Freddy

I'm starting to wake up later, and later, and later. I'm also getting good at taking a shower and getting dressed faster, and faster, and faster. So, I guess you could say I'm evolving and developing my superhuman abilities.

Today was the day I finally kind of dove into things. At 9:00 AM I had a meeting with Brian, and three other guys. This was a meeting about one of our biggest publishers that we get half a million a month from. They have some pretty specific needs and wants for their clients, so we have to conform to what they want or we lose them. On top of this, they cater to two of our biggest advertisers, Barnes and Noble, and Circuit City. So, it's a triple whammy if we lose them. Basically, they have data that they need sent to them in XML format a certain way. Files can't have more than 1000 orders in them, they have to have a unique ID, they have to have a tally of certain things, etc etc. I didn't grasp entirely what was going on, but what I did grasp is that we were a little unhappy about the matter (and engineering, which was probably not going to make the deadline of June 10^th). Choice words were said about certain aspects of the program, so it was pretty apparent that this was important.

My job boiled down to taking a very large XML file and making it into several other XML files, all the while maintaining the header and footers, and editing the headers and footers a little bit to conform to some requirements. It would be best if I did it automatically, so I decided to write a script instead of doing mindless work.

On top of that, other people were giving me small jobs to do so I pretty much stayed on my toes the entire day.

For lunch, we had the usual Go Roma Italian food catered to us. I think I'm getting better at balancing and strategically placing items of food on my plate to maximize its edible capacity. So good.

So, to break up my work day and Perl script writing with an elevator ride in the State of Illinois Building. That was fun. Even though my ride was completely uninterrupted, I think they slowed down the elevator, so that hampered my fun and entertainment of the experience.

On the way back,, I grabbed some Coffee from the Starbuck's connected to our office building. I had an Orange Mocha. It was quite good.

By the end of the day, my script was working, so I was happy. I finally fixed a bug right at 4:58, so I shot off an e-mail to my coworkers that work on the files the script was for, and I was off. Time to go home!

An idea has been floating around in my head for a while: to make a website for a homeless person.

There's this one homeless drummer that plays on the north side of the Madison St. bridge every afternoon for the commuters ending their work day. He's out there every day, rain or shine.

I'm thinking of going to him early in the afternoon, if it isn't so busy, and ask him what his name is and how long he's been drumming. I might make a website called “www.freddyplaysdrums.com”. I would then make him some durable waterproof poster saying “Support Freddy! Visit www.freddyplaysdrums.com!” On the website, I would give a little background on “Freddy” and post vidoes and pictures of him with the sign to prove he's a real, breathing, person. I would make a donation link to raise money in getting him a new drum set.

Right now, Freddy plays on a snare drum balanced on a milk crate, he sits on a PVC bucket, plays on a PVC bucket, and his cymbal is balanced on a drum stick which is stuck in a milk crate. If this thing caught on, maybe I could eventually fund to give him food gift cards or something like that. It's an entertaining possibility that would be pretty cool if the site got famous. Anyways, yea.