Revision 111

By the way, before I start, if you're reading my blog and you don't understand the title, it's from a terry pratchett book about a made-up universe in which the world is a flat disc sitting on the backs of 4 elephants riding a giant turtle through space. It is a world where narrativium is an actual element. A world in which earthquakes are caused by butterflies. The specific quote is from Guards! Guards! where the city watch faces a dragon threatning to burn down their city.

If you've never read Terry Pratchett, I'm jealous, because that means there are about 34 titles of guaranteed entertainment waiting for you. If there's anything you should take from my blog, Terry Pratchett is it.

Back to business (as far as the 275 project is concerned).

We actually got full marks for the presentation and 90 on phase I.
Good job. It's nice to see results for hard work.

We also had our first meeting (after the presentation) this wednesday.
Steve was first to show up, so I got to spend 10 minutes of quality time with him. He apologized, and I told him that apologies don't change the past. I said that I find him unreliable, and that if it weren't for the instructor's indecision, he'd be off the team. I mentioned that if this was anything other than a University project, he'd be fired, and that if anything like that happens again I would personally make sure he is off the project, regardless of his past contribution or what the instructor says.

Then the other teammates showed up, and Steve apologized again, to everyone, which resulted in a minute of silence followed by John's bitter remark that in reality, if he pulled this stunt in a job situation, and as an excuse said he had a fever, his email didn't go through, and he lost his phone, his boss would laugh while handing him the pink slip.

Gotta love John.
If ever there was a man grumpier than myself, John's it.

I think Steve got the hint.

Useless member No. 5 didn't show up at all, nor did he show up to the following meeting we had today, and I'd say he's treading dangerous waters right about now.

I  announced that these kind of stunts are unacceptable, and that if anyone pulls a Steve on us again, they're off the team, even if I.... blah blah blah.
Furthermore, I added, everyone's gotta pull their weight from now on, that being addressed to useless member No. 5 who was not present.

Anyways, this is the point I predicted earlier where Steve leads this group into ruin, I pick up the reigns, and order is established.

This is where I say "I told you so."

We're up to revision 111 by now, no more trouble with SVN. We have asteroids colliding with each other, phasing through to the other side of the screen instead of bouncing off the walls. When an asteroid hits the ship, it affects the shield and ultimately the player's "lives". Score gets updated, and there's a gradual increase in difficulty with an automatic topic switch every 100 points.

We also fixed the navigation screens. We're saving the profile to a file. Serialization seems to be going somewhere, and i'm looking into the objective-c FTP transfer API, so that we can connect with the web server where we store the top scores for each player.

Not bad overall. Phase 2 is almost complete and we have wednesday set as development deadline, leaving us 5 days for document update and testing.

Phase 3 will be all animation and sound.
I'd finally get to integrate my Asteroids song as background music.

On another matter, evidently I didn't get the Autoship job.
Too bad, I kinda liked the company and I though the interview went well.

Some guy who worked on a database project with me got hired by a company who didn't even invite me for an interview. That's super frustrating, because at least in this case, I know with certainty that I'm about 10 times more qualified than he is.

I honestly don't get it. What am I missing?
Or maybe this is the hiring stage where they hire people with previous co-op experience?
Am I aiming too high?

Should I go for tech support and waste my time ?

I really, really don't get it.

Maybe it's the failed marks on my transcript... but if that is the case then I'm wasting my time even applying for co-ops.

fruss. te. ray. ting.

How do I show people I'm a good programmer?

Hey, you know what. When steve fucked us over, I didn't give up. I took the reigns and we aced the presentation. I wouldn't call it good resolution, because it forced me to sacrifice my other classes during that week and ultimately do someone else's work, which is hardly good resource management.

But it saved our group.

At least after this thing is done I'll have one more thing to throw in the portfolio.