The occasional musings of Andy Scheffler
So I probably should have posted this yesterday, but I’m lazy. I finally braved the line a bought an iPhone. The line was all of one person long, too.
Then I used Bluetooth to sync it to my Prius and they both exploded in a cloud of pretentiousness.
Hmm it looks like Safari is freaking out on the tags box on the post form. So I’ll just have to leave it on something.
I hate it when I get a whole post thought out in my head, but then forget to actually post it.
This weekend was the first for a while that I didn’t have to go into to work at some point, which was good. Last weekend, I had something weird happen. So I’m in the office on Saturday, spinning my wheels trying to figure out this code so I can fix a bug in it which may or may not have been in the code itself or with Struts/OGNL being the bastard that it usually is and just silently refusing to accept data passed to it for some arcane reason. The code is like quite a bit on this project, where it started out simple and elegant, but had so many other things tacked on to it that it becomes almost impossible to trace through how its supposed to work. (The fact that JavaScript is mostly event-based makes it even harder to figure out.)
I’ve been at it for four or five hours, iterating each time takes about 15-20 minutes as usual (compile, install, restart, navigate to page) so I’m already a bit frustrated, having only sort of nailed down one part of the error (an event wasn’t being fired when it should have been), and all of a sudden my monitor goes blank. Then my computer starts beeping. Four short beeps. I tried turning it off and on, and it beeps again.
The motherboard had died.
Spaghetti code killed my computer.
Until today, I had one each of all of the previous 45 state quarters, all saved in one of those folders designed for such.
It is now almost exactly halfway through 2008, and I finally got a New Mexico quarter. I hope the other four aren’t as hard to find.
Quantum Programming: When the simple act of observing something in the debugger causes the program to behave differently.
a.k.a. “It works when I look at it.”
There are a few metrics I can use to determine how well my day is going.
The first is how many IM conversation windows I end up with at the end of the day. Today I’m at 6, which is pretty high.
Another is at what point I’ve finished the bugs which I was supposed to have finished yesterday and can start working on today’s bugs. By this measure, 5 p.m. is pretty awful, especially since we consider a working day to have eight hours in it.
This leads into the last one: what time I get home in the evening.
*headdesk*
Edit: Salmoned!
This post should have been on June 29th, but I spaced and missed it. But on June 29, ten years ago I first started working at Yahoo!. Four jobs, five managers, three computers, three phone numbers, nine christmas gifts, ten year-end parties, ten oktoberfest mugs, eleven stuffed hamsters, and probably close to twenty cubicles later, I’m still here.
It is spelled “Sneak Peek”. Not “Sneak Peak”.
On a related note, something “piques” your interest, not “peeks” or “peaks”.
The power just went out here.
Posting on laptop, and for some reason the wireless access points are on the emergency circuit. (Gotta love a company with priorities.)
At least we weren’t the folks who were stuck on the rollercoasters next door.
I finally got Captain rank in FFXI (took a screenshot but forgot to upload it).
With this, I am done with FFXI. I have posted a (rather length) goodbye post in my linkshell’s forums explaining my reasons for leaving in probably way more detail than anyone cares, but it feels good to actually say it.
The most important part is that I kept playing FFXI for the people, but my (sometimes more than) full time job kept me from playing enough and at the same times as most of them, so I lost that connection, and therefore my real reason for sticking around.
If Yahoo! were a person, it would totally have its feelings hurt right now.
<Yahoo!> I’m not merging with Microsoft! For reals this time!
<StockMarket> We don’t like you! Down 10%!
<Yahoo!> What, I’m no good to you by myself? You only liked me for my potentially cheap post-merger Microsoft stock?
<StockMarket> Yeah, duh!
<Yahoo!> /wrists