Even though its the holidays, I have been working harder than ever. Currently, I'm working two days a week at my part-time job and the other three days at the Summer Scholarship at my university. Unfortunately, my preferred living style (going to bed really late and waking up as late as possible) doesn't work well with 5 days a week of full time work, so I've been tired as hell.

Luckily the work is mostly good: in my part-time job I have starting to be elevated from a mere software tester to a software developer. I wrote my first bit of code (in ColdFusion) for them on Monday! The Summer Scholarship is also great. I've been assigned a task where I have to create a simple API for creating games in the Pascal programming language, and to demonstrate that API with a side-scrolling game. The API will be used by next year's PSDs in their Algorithmic Problem Solving subject.

Writing the API in Pascal sucks, because I love real IDEs with code suggesting (Intellisense), and I'm using Crimson Editor (simple as hell text editor) to write my Pascal. Also, Pascal isn't exactly a language that is widespread, so learning it hardcore is (almost) wasted. I can't even use the object oriented features of the language since the APS students won't know OOP yet! The other guys get to write in C#, Java and PHP! But knowing that next year's APS students will use what I write makes it worthwhile and mollifies me.

Most of my blogging over the next three weeks will probably be on the Summer Scholarship's PictBlog at Blogspot, so keep an eye on that. As a side note, Blogspot's blog editor sucks. I had to edit my post there at least six times before it was correct. The worst problem was, for some reason, my text didn't word wrap and it poked out over the right-side navigation menu (overlapping it) and stretched the page. Hopeless.

Outside of work, I have also been busy writing the PHP for Aurora, the CMS that will power web solutions created by Pulse Development (my cousin and I's web design business). Aurora is written in PHP and I was happy to find that PHP 5 has almost all the OOP features that C# has: interfaces, inheritance, polymorphism, etc.

Aurora will power this website once its done (in fact I'll use DigitallyCreated as a kind of test bed for Aurora), so you'll get a nicer blog and news interface, and it'll be a hell of a lot easier for me to update it (hopefully increasing my blog count). Also, you've probably noticed this page getting stupidly long; Aurora will split it automatically over multiple pages. It will also do automatic generation of the RSS feeds for this blog (thank god, I do it manually at the moment!).

Finishing up, I'll leave you with a warning: I read an article over at the INQ about one of their reporters who got RSI (yes, that thing you ignore the warnings about). The afflicted hack wrote an article about his experiences with RSI and it sounds entirely nasty. He ended up with arms that didn't work. Normally, I don't really read this sort of stuff, let alone get worried about it, but this hits close to home since I do a lot of typing and I really don't want to break my livelihood (you can't code C# with speech recognition when your arms are stuffed). I would suggest you read it, so as to avoid it yourself. Find the article here.