vjl's Journal: Hackin' away....

So here I am, 1:14am, on a Thursday night, and I'm about to set a new record for going to bed: it'll be the earliest I've gone to bed in over 2 weeks!

Fall quarter starts next Friday. As a result, I'm finishing up several projects that need to be ready, and out of beta, before fall starts. These projects are all PHP based, as that is my language of choice for coding all things w3-based.

I'm finding that being the only programmer in our school can be quite a challenge. While UCI has plenty of programmers, our small school, the School of Social Ecology, has never had a programmer before. Because of this, *everyone* has had requests for programs and interactive w3 sites.

So far, my first project has been to convert the entire soceco site into a php/mysql based content-management system, called EzEdit. EzEdit allows staff and faculty the ability to easily edit pages that they are responsible for. Faculty can upload their vitas, edit their publications, change their bio, etc. Staff can edit their pages/images as well as do some maintainence on some faculty [each department has a manager who oversees the faculty; some faculty don't like even touching a computer, so their department manager does all of the editing].

While all of this is well and good, I've got a *ton* of other projects at that magic 95% complete mark and am hurriedly trying to finish them. Though the licenses to all of my coding is GPL, I do not know if legally I can do that, since when I started at UCI in 1997, I had to sign a "all your code belong to us" deal. But then I left in 2000 to check out corporate america [prior to UCI, i worked as a programmer in city government]. Quest Software was that step I took, and it was very boring. So, 9 months later, I headed back to the poorly paying life of .edu [.gov and .edu are so similar it's hard to tell the difference]. When I started back up at UCI, though, they never made me sign a contract about my IP. Hmmm...

Now that i'm back in .edu, i'm anything but bored!

Maybe someday I'll finally hit the Big Burnout [already have had 4 burnouts], and just stick to what I love to do: photography. I do like working with computers, but not enough to spend 14 hours + a day doing it! [well, sometimes, but not 14 hour days all the time...].

Ok, it's 1:24am...I'm off to bed...amazing! The sun hasn't risen yet, and I've not had a diet coke all evening...a new record for the month of September! :-)

/vjl/