Well, I figured I should update since the last post was all doom and gloom.

Man.

So, it's been almost two months since I've been slaving away on this project, working nights and weekends to get it close enough to call done.

Now I'm down to five days (including today which is almost over) until we go to production. Then we have a week to test and work out any major bugs and we're releasing to our customers. Crazy.

I hope to save some headaches for other people by going through my own
here.

I currently have the need to determine the difference between two XML
documents. Not a line-by-line unix-style diff utility, but a nice
DOM/Tree/XML document as a result.

So let's start, shall we?

Fuck, I am stressed.

I slept horribly last night with dreams about this project. One dream was weird - Gared O'Donnel from Planes Mistaken For Stars was playing a show, and gave me a new book of his to read. The book
featured many technical specifics about my company and project. I was like, "Gared! I didn't know you worked here before!" Yeah, that one was stupid.

I wish people were better at explaining things.

Whenever I want to know how something works, I don't need to know
philosophy behind it and the 101 class, and shit. I need to know how it
works within the context of what I am trying to get done RIGHT NOW.

I'm realizing that since blocking all my fun sites, I routinely come
back to Slashdot, and particularly my journal for brief reprieve. And
honestly, this is more fulfilling and productive than sitting on Facebook
getting dumber by reading everyone's poor grammar.

Your. You're. LEARN THE FUCKING DIFFERENCE.

My gay? My gay what? Ugh. Anyway.

Well, I got Eclipse fixed. It was apparently in a cycle of "Updating workspace..." I uninstalled one of the Spring plugins, which seem to be worthless anyway. For some reason, that fixed it.

Man, I just wish Eclipse weren't so cryptic sometimes.

Eclipse: When it works, it works better than anything in the world. When
it doesn't, well that's just called a "weekday." But seriously, there
are so many little quirks, particularly with the plugins.

I imagine it's like Firefox, where the base product is relatively solid,
but as you start adding (super useful!) plugins, things start getting
fucked up.

So I'm a shiny new developer. New, for sure. Shiny? ehhhh. I haven't
talked much about this job, but I think it would be fun to compare this
to my last one. Is the grass greener? Let's compare and contrast.

Pay - It is better here! I have been given a solid raise and bonus.
Plus, there are supposed to be incentives for completing projects.

Brian has left the building!

Yep, I'm a few days late on this, but I'm done working for Uncle Pete. That is, in the direct sense. Now I'm working for his little sister, Seline. If this doesn't make sense, don't worry. I'm just trying to keep it vague enough to write about.

Well here's a fuckin' update for ya!

I am progressing with OPERATION: GITFO slowly but surely. Some days I just have no motivation to do anything, so I don't. But some days are perfect for work; It's quiet, I'm well rested, I've got ample coffee, and it's QUIET.

What is really helping is having New Guy take over the bullshit tickets I get every day. That is helping immensely.

There are some days when I walk into work and I know it is going to be hell. Usually it's because I'm tired, I wake up late, and I made a bunch of changes on Friday that are now coming around on Monday to bite me.

Today fits that bill.

So I started a consulting gig a while back to design a website for a psychotherapist.

Many months later, she's finally wanting to get on with it. This isn't the first consulting job I've offered to do where the client flaked. Super annoying. Anyway, I guess we might be getting on with it.

So we have an account on Host Gator. You don't get SCP or anything cool like that. Just FTP. So I'm finding I'm having trouble remembering how to auto-login to FTP on Linux. So here's how: