Wow. Productivity.
When I was on my way to the subway this morning, I thought to check my cellphone as I had heard it ring while I was in the shower. It was my boss, suggesting that since Zak wasn't going into the office today (apparently it snowed rather heavily last night in Alliston, where he lives), perhaps I should work from home as the biggest benefit to my schlepping all the way to Aurora every day is to have him available in case I encounter any problems or issues I can't solve on my own (though those have been getting fewer as the months go on).
Since I'm always in a rush to get to the bowling alley on Friday nights, I thought sure, why not? So I came back home and settled in front of the computer for a productive day. (It helped that it was overcast through most of the day - I didn't have to squint at my screen and give myself a headache.) I haven't been doing anything all that exciting, though it's a little complex - our website uses a lot of controls that were developed by a company called Infragistics, and we don't have any of the source code for their custom controls. I've been working for the past few weeks on replacing all of the Infragistics grids on the site with ASP repeater objects. The fun part comes when there's more than one grid on a page and when clicking on a column header is supposed to sort the data on that column. Not difficult, but it can get a little tricky at times. (I always seem to miss renaming at least one tag. And Visual Studio has the annoying habit of renaming my controls for me - normally, one isn't supposed to have multiple controls on a page with the same name. However, in a repeater object, when you're formatting your table so that alternating lines are in different colours, for instance, you name the controls in your row with the same names as those in the alternating row. Visual Studio always wants to rename the alternating row's controls to things like "Literal1" and "CheckBox2". Argh.) I think I've done about a dozen or so pages over the past couple of weeks, and I got two more done today.
The other advantage to working from home is that I got to go over to the Yonge/Eglinton Centre at lunchtime and eat something that wasn't from Subway, Mr. Sub or Pizza Nova. ;)
I got out of here around 5:30 and managed to get to the bowling alley by about 6:10, which gave me plenty of time to grab something to eat and read some of the paper, which I hadn't even opened yet as I usually read it during my commute. (Speaking of which, I learned this week just how slow the print media is compared to online sources... the Jiri Tlusty story, which I posted about over a week ago and which I was apparently slow to learn about, only hit the Toronto newspapers on Wednesday. The Sun and the Star are on their moral high horses about it - which surprised me in the Star's case, as they're a fairly left-wing paper. The Sun doesn't approve of nudity unless it's female. The Globe and Mail - which is the paper I read - had this editorial about the topic today, in which they basically say, "Meh. He's 19. Big deal.")
Anyway, bowling was quicker than normal tonight, as h8torun, Randy, Mario and Bridgette were all away tonight. Ralph was filling in for h8torun, but we were using declared scores for Mario and Bridgette, and a dummy score for Randy as we couldn't get a spare to fill in for him in time (he called me at 5:30 to let me know that he was stuck at work). So with only two of us there, and only four on the other team, we were out fairly early. My night was, again, mediocre: 143, 141, 170. I was suffering from "splititis" - I started each game with a split, and had two or three more in each of the first two games. In the third game, I started with a 5-10 (which I just missed sparing) and finished with a 4-6. Somehow, we still managed to win the first game, albeit only by 11 pins.
This is shaping up to be a busy weekend - I have a meeting tomorrow, and another one on Sunday, and I still have stuff from last weekend's To Do list that remains to be done (like laundry). Plus I want to see about getting together with Ambrose at some point - I tried calling earlier, but got his voicemail. I haven't even heard from him since the last time we went out, about three weeks ago. I'd called him a couple of weekends ago to see if he wanted to come with me to Declan's get-together, but I wasn't able to get hold of him then either. Is it so much to ask for that he call me once in a while? I know he's got a busy life, but so do I (and it's probably about to get busier). Sure, he warned me that I was going to have to initiate things most of the time, but I'm not sure that I particularly like that. It would be nice to think that he was thinking of me once in a while. I'm feeling like he only thinks about me when I call him. *sigh*
Since I'm always in a rush to get to the bowling alley on Friday nights, I thought sure, why not? So I came back home and settled in front of the computer for a productive day. (It helped that it was overcast through most of the day - I didn't have to squint at my screen and give myself a headache.) I haven't been doing anything all that exciting, though it's a little complex - our website uses a lot of controls that were developed by a company called Infragistics, and we don't have any of the source code for their custom controls. I've been working for the past few weeks on replacing all of the Infragistics grids on the site with ASP repeater objects. The fun part comes when there's more than one grid on a page and when clicking on a column header is supposed to sort the data on that column. Not difficult, but it can get a little tricky at times. (I always seem to miss renaming at least one tag. And Visual Studio has the annoying habit of renaming my controls for me - normally, one isn't supposed to have multiple controls on a page with the same name. However, in a repeater object, when you're formatting your table so that alternating lines are in different colours, for instance, you name the controls in your row with the same names as those in the alternating row. Visual Studio always wants to rename the alternating row's controls to things like "Literal1" and "CheckBox2". Argh.) I think I've done about a dozen or so pages over the past couple of weeks, and I got two more done today.
The other advantage to working from home is that I got to go over to the Yonge/Eglinton Centre at lunchtime and eat something that wasn't from Subway, Mr. Sub or Pizza Nova. ;)
I got out of here around 5:30 and managed to get to the bowling alley by about 6:10, which gave me plenty of time to grab something to eat and read some of the paper, which I hadn't even opened yet as I usually read it during my commute. (Speaking of which, I learned this week just how slow the print media is compared to online sources... the Jiri Tlusty story, which I posted about over a week ago and which I was apparently slow to learn about, only hit the Toronto newspapers on Wednesday. The Sun and the Star are on their moral high horses about it - which surprised me in the Star's case, as they're a fairly left-wing paper. The Sun doesn't approve of nudity unless it's female. The Globe and Mail - which is the paper I read - had this editorial about the topic today, in which they basically say, "Meh. He's 19. Big deal.")
Anyway, bowling was quicker than normal tonight, as h8torun, Randy, Mario and Bridgette were all away tonight. Ralph was filling in for h8torun, but we were using declared scores for Mario and Bridgette, and a dummy score for Randy as we couldn't get a spare to fill in for him in time (he called me at 5:30 to let me know that he was stuck at work). So with only two of us there, and only four on the other team, we were out fairly early. My night was, again, mediocre: 143, 141, 170. I was suffering from "splititis" - I started each game with a split, and had two or three more in each of the first two games. In the third game, I started with a 5-10 (which I just missed sparing) and finished with a 4-6. Somehow, we still managed to win the first game, albeit only by 11 pins.
This is shaping up to be a busy weekend - I have a meeting tomorrow, and another one on Sunday, and I still have stuff from last weekend's To Do list that remains to be done (like laundry). Plus I want to see about getting together with Ambrose at some point - I tried calling earlier, but got his voicemail. I haven't even heard from him since the last time we went out, about three weeks ago. I'd called him a couple of weekends ago to see if he wanted to come with me to Declan's get-together, but I wasn't able to get hold of him then either. Is it so much to ask for that he call me once in a while? I know he's got a busy life, but so do I (and it's probably about to get busier). Sure, he warned me that I was going to have to initiate things most of the time, but I'm not sure that I particularly like that. It would be nice to think that he was thinking of me once in a while. I'm feeling like he only thinks about me when I call him. *sigh*