Echo Binary

I spent my valentine’s day with my girlfriend eating at Tokyo Tokyo this afternoon. The coupon for “Masarap Yen” saved me a measly P20 but it’s ok. I also bought a new laptop backpack from her. Apparently I really don’t need a new backpack. I just want to boost her sales because she needs to meet her quota or else she would fail it. It seems that’s the only way I could contribute. I also felt that buying a new backpack from her would be a good idea because (1) the shoulder strap padding of my old backpack is already worn out which makes it uncomfortable to carry sometimes and (2) I want a unique laptop backpack at school. LOL. The second reason is silly but I really don’t like the whole idea of someone else carrying the same backpack model that I carry around in campus.

My new laptop backpack is Victorinox Oxford. FYI, Victorinox is a renowned Swiss knife maker. I didn’t know they also make travelgear until recently. The quality of this backpack is superb. Design-wise it’s cooler than its Jansport counterpart, and relatively less expensive too. I won’t say it’s cheap but it does not carry a ridiculous price tag compared to other “lifetime warranty” assured bags. It’s bigger than my previous backpack in terms of breadth. Even if I put my laptop inside, it leaves room for 2 big hardbound books. One caveat — it looks like a camping bag when full. I think my printer would fit inside it. ^_^

I’m stuck with the database design I’m working on. It has been dragging for several days already… and I don’t know whether I should consult more pre-existing database or should I just ignore the design patterns and do it my own style.

I’m not a database designer to begin with. I’m a programmer. More appropriately a developer (web developer or software developer) so I shouldn’t be designing our database model. However, we only have one “database person” in our team so I’m also manipulating the model so that we can start with a good database design. Fortunately dealing with database is not new to me. I had several projects dealing with database design but I had never designed a database this big. How will I know if this will scale well with our application? Fine tuning and stress testing is just troublesome.

Everything is troublesome. Argh! Let me vent for a while….

I’m really surprised this morning when my groupmates in thesis namely Frederick and Jeremiah were wearing red. Hmmm… we didn’t make any special arrangement but we were all wearing red. Even Glenn who was seating next to us in Cisco lab was wearing a red jacket. Then I saw Jed, who was working on the student module of our thesis, was also wearing a red jacket. Even Edison was wearing red! W00t! So everyone who attended the meating last night was wearing red even though we didn’t plan on what to wear today. What a coincidence. Everyone was joking about it as if we really planned it. Whatever is the reason perhaps we should celebrate since we’re all in red.

I just arrived at home from Makati… Quite amazing how I’m able to keep up even though it’s too late. Caffeine works like charm.

We were waiting for Edison, our project coordinator, as early as 6 PM but he was caught in heavy traffic so we waited until 7:50 PM. We ate our dinner fast and headed to Starbuck Alfaro where we held our group meeting. We still managed to pull some string and had the initial database plan done even though we started late. I thought we couldn’t get a decent place to discuss our project because when we entered Starbucks there weren’t any good seats available. The coffee shop was crowded but we spotted a table at the back. It’s somewhat confined and separated from the rest of the Starbucks seats; however, there were two foreign students who occupied the table before us. We kindly asked if we could share the table and it was okay with them. I think they were Korean. I couldn’t recognize any single word they spoke so they definitely weren’t Japanese or Chinese. They stayed at the table corner until 11 PM, studying and cuddling, so we only had a chance to take over the whole table for one hour.

All of us brought our laptops which really amused me. Everyone’s mobile. It seems to be the trend in our school now. Or it is just because of our thesis that most students opt for mobility? It’s logical to take your stuffs anywhere you go so that you can do something whenever you like to.

Anyway, I ordered my Coffee Jelly Frappuccino during our group dynamics and I could still feel its effect hence I’m still up. Trivia: Don’t you know that there are 77 Starbucks branches in Metro Manila alone? Makati is on top of the list with 28 branches.

It feels like the effect of Frappucino is wearing off soon… so, I’m off to bed now. Zzz…

It’s hard to study two programming languages when they both suck most of my brain juices. On the red corner — Java; on the blue corner — .NET. W00t! It feels like Pacquiao and Morales boxing in my head. I can’t seem to grasp everything that I do in Java GUI when I turn my back to .NET… and vice versa. What’s irritating is that I have to learn advance Swing components in Java to make my Java machine problem as interactive as possible. I just can’t ignore it because I might suffer the consequences later. On the other hand I have to learn more .NET because my group is jumpstarting an ASP.NET 2.0 web app for our thesis. How ironic that my specialization is Java but my thesis is built on .NET. It feels good to be a multilingual programmer but what’s the point when you can’t master one? Beats me like hell. Who needs a jack of all trades these days. I certainly have to forfeit one of them later on to raise my standards. Will it be Java or .NET… I don’t know yet. It’s a though choice. To make matters worse, I have to continue mastering PHP regardless of Java or .NET because I love open source. Crap… my brain is bleeding! x_x