This Moment

"How long would it take to fix this problem," innocent coworker asks.

"A few hours," I reply thinking that it will be pretty simple to fix and will just require a buttload of testing.

"Oh great!" Innocent coworker exclaims. "Let's do it then."

"OK!" I say back with a smile, figuratively already rolling up my sleeves.

I sit down and start looking into the issue. "No problem," I mutter to myself. "I bet if I do this, it will work perfectly."

*Test runs*

Issue still happens.

"Hmm...oh ok, it must be this!" I decide and press a few more keys before running the next test.

Issue still happens.

Rinse and repeat this for about an hour until I decide that this issue is a stupid f-ing issue anyway and people should just learn to deal with it instead of having me waste my time trying to fix it.

Then I take a 15 minute break and read blogs on the Internet because somehow, that always calms me down. Or, I update my blog. Hello world!

Once I'm adequately calmer, I'll go back to fixing the issue on hand. I'll fix it at some point - but it might take longer than that initial few hour estimate. And at the end, I'll feel really good. But up until then, I'll bitch and whine and moan and say that it's impossible and that there's no way to fix it.

Welcome to a day in my life. And this very moment.

Yours,

(Programming) World Conspires Against Me

I've been working on this coding issue since yesterday afternoon. Basically, I have a list of items out of order, we'll say:

B, D, A, C, E

I need to put them in a specific order based on some of their attributes (for simplicity, let's say I need them in alphabetical order). Unfortunately, I need to do this with two passes because there are a couple attributes I need to look at.

First pass executes and I get:

C, D, A, B, E

That's ok. It's not perfect but it's fine. I can adjust pass two to make this end up magically in the right order. Pass two, go!

A, B, D, E, C

What...the...That's not what I wanted at all. Well ok, it starts off ok but what the hell happened? I've been looking into this problem and I've come up with one solution.

The world hates me. That must be it. It's decided that I am not destined to figure out the solution to this and therefore will always give me the wrong result no matter what I do. Even if the process is correct, the world will still hand me out of order items.

Unfortunately, I get paid for this and I have to fight the world. Boss, do you see how hard I work? I'm fighting the whole damn world here. See. I am useful.

Yours,

Email On Hold

I always have gchat open at work because it's how the office communicates with each other. I always know when I get a new email because the gchat icon will immediately change to show me that it's waiting for me.

If I'm not at work, my phone will flash at me until I check my email. Therefore, I always know right away when I get an email.

Sometimes, I see a new email and I want to respond right away but I make myself wait a little so the other person doesn't think I'm weird for responding so fast.

I figure this is the modern day version of letting something leave a voicemail instead of picking up so they thinks you're busy with your amazing life.

Anyone else have this constant need to check your email?

Yours,

End of the World Animation

This is old but still my favorite flash video (posting the Youtube video version so I can embed it):



Yours,

Replace x 100

When you see the next few lines, you may have the urge to run away. Or at least to close this browser. That is, if you have an aversion to programming, code and other technical things that many people do not really like. Sometimes, I don't like them either. Let me assuage your fears, you don't need to be familiar with any programming concepts to understand what I'm about to say.

There are these things called "Stored Procedures". It's something that sits around and when triggered, does something. That's all. I opened one of them here at work to see what it did. Then I burst out laughing. Because I saw this:

replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace((i.description),'&','&amp;'),'&amp;#','&#'),'™','&#8482;'),'>','&gt;'),'<','&lt;'),'"','&quot;'),char(39),'&apos;'),'—','-'),'&#145;','&apos;'),'&#146;','&apos;'),'&#133;','...'),'&#147;','&quot;'),'&#148;','&quot;'),'®','&#174;')

If you know nothing about code, you still should be able to see the hilarious nature of this. Basically, it's taking in a string (you can think of a string as a word) and replacing all characters to be SQL friendly. In other words, if your word was "O...M...G", it would replace all the '...' .

But seriously, how would anyone understand what this is doing? Is the best way to do this really to have a million replace statements in one line? I don't know everything (or much) about SQL but to my non-expert eyes, this does not look good.

If someone wants to tell me that this is standard and done all the time and is perfect then I'll humbly admit defeat. But for now, I'll keep giggling.

Yours,

Procrastinating Problems

I spend a lot of my time at work solving problems. I feel like that's mostly what my job is about - a problem comes up in one of our applications, and it's my job to fix it. I have to find the cause of the problem and come up with a solution that will not create new problems.

For the last few weeks, I've been working on one application specifically - one that I basically got to build from scratch. It's pretty fun seeing something you created from nothing but when it gets to the end, I start to procrastinate all the little things that still need to be done.

Examples? Well, I needed to add validation to my form (e.g. so you can't enter IMAWESOME as a phone number). I spent forever coming up with other things to work on so I didn't have to do this.

I needed to make the web app look good in both IE and Firefox. Whoops, there's something else to work on! I don't have time to deal with why that red X is coming up in IE. It's IE's fault anyway. Stop using it, move onto Chrome or Firefox.

Apparently, I can't have that kind of logic. Fine, fine. I can accept that since I am being paid to do this.

I finally got around to finishing all these details. I make a to-do list for every project and break it down into steps so I don't forget about anything and I'm finally down to two tasks:

1) Implement these buttons that are more complicated than I like
2) Find some way to log everything a user does

#2 is pretty important. Even though this is an in house application, it's inevitable that I'll get an email after it goes live saying something along the lines of, "I didn't change this but now store XYZ says it is located in Nowhere, Alaska! It's supposed to be in Los Angeles! What happened?"

If I don't have any logs that show what the user has been doing, my answer would be a blank stare. If I have logs, I can pull them up and point exactly to the time and place where the user decided the store would be better off in Alaska, rather than LA. And I can show them the system did not just crap out on them like they thought, but rather, it was user error.

Damn, do I sound mean? Imagine I'm saying all this with a happy smile on my face. Does that make it better?

I'll work on it.

Time to stop procrastinating. Maybe.

Yours,

AI Bots Chatting

Ah, the power of Artificial Intelligence.



Sadly, the woman seems more annoying than the man. I wonder if they were designed that way. Hmm...

Yours,