What Has Been Going On
// Don't bother if it's not visible
// NOTE: Not going to use zone.isTokenVisible as it is very slow. In fact, it's faster
// to just draw the tokens and let them be clipped
If you are the proud author of this comment in MapTool b87, I would like to let you know that I hope you choke on a donut. Now that that's out of the way...
Okay, so, I have kind of neglected this. I blame it on moving all my bookmarks from the My Yahoo page into my browser's own bookmark lists, where LJ got shuffled down a bit away from the other things I normally visit.
Allow me to recap everything that happened after the last public entry I made, almost a year ago now. Until April/May-ish, I was working with a company in Toronto that taught programming outside of school hours to students from grades 4-12. It was only part time, but it was in my field, which is more than Tim Horton's ever was. It involved an hour and a half commute each way two days a week out to Richmond Hill, and I barely earned enough money to cover my rent, food, and transit tokens, so I was constantly on the lookout for a full-time job.
Then, after working as a programming instructor for over a year, I finally seemed to catch a break. I got a response from a company I had long given up on, out in Nova Scotia, a games studio who were probably the only company in my field in Canada willing to hire someone without 3+ years of experience. My aptitude test and my interview went well enough that they offered me a position, so I handed in my two weeks' notice and prepared to move. I had to throw out about 75% of my possessions and pack the rest into a large van, then travelled across four provinces and settled in to my new place.
And on Monday, I found out my contract had been cancelled.
It seems that the project I was going to work on had fallen through, and so they dropped two contracts for new employees - myself, and someone else moving over from England. I was at the top of the list for the next position, but that could have come in two days, or two years. The town I was in was even tinier and more remote than the one my parents live in - even the Tim Horton's had all the employees it needed. I waited a month, since I had already paid rent for it, but after I heard nothing from them at the end of the month I decided it was time to leave.
But I couldn't go back to Toronto. I'd quit my job, and my flat had already been let out to someone else, and I had thrown out all my furniture anyway. I had to go back to live with my parents in their tiny coastal tourist town, which is where I am now. But, having shown up after the summer already started, I couldn't find work anywhere in town - everything had already been taken. As a result I got put to work as cheap slave labour painting and painting and re-painting a house someone else was selling and looking after dogs that my parents agreed to take care of (and then promptly went out golfing every sunny day and a few rainy ones too).
So here it was; I had fallen as far as I could fall. I had lost my home, lost my old job and my new job, lost my independance and lost my freedom. I'd gone from living in the city where I could get anything I needed whenever I wanted at any time of day, to a tiny coastal town that still lacks luxuries of civilization such as sidewalks, public transit, and convenience stores. I'd like to say that there was a happy ending to all this, but that's not how life works. It doesn't get better, it can always get worse, rough patches don't go away if you wait long enough, and anyone who tells you otherwise is a blind optimist and/or a liar.
But I have no intentions of staying in the middle of nowhere forever. There's a community college here that I'm going to now, training for some industry-recognized certifications (A+ and CCNA - the former is 'how to build, maintain, and repair computers' and the latter is 'how to build, maintain, and repair networks'). On top of that, I discovered that I am, in fact, a citizen of the United States of America, despite having never lived there a day in my life - my mother was a US citizen and lived there long enough that citizenship was transferred to me on birth. All I have to do is get a passport to prove it, and I almost have all the documentation I need to do so. Three of four items have already checked out, but I need to get a copy of my birth certificate with a raised seal on it, so I'm waiting for that to arrive. With that passport, I can get a job in the US without having to go through green cards and visas and whatever other nonsense would be necessary. And with those certifications, I could get a well-paying job in the US.
This is, of course, assuming that my horrible, terrible luck doesn't screw me over once again, but we'll have to see.
That's where I stand now. It's March Break, and I am doing very well at the college so far. Unfortunately, the province of New Brunswick will be doing everything it can to prevent me from leaving the province when I finish the college program and get my certifications. I, however, have no intention of staying in this under-developed rural province any longer than is necessary, and they can't physically stop me from leaving. That problem will have to wait, as my college program finishes on June 22nd. Until then, all I can do is keep preparing.
Even though I am no longer academically studying programming, I'm doing my best to keep my Codewarrior edge sharp. I have various projects I'm juggling, the primary one being working on my own customized build of MapTool, a Java-based program for playing tabletop games online. Unfortunately, just like Smaug, it is a huge lump of spaghetti code written by a large group of inept fools who regularly have me frothing at the mouth and gnawing on my monitor when I see idiotic comments and horrible violations of every Software Engineering practice I learned. The one at the top of this entry is but a sample; not only was that person completely WRONG (the remainder of the method that comment was in is several hundred lines of expensive checks and drawing calls, whereas the method it refers to is a few if-statements, a single loop building up an Area, and a single Interects call), but their "optimization" introduced a very subtle bug where tokens that were within vision range but underneath fog of war would still be drawn. I hunted that bug down for a week before I found what had caused it.
tl;dr Murphy's Law happened, now I'm in community college.