The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Thursday, November 15, 2001

Getting a fix …

The network seems to be working smoothly now; it only took them 21 hours to get it working (either that, or they actually did a rollback and went back to the drawing boards). In any case, things seem to be back to normal.

---

“No fighting in the war room!”

WASHINGTON - Law enforcement officials were stunned recently after they urged the nation to be on the “highest alert possible”, and they were informed that we already were. Soon after that, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld ordered our nations military to go to “DefCon 1”, the highest defense condition possible, and he too was informed that they already were at “DefCon 1”.

Via my dog wants to be on the radio, Defense Sec Rumsfeld Requests More DefCon Levels

Now that things have returned to normal (network wise), I figured it was time for a bit of levity.

Besides, you can tell that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld isn't a computer guy—1,024 is is much better than 1,027. And I suspect it would have been Ashcroft to ask for more DefCon levels, not Rumsfeld.

Monday, November 15, 2004

Reason #1.414213562 I hate PHP

Work was there. But then again, I was in my cubicle with that neat Zen-like emptiness to it.

Today's PHP problem I don't think was necessarily a PHP problem as it was a lack of documentation about installation. One of the clients uses OSCommerce, an open-source shopping cart management system and one of the modules “supposedly installed” was EasyPopulate, which allows one to populate the product database on the webserver from a spreadsheet. The customer used it once before, but that was then.

This is now.

Try as I might, I could not get the module to load. It was there, written in PHP, on the server, nestled among all the other PHP modules making up the shopping cart. Only it would not run.

Or rather, the shopping cart software would refuse to run it.

Or something like that.

It took me the better part of an hour (using Google) to find anything close to installation notes, for a slightly different version (“let me tell you about slightly different versions … ”) and it wasn't terribly surprising when those instructions didn't work.

Another hour or so was wasted trying to locate the module to download any version; old, new, borrowed, blue, anything.

I will say that the OSCommerce site looks good, but actually finding anything useful? Like … oh … the software? It's a sad state of affairs when one realizes that one downloaded what they were looking for by mistake (I was trying to download OSCommerce itself, thinking the module was one of those that used to be third party but had become part of the main distribution—I thought I downloaded OSCommerce but instead I had downloaded the latest version of the Easy Populate module). Yes, the site is that bad.

Now, the installation of the module. The module itself came with no installation guide, I guess on the assumption that you have the OSCommerce guide and that tells you how to install modules, cause the Good Lord knows that what I thought was the module installation module wasn't installing modules. I ended up having to go through the source code to the module, finding out why it was refusing to run and found the answer—because the module wasn't listed in one of the database tables that OSCommerce uses.

Some sixy SQL statments later (one to see what was in that particular table, one that I botched so badly that it basically wiped out that particular table, and fifty-eight to restore the table and add the new module) it was added and would now run.

Not correctly mind you, but it would run.

Some more hacking on the module (“no, the product database doesn't have those fields, so forget about them!”) and I think it works.

I hope.

---

This is not a keyboard

Now, About that keyboard …

I'm picky about keyboards. The only keyboard I use are IBM keyboards. Specifically the IBM AT or PS/2 keyboards. Nothing matches the feel of the IBM AT keyboard; not even the PS/2 keyboard (although it comes very close). But those are quite rare, and the lack of a separate bunch of editing keys is a bit bothersome to me (as I'm used to the inverted-T layout of the arrow keys). PS/2 keyboards are easier to come by and with the exception of the CapsLock key being where the Control key should be (were God intended it on keyboards used by programmers) it's just as good as the IBM AT keyboard (oh, you can also rearrange the keycaps on the PS/2; good for practical jokes).

And both are, as far as I can tell, indestructable.

But I don't have one of those at work. I have … this.

This is not a keyboard. Oh sure, it may look like a keyboard, and it may even marginally function like a keyboard. But it is not a keyboard. This is a weak imitation of a keyboard. This wouldn't even survive my using it to hit a luser, much less survive me pounding the hell out of it in frustration of using Windows. This is a joke of a keyboard.

And that's my judgement on just the feel of the keyboard.

I also have problems with those … extra … buttons that adorn the top edge of the keyboard. The function keys? They don't work. Not unless you hit that small “F” key on the far left edge, which supposedly toggle between the use of the function keys as function keys, and the use of the function keys as some random controls for some bits of software somewhere. And that small ovoidal key above the small “F” key? That's the “User” key, which, curious about, I hit.

Immediately the screen shut off, shortly followed by my screaming out in alarm that this “User” key was in fact, a stealth Big Red Switch. Turns out it just locked (as in keyboard lock, not crash locked) my Windows session and blanked the screen. Intuitive use of the “User” key that. Now I'm paranoid about pressing any of the other “buttons” on that keyboard.

I'm seriously considering bringing in my own keyboard. I did that for my last two jobs; I don't see why this one should be any different.

---

Grass is always greener on the other side of the roof

The offices where I work are on the second floor. Below is the view outside the window of the conference room.

Why yes, there is grass growing on the roof. Why do you ask?

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Your friendly neighborhood Big Brother

With 3,600 stores in the United States and roughly 100 million customers walking through the doors each week, Wal-Mart has access to information about a broad slice of America - from individual Social Security and driver's license numbers to geographic proclivities for Mallomars, or lipsticks, or jugs of antifreeze. The data are gathered item by item at the checkout aisle, then recorded, mapped and updated by store, by state, by region.

By its own count, Wal-Mart has 460 terabytes of data stored on Teradata mainframes, made by NCR, at its Bentonville headquarters. To put that in perspective, the Internet has less than half as much data, according to experts.

Via The Diff Wire, What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits

Like last week, this week again I went shopping at Wal★Mart. I was talked into shopping there for a few weeks just to get a feel for how much money we won't spend there, as apposed to Publix. Yes, we're evil for doing it, and articles like the above don't make it any easier to do.

It's also amazing the amount of data they have, and how they can pour through it. Privacy and Big Brother issues aside, it is fascinating that they are able to data mine that much data. Who would have thought that Pop-Tarts and beer are big sellers prior to hurricanes? And how do you come up with the queries to find out such information?

But least you think that all that data Wal★Mart has can only be used for evil:

STILL, as Wal-Mart recently discovered, there can be such a thing as too much information. Six women brought a sex-discrimination lawsuit against the company in 2001 that was broadened this year to a class of about 1.6 million current and former female employees. Lawyers for the women have said that Wal-Mart has the ability to use its human-resources database to calculate back pay for the plaintiffs as well as to determine whether women were fairly promoted and paid. The judge hearing the case, which is pending in a federal court in San Francisco, has agreed.

The database is unusually detail-rich, said Joseph Sellers, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “They've put into their work force database the information that bears on virtually every facet of compensation,” he said. “They have performance reviews, along with seniority, the time spent with the company, which store they worked in. So you can compare people working in the same store, to measure whether men and women are paid differently.”

Via The Diff Wire, What Wal-Mart Knows About Customers' Habits

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Talk about ironic advertising

I'm sure this is completely unintentional, but I found it hilarious.

Tuesday, November 15, 2005

Catching up

From: <XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX>
To: <sean@conman.org>
Subject: Indolence…
Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2005 01:11:38 -0500

Mark says you're falling down on the job. (No posts since last Tuesday??) Actually, that's not how he put it, but I felt compelled to sanitize, since I don't know you.

Yes, things have been quiet since last Tuesday. I blame it on control panels (and no, I'm not bothering to link to the umptzillion posts I've made on control panels this time). But just as things were their darkest, Smirk pulled me temporarily off that project and onto more important things, like configuring a router for the DSL service we'll be offering (and the best part—I'll be getting free Internet service again! Unlimited static IP addresses! The ability to fix routing problems! The ability to control my own reverse DNS! Woot!).

Since I got MRTG playing nicely, I went ahead and installed Cacti, a type of “next generation” version of MRTG and a lot nicer to work with. Yes, the interface is a bit klunky, but I can understand why it's klunky the way it's klunky (you define your device and the type of monitoring you want. You then select the actual items you want to monitor and the type of graphs you want to generate (you can generate multiple types of graphs from the same data source). Then you create the graphs, and add them to the viewing tree) but it sure beats MRTG (where you hand generate the configuration file, then hand generate a page with links to the various graphs, unless you like looking at a raw directory dump in your web browser). Hopefully, the reports Cacti generates are good enough for Smirk to use and we can retire MRTG.

And to make matters better, I no longer have to install Web-CP. Granted, it's a different one I have to install, but the new one (still haven't come up with a pseudonym for it) seems more reasonable than Web-CP.

In other news, my friend Bill Lefler send me the link to his blog, so now Mark has another programmer's blog he can read while waiting for me to update mine.

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

“How many words per day was that again?”

So, here it is, November 15^th, which marks the halfway point of NaNoWriMo, and the expectation of having 25,000 words done by the end of the day.

My current count?

Let's see … la de da … carry the one … dum de dum … and I have a total word count of …

Zero.

The Magic 8 Ball says: Outlook not so good.

Sigh.

---

A night at the carnival

“We have to go on the Ferris Wheel,” said Bunny. “We just have to.”

“Okay,” I said. It's one of the few rides I don't mind at carnivals. “Although it's pretty big.” I also have a fear of hights but it doesn't always manifest itself—it's a fear that is partially situational, but that, as Alton Brown would say, is another show).

The carnival itself was in the parking lot of a large strip mall along US-441 and Glades, in Boca Raton, Florida. There are few fields left empty here in Lower Sheol anymore, so I guess they set up where ever they can these days.

It was rather slow by the time we showed up, near 9:00 pm. Whether it was due to the hour of the day, or the day of the week, I don't know. But there were hardly any lines to speak of. Bunny picked up the tickets and as we waited (there was one rider on the Ferris Wheel when we queued up) we bantered with the carney. The carnival is operated by a larger company that has several “units” out at any one time (one here in Boca Raton, another one in Ft. Lauderdale, and a few down in Miami) and that what we were looking at wasn't just a Ferris Wheel, but a huge Ferris Wheel, some 90′ tall.

A few minutes go by, and the wheel stops. We get into one of the gondolas, the wheel lurches forward a few cars, and a group get into another gondola; the carney explaining to the other group that the groups need to be spaced to keep the wheel in balance.

And we're off …

And it's clear by the time we peak over the top and are on the way down again that this isn't just a Ferris Wheel, but the Ferris Wheel. Vertigo kicked in and I just had to get off, but it took another three trips to get the carney's attention, and then me waving off Bunny as she tried to help (we were walking down a plank off the ride) but I really needed to get grounded, as in “standing on solid ground, now.”

After calming down a few minutes, we headed off to the Funnel Cake booth. I'm neutral towards deep fried dough but Bunny loves the stuff [Update Friday, November 17^th—Bunny wishes to let it be known that she loves funnel cakes and not just any old type of fried dough –Editor], so she got a funnel cake (she found it good but she's had better—I found it okay myself) and I got a soft-serve ice cream cone (I didn't get sick on the Ferris Wheel, I just couldn't take it).

Next to the Ferris Wheel was this outrageous ride. Not only does it swing back and forth, but the end, where you sit, spins. I found it horribly disorienting just looking at the thing, but it was very pretty with all the lights. It looked like something you would find in Las Vegas. Or on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

---

High Anxiety

About that Ferris Wheel ride …

I have acrophobia (and not vertigo as I always thought, much to my surprise) but it doesn't always manifest itself. In fact, I've ridden Ferris Wheels before without problem, although I don't think I've ridden one quite as large as the one earlier tonight.

As a young kid, I remember hanging out with my friend Duke and we would climb and walk along this fallen tree spanning a rather large hole in the ground (as a young kid, I would have sworn that the hole was 50′ deep but in reality it was probably not more than 10′ or so) without thought. We would also clamber up and down hills with a 70% grade or so (although at that point they cease to be hills and more like “cliffs” or “stupid kids—you'll fall and shoot your eye out on that cliff!”).

In high school, as part of Drama, I would set lights and to reach the FOHs I had to go outside the auditorium, enter the electrical breaker room, and climb up a vertical ladder. The only portion of the ladder you could see was at the bottom, in the electrical breaker room, where it went up past the ceiling. Once past the ceiling of that room, it was a) pitch black as there was no lighting, b) the ladder was surrounded by a steel cage and c) there were walls on two sides of the ladder (front and back). So not only were you cocooned on the way up, but the lack of light actually helped as you couldn't see anything, up or down. So the acrophobia never got a chance to kick in there.

And once up at the FOHs, I was too busy setting lights to really think that the only thing keeping me from a fall of about 60′ was chicken wire.

At FAU I also worked on the stage crew for the auditorium, and while it was no biggie to go up in the catwalk system that extended out over the audience, and even work spotlights from a platform about 40′ up in the center of the audience, waiting an hour for my cue could get … interesting (“Hmmm … I wonder how I'd survive if those four bolts right there were to fall out … oook”).

I also used to hang out on the roof of various buildings with friends at FAU, and even climbed out through the observatory (on the top floor of the Science and Engineering Building) onto the roof (where one mistep meant a real nasty fall) but I could never work up the courage to go out onto the top of the Social Sciences Building (and when my friends did that, I had to physically lie down on the ground the acrophobia kicked in so hard).

But I'm fine in airplanes. In fact, I love window seats and I get a thrill when the plane takes off and lands (I love watching the ground fall away, and watching us descend to land—go figure).

I've also ridden in cable cars, but the last time I did that I was 11 or so. I had a chance a few years ago in Palm Springs, California but declined when I actually saw the grade (and I'm getting short of breath just reading the specs on the website—sheesh!).

Last year in Las Vegas, Hoade and I snuck up to the upper floors of the Luxor Hotel and on each level is a floor to ceiling window overlooking the interior of the hotel. I couldn't even get within 10′ of the window, and even Hoade was apprehensive at approaching to take pictures.

So yeah, having ridden Ferris Wheels before, I thought I could handle it.

Apparently, I could not.

Thursday, November 15, 2007

I've blogged for so long, I'm beginning to forget what I've blogged about

Heh. Here I was, getting ready to post about The IDE Divide when, searching for past entries about my dislike of IDEs, I found out I already did (three years ago!).

This time, I definitely identified with being a language maven, but I can certainly understand the lure of being a tool maven. When programming, it's not uncommon for me to have half a dozen (or more) terms open, editing code, viewing a few header files, a few man pages open, and a command line sitting ready for compiling. I'm not much on syntax highlighting, but automatic code completion would definitly be nice, or perhaps a form of running commentary on the code.

Saturday, November 15, 2008

Scott McCloud is my homeboy

It's been a week of lectures. Today, Bunny and I drove down to the Miami Book Fair to attend Scott McCloud's lecture on comic trends.

The one thing that struck me about seeing Scott McCloud—his glasses aren't opaque. Second, he's going grey. Third, he's a funny guy (while waiting for the technicians to finish up so he could start his lecture, he asked the audience who was the most forgettable President. No answer was correct because if you named a President, he wasn't forgettable. Um … perhaps you had to have been there).

While the topic pretty much covered the territory in his book Reinventing Comics, there was still enough new material to make it fresh, especially with comics that have come out since the book was published in 2000.

And since he was speaking at a book fair he tended to emphasize the innovations that were (or needed to) happen in the print media, although he did touch upon some innovative web comics.

After the lecture, he held a book signing. I brought along copies of Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics and Making Comics, but given the line behind me, I decided to have him sign DESTROY!!: The Loudest Comic Book in the Universe!!!, an oversized comic book he did in 1986 of two superheroes slugging it out in New York City. He was quite amused to learn I had a copy of it.

Sunday, November 15, 2015

The Flowers and Fruit Basket Request Form Form

A certain HR manager, hired from DEC, arrived with a binder full of “memo templates” to be used for all intra-office communication. She loved memos so much that people were soon just calling her “Memos.” When she sent out a memo instructing everyone on the proper care of their office plants, Mereztky decided enough was enough. He and a few co-conspirators surreptitiously replaced the original memo in everyone’s in-box with another, which said that the company was now offering a service to take care of employees’ house plants; it seemed there was concern in management that, what with the long hours everyone was working, said plants were being neglected. An included multi-page questionnaire asked for the location of each plant as well as such essential information as the song it preferred to have sung to it while being watered. Some people took it seriously, mostly — and much to the Meretzky and company’s delight — the poor humorless souls in business marketing and the other more buttoned-down wings of the company. HR rushed around to put a cover sheet on each memo saying it was not to be taken seriously, whereupon Meretzky and company added a cover sheet of their own saying the cover sheet saying not to take the memo seriously should itself not be taken seriously. “Immense confusion” followed.

Not learning her lesson, Memos was soon distributing a “Flowers and Fruit Basket Request Form,” for sending out condolences to employees’ families who were experiencing a bereavement. Meretzky did her one better, creating a “Flowers and Fruit Basket Request Form Form”; the idea would later show up in Stationfall as the “Request for Stellar Patrol Issue Regulations Black Form Binders Request Form Form.”

» Down From the Top The Digital Antiquarian

Given some of the past memos I've received from HR at The Ft. Lauderdale Office of The Corporation, the idea of sending out satirical fake memos is appealing, but I like the paychecks that they send me to actually do anything like this.

Pity, because it sounds like fun!

Monday, November 15, 2021

Extreme sales position every one is dying for, Brevard edition

Actually, one more picture, caught by Bunny as we were leaving Brevard this morming:

It's a bit hard to see, but that “SALES HELP WANTED” sign is in a cemetery!

…

Yeah.

Anyway, we made it back safely to Chez Boca, and thus ends our 2021 trip to Brevard.

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