kristy’s father.

David didn’t know where he would get that money, so he went out begging for the money. He had his sign out with a jug to collect money in, and by Thursday he had only collected $80. A far cry from what he needed for the ring. This is when Eric and Kathy started to get the ball rolling. They got the marketing department frantically working to get a jeweler to donate an engagement ring, or at least help David pay for one.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get to hear the Friday update because I was home sick. Thankfully, the story showed up on My Yahoo! As it turns out, the ring is being donated by Azar Jewelers, Kristy’s place of employment. Fadi Azar, Kristy’s boss, donated the $6,000 ring to couple. Kristy and David are going out to dinner tonight, where David will propose to her. As for David’s big surprise getting ruined by the media, Kristy is going to pretend as if she didn’t know tonight. Call me a sap, but I like happy endings.

Goodbye, iPod

Mark Ordonez — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 02:52:06 +0000

Today I bid farewell to my iPod. A lucky eBay user won the auction with a bid of $228.50. The payment was prompt, and so was my shipping. Now the question is what to do with my iPod money?

I have had my eye on some LCD screens and the iPod Shuffle, but I’ve been wanting to get a new coat to replace Bessie’s aging hide (she just turned six last fall). Any suggestions?

One day left

Mark Ordonez — Mon, 07 Feb 2005 13:53:49 +0000

There’s just one day left to bid on my iPod on eBay. I just thought I’d let you all know (well, I guess I could have just called up all three people not related to me who read this).

Longest word

Mark Ordonez — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 15:20:16 +0000

Ashley asks:

What’s the worlds longest word?

While I have a large vocabulary (pardon the pun), I found the answer in Dictionary.com‘s FAQ.

New SMS address

Mark Ordonez — Sat, 05 Feb 2005 21:16:27 +0000

I’ve got a new SMS address to quickly send a message to my phone. This will help those of you who don’t get a cell signal where you normally sit in front of a computer on the internet (à l’école ou au travaille, par example). My new address is markomni tmomail net. It will send a text message to my phone, so keep it short or T-Mobile will likely truncate it.

NBC's State of the Union coverage

Mark Ordonez — Thu, 03 Feb 2005 03:19:10 +0000

So, I tuned into the State of the Union about half an hour after it started (I was watching recorder episodes of NBC’s Committed). I’m not going to get into the specifics of the actual speech, since I was only half listening and it will all get analyzed to death over the next twenty-four hours by every news outlet in the United States. While I was watching, I noticed that there was a weird blue-purple strip in the upper-left corner of the screen. I flipped stations and did not see this on the other channels.

Then during one of the closeups on audience members, I noticed that the overlay of the person’s name was half off of the screen. It looks like the overlays are somehow zoomed in, while the video is at the appropriate size. A good chunk of the overlays are off of the screen because of this weird zoom. Did anyone else see it? And why the hell didn’t NBC fix it after a commercial break or even during the President’s speech or the Democratic Party’s response?