HJCotton.net

My first video blog; covering the topic of Penn States ability to charge you for anything and everything.

Video Blog – PSU bill

This past Monday was my first day of my internship in Wilkes-Barre. Despite a shortage of free parking near public square, I obtained a free spot in the dilapidated Boscov’s parking garage.

The position is all about programming using Ruby on Rails: a subject that is entirely new to me. I looked at some code and some examples on a Mac; though after some time I realized I was completely unable to use such a machine for I began to grow angry that in the year 2006, mice are still being made without 2 buttons and a scrollwheel in the middle. I realized that using such a device for an extended period of time would result in the other employees coming back from lunch to find me huddled in the corner of the office, rocking back and forth while commencing with repetitive handwashing motions.

At this time, I tried installing Ruby, RadRails, and MySQL on a WindowsXP machine so I’d be a little more familiar with the OS and have 20 years of mouse improvements at hand, so to speak. Everything went well up until the point I unzipped some files, which taxed the system beyond all belief and crashed it entirely. Negatory on the Windows, good buddy.

So it was on to the Suse Linux machine. Anyone who’s ever used Linux before knows what a breeze it is to install new software. Yeah right… you can’t so much as install a calculator without getting error messages about missing dependencies. So all you’ve got to do is install those missing dependencies right? Wrong, because you soon discover that each missing dependency requires 2 other pieces of software in order to function.
If they made a movie about installing software in Linux it would be a horror movie based loosely on “Pay it Forward”. In the end, you spend about 40 hours researching the problem in forums, downloading 300 megabytes of various files, and ultimately going down to Staples to buy a freakin’ calculator.

Needless to say, I did not make much progress on Monday; though Wednesday was a good deal better…