Monday, June 2, 2008

My first tears of frustration

Today was a pretty lazy day. I woke up early and my roommates and I ate breakfast together (while on our computers, its becoming a morning ritual), then went to the gym that Microsoft gives us membership to. Its called ProSport and its the biggest gym in North America. They said that it started out as a small gym but when Microsoft showed up right down the street, they had to continue to expand to accommodate all the Micro employees. It wasn't that impressive from the outside, but was very nice on the inside. It had a full restaurant and coffee shop, as well as 3 cardio centers, some of which have dimmed lighting. I thought that was kinda weird. We had fun, and went in the pool and hot tub. When we came home we made lunch and I did much better on my meal! My roommate (the one in my group at work) and I decided to start doing some research about our project. Since we have to create a Windows Vista Gadget, we opened up an existing gadget, looked at its source code, and noticed what kind of files create that gadget. Turns out its made from 4 files, a simple HTML file, an XML file (both are mark up languages which basically means they only deal with basic text) a javascript file which tells the two markup language files how to behave, and a CSS file which tells the markup language how to look. Its pretty simple process and we were very excited to understand this, and also that hopefully actually creating the gadget won't be so hard. The hard part will be connecting the gadget to the Exchange server, which is when we will use C# (an actual programming language not just a markup language or scripting language like the previous). So we went out to eat with some friends, then came home with a movie from blockbuster, and while our friends watched the movie, my roommate and I worked on creating a simple gadget with the process we had learned. She got some help from one of my friends who was here, while I struggled by myself ( He gave me some pointers but i'm determined to understand it for myself and not just have someone show me). She finally got her gadget to work, and I was still struggling. They all watched the movie, and I went to my bedroom, and just got more and more frustrated trying to get this stupid thing to work!!! So thats where the tears came! I'm sure there will be many more to come;  i've accepted that its just part of being a CS student, but on this project my first ones were tonight. Well I did finally get my gadget to work, at about midnight! What a pain. And it was all just a few grammatical bugs. Anyways, nothing else to interesting today. Back to work tomorrow!!

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