About Me

Got My New PC

Today is one of the happiest days of my life. I finally got my new computer. Here is a quick break down of the specifications: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600 256M Radeon X1300PRO GDDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card [KWORLD PCI Interface TV Tuner Card][1] 1 GB DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Memory LITE-ON 18X DVD/DVD Burner Hanns G Black 19? 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor 250 GB SATA Hard Drive + Plus one of my old 120 GB IDE Hard Drives Some cheap Creative Labs Speakers (In a noise free apartment complex) Now I would love to tell you guys to look forward to a lot of new posts, but honestly I’m going to be wrapped up in this for a while.

No Computer No Posts

I know a lot of you might be wondering what’s going on, but once again we’re gonna have to take a short break. I recently sold off my old computer so right now I’m paying for internet access and I don’t have a computer. OK, I’m not a total idiot. I did make a purchase recently. I ordered a bunch of computer parts, since I’m building the new one. Here’s the problem.

Blog Revival

It’s been a long time but I finally decided to breathe some life back into Day In The Life of Baz. It’s been a while since I touched anything on that blog. With the whole graduation thing and the job hut and the starting a new job and moving, I’ve just been a bit overwhelmed lately. Some say welcome back to: Day In The Life of Baz.[ ]1

Job Update – Part 1

Introduction OK, now I did promise you some information about my new job, so here goes. First off we need a little background information. How It All Started Sometime back in October of 2006, during my last semester of school, a Software company came to my school to recruit programmers. They are situated in Texas and they provide a Software Package for companies in Texas. They have about 85% of the market cornered, so business is really good.

Finally Graduating – I’m Done

The day has finally come. Well, it’s tomorrow, but you know what I mean. I am done, done, done, done, done! Words cannot express the joy and elation I feel right now. Throughout the semester I knew this day was coming. I mean, how could I not graduate. But there were just things that made it rather difficult to be happy about. Every time I mention graduation to someone we have the same conversation:

  • Person: So you’re graduating in December?
  • Me: Yep.
  • Person: So you must be really excited, huh?
  • Me: I guess so.
  • Person: So what are you going to do afterwards?
  • Me (Thinking): How the hell should I know? Do you have a rich uncle that owns a company and is willing to give me a job? Because I sure haven’t been successful on the millions of interviews I’ve gone to. Shoot, I guess I’m going to end up working in the mall selling women’s shoes or something.
  • Me (Actual response): I’m not sure. I guess try to find a job.

One Down Two To Go

OK, So I’ve just gotten done with my Algebraic Structures (Part 1) final exam. Yes, Part 1. It was supposedly designed to help us in that the in-class portion does not contain any proofs. The result is instead of having one normal sized test taking up just 2 hours, we have one in-class portion that was really difficult and took one and a half hours; and one take-home portion that is full of proofs that is going to take about eight hours.

Finals Week – Sorry Folks

OK, so things have been a little bit hectic so I haven’t gotten around to posting for a while. Here is a basic run down of what has been going on so far (much more detail to come later): Finals start today. Yes, this struggling college student is about to go into finals week and obviously I’m going a bit crazy. We’ve had end of semester project dues. One project, Software Engineering, was proving to be a major pain.

Fixed vs. Fluid Layouts and Screen Resolutions

I’ve sort of been fighting it for a while now. I must say I’ve been stuck in the past and I apologize for that. I was stuck in the whole “It’s gotta be less that 800 pixels” things. That’s just a basic rule of accessibility, which I’ve carried from years ago. Back them a significant number of Internet surfers still had relatively small monitors and used the 800×600 resolution. Therefore, if you wanted your content accessible to the highest majority of visitors you had to ensure that your site can be viewed relatively well in at least 800 pixels. Although the number of visitors using this resolution was in the minority, it was still not small enough to ignore.

Now comes another problem. Rather a solution that causes a problem. Most people fixed this resolution issue by slapping on a fixed layout. Now fixed layouts have their pros and cons. The pros are, you know exactly how it will look every time. You know where every thing will be on the website. One major con, I experienced at a friend’s house. He had just gotten a brand new 21" flat panel monitor and everything looked so crisp. After a couple hours of playing, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory we were just browsing the Internet and I just asked him to check out my latest post at the time. When he did I was horrified. My beautiful fixed width 787 pixel layout, which looks just brilliant on my 17" at home, still looked brilliant here, but it was so bloody small. I mean the thing was tiny and scrolling took forever. Yeah, we would have had to scroll a lot on a smaller monitor but since we have this huge one, why should we. There was just so much wasted screen space it annoyed me. You could almost fit a whole other site right next to mine.

Saving Money Blog

Ok, It's been a long time in the making, I'll be the first to admit. This is a blog by a colleague of mine who shall remain nameless. There are some interesting tips on saving money and some cute lil' rants. Check it out: Save Money.