It’s back to working on the extractors again. It’s totally boring and not motivating at all. I’d just wish to get over with this.
Perhaps I’ll blog later about one of the extractor I’m working on. If you actually find it interesting, PLEASE send me your resume so I can send it to my boss!
I thought I’d be a lot more free to do many other things once my final exam was over and was planning a few things which I wanted to do. Namely, I had planned on creating a few websites, one which belongs to a potential client. Go to gym more, wash my car, fix my PC’s display and clear up lots of junk laying around.
But work is taking up a lot of my time and I need to finish up some projects quickly so I can move on and apply for another job in a different department. My current job isn’t really that bad, but the working environment is very unhealthy. Just being in the office listening to everyone talking stresses me out. Also, nobody seems to understand and value all the work I’ve put into my work. They just want things done quickly and want it to work. Maybe all the department needs to do is to move to China and not continue to expand in a country where people are trying to improve the quality of things instead of the quantity.
Reading thought some materials about costs of a professional work. Sometimes, people just do not understand the effort and the value of an item or work being put into their project. From the outside, the end product might look like just a simple static item to do simple things, and that’s just how they value the project.
This is what is spoiling the professional industry. Just like how I’m struggling to meet my “client’s” requirements. I believe almost every single programmer falls into this category.
For example: Your clients wants you to make a program, and that program’s function is simply to store information about your stock into a database. It may sound as easy as, Step 1 enter item and amount, Step 2: store in hard drive, Step 3: Load data when called. Never will the client think about the trouble the programmer has to go through for that program. What kind of interface does the client needs? Bar code, keyboard, 2D bar code, or RFID? What kind of database structure do they need? Nested categories? Simple storage? What kind of output do they need? Printout, website, full report, or summary?
Besides those things, there are other things to consider such as infrastructure, program environment, modularity for support, etc. All those things are blind to the end user and all they know is they key in the data and the computer does the rest. All those happen in real time and it’s so easy and straight forward, a programmer just need to type and click a few commands for the computer to do all that.
Now, I feel really bad being underpaid for doing all this kind of work but end up being targeted as doing easy jobs. They don’t understand the work I put into and the trouble I went through to make sure their data is as accurate as possible.
Programmers, and designers don’t just make something work and look good then sell it to you. We are solutions provider. We work our ass off so you can be a little lazy or a little more efficient at yours.
Value, must not be judged by looking at the end product. It must be judged by the actual usage and work put into. If you asked for a product that function doesn’t add a lot of value to your system or working environment, that’s your fault. It’s not the programmer’s fault for following your orders.
Petalingstreet.org, officially called Project Petaling Street (PPS) was a blog aggregator where bloggers can “ping” their latest blog posts to petalingstreet.org and get their post listed in the site. It worked very well for both bloggers and readers. Readers will always find new things to read almost every few minutes and bloggers get lots of traffic from PPS. I won’t deny it, I used to get up to a few hundred hits from PPS even when I post something lame.
However, the good times didn’t last. The website was bought over by MenJ and he turned petalingstreet.org into an advertisement paradise. Since then, most bloggers’ posts were monitored and censored and almost every bloggers were upset by his extremist attitude. There were movement to ban the usage of PPS and that was about the time I stopped visiting PPS as well. I didn’t really care if they banned my posts there or not as I had an automated ping plugin which helped me to post all my latest posts to PPS at that time.
Today, as I was running out of things to read, I paid a visit to PPS just to see how it has become lately. I was surprised to see this:
I guess it was to happen sooner or later since no one will support any party who suppress freedom of speech.
Well, I guess that idiot kinda figured out that just buying a high traffic site and posting ads all over the site doesn’t really help you to make money.
Anyway, I guess Ah Mike beat me to it posting about this. 
It’s just so screwed up. Seeing that Person A failed with 1 mistake while person B passed with 1 different mistake. It’s not corruption either, the marker was just stupid and not worthy as a human being.
This mistake costs me A heck of a lot of CGPA. Pulled all the way down. How can I make him pay?
If you take a look at incoming links to my blog, you’ll actually realized that those links are pointing to pages which didn’t exists in my blog. That’s because I’ve actually removed a lot of old posts and restarted my blog several times in the past. There were a few reasons for doing that. The main reason was poor management and poor commitment. My blog used to have at least 100 visitors daily. Compared to 1 visitors monthly now? Hah!
I wonder what was it which attracted so much attention then? Studying the contents of the link back, most of them were actually criticism on politics and current issues. That includes issues such Xia Xue and Kah Soon. In my old blogging style, I would blog first and think later about the consequences of what I said. Now, I would consider if I even have the time to blog or not.
Completing my diploma has given me some free time now. I’m thinking 0f brushing the dust off my camera and start taking more pictures for my blog again.
So can I make lots of visitors daily again? Hope so. 
I went to Fourier Technical Consultants and met with the principle for a quick discussion about studying Engineering council. Engineering Council is a professional paper in UK which is equivalent to a Diploma for their Part 1, Degree for their Part 2 and Masters for their Part 3.
However, unlike studying in college or university, you study their subjects with no assignments and just register and sit for their papers once a year.
For me and my friends, we start at Part 2 as we are going in with a Diploma already. We need to take a total of 5 subjects out of the 7 offered.
Price is a reasonable RM100 registration and RM1500 per subject. While exam papers are 70 British pounds each. In total, it’s way cheaper then taking a complete degree course, shorter duration and you’ll get a cert with better prospect especially if you’re going to work oversees. BUT, it’s sure to be a lot harder as well since their standards are set quite high. But at least we’ll be able to just focus on the subject and not get distracted by lame assignments.
It’s all finally over. My last subject which is the Final Year Project has been presented last Monday and it went well. We don’t really know the official results yet but we were told instantly who made it through and who didn’t. So my partner and me made it through.
That means, for most people in the class, all they have to do is wait for the official result and their certificate + invitation for the graduation. BUT, for me, I’ve a single paper to resit. Curse that damn tutor for being so strict and telling me that the spice coding is Not Important.
Anyway, i really hope to get over with it soon as well.
Need to study it so I don’t make any more mistake.