Merry Christmas, everyone.
He says while managing to stiffle a laugh. I had to stiffle the laugh because it would have triggered a painful coughing jag. Influenza ran roughshod through my family during Christmas. I was the only one sick on Christmas day, but 3 more cases had appeared by Sunday night.
They say that the flu shot can't give you the flu. Probably true. But in my case at least, it activates the same defense reactions as the flu. Thus, I get the sweats and aches and sometimes the headache that I normally associate with the flu. So I tend to avoid flu shots.
But I normally pay attention to the news. In some years, the flu strain is so bad that they hold a second round of flu shots. In these years, I weigh the pros and cons and sometimes decide to take the shot rather than risk the flu.
This year, I got hit by a double whammy. I've been too busy to follow health news. Just too dadblasted much to get done before the end of the year and Christmas vacation and....
So, not only did I miss hearing how serious the flu was doing out in California (where I spent my Christmas), but I was also really beat from long hours at work before vacation.
It's too late to revise my thinking about flu shots for this year. But spending Christmas in a black haze and watching my Mom throw away the vast majority of the turkey, and dressing, and pie, and cookies, etc., just because no one was hungry for 5 days is definitely going to weigh in heavily in the "pro" column next flu season.
Life is strange and fairy godmothers apparently do exist.
Ever had one of those coincidences where you want to call someone and the phone rings and there they are?
Ok, how about this? You are running around putting out fires at work, putting enough miles on your shoes that you want to turn in a travel voucher and get reimbursed. Then you find that someone used the last of the supplies for your department's top quality color printer and failed to tell anyone about it.
Naturally, the powers that be consider this to be a disaster of fantastic proportions and there is no way that the department can function for an instant without that color printer, let alone the several days that you know an order will take. So you put out your current fire, take a deep breath and prepare to kiss butt and spend dough to get a rush order placed and hopefully get those urgent color prints flowing again.
You walk in to the supply clerk's office and she says, "Where do you want these supplies for the color printer?"
"Oh, yeah, don't forget that it is payday."
Not many thoughts recently. That's because I've been so busy at work that I simply haven't had the will to work on my home web pages. And yes, it is a matter of will and nothing else. There existed plenty of time to do things with my home machine and in fact I did do some "homework", but anything on my list of things to do that looked like a "project" simply evoked a mild dread that prevented me from considering working on it.
But the holiday occurred. (Which by the way increased the workload due to the fact that as of Wednesday noon I still hadn't bought my Thanksgiving turkey.) I took half a day and elminated the top of my dire chore list.
Thanksgiving tends to be a mild holiday for me. Cook a turkey, homemade stuffing, homemade gravy, a veggie or two. Pig out when it is ready or mid-afternoon, whichever comes first.
This Thanksgiving I gave myself an early Christmas present. While doing those dire chores, I made up my mind and bought a CD ReWriter. This gave me something to do while waiting for the turkey to start producing juice for the gravy and when not talking to family on the phone.
But this was supposed to be about working on the web pages. So now that I've blathered all over the map, let's get back on topic:
Ok, I'm an old Unix user. (Circa 1983.) I've programmed with some level of proficiency in the major Unix scripting languages, sh, csh, awk, sed, etc. (No, etc is not a programming language, it just looks like it. I hope no one ever really creates a language named etc.) Then I wrote a huge backup control program in csh which, despite the fact that it was essentially doing a preset sequence of commands, grew into a multi-thousand line, unmaintainable piece of junk.
Then came perl 4. Aaaahhhh.
A week later I had a 400 line perl script that did 70% of the job and I had redefined the task to elminate another 20%. A month later I had a 1500 line program that did 73% of the job and was looking really ugly. I was begining to wonder if I had made a mistake in choosing perl.
But I liked programming in perl. There's something nice about knowing that there is a kitchen sink available when a bathroom sink just won't do. So I started completely over. I was learning that the perl motto- "There's more than one way to do it"- also meant that my way was the wrong way most of the time.
For example, while learning perl, I would frequently get stuck on some really minor thing, and no change to the code would seem to make any change in the behavior. After a few frustrating hours, I would crack open the camel book. (O'Reily & Associates, "Programming perl" by Larry Wall and Randal L. Schwarz) Therein I would almost invariably find a perl function which does exactly what I was trying to make a huge subroutine do. I got so mystical about it that if I spent more than 10 minutes on a problem, I'd crack the camel expecting to find the answer in Chapter 4.
Back to the backup program. Two weeks of rewriting left me with 500 fairly clean lines of code that did about 95% of the backup. And the rest was "human intervention required" anyway. Perl was going to stay in my arsenal.
(About this time I discovered the Amanda backup program and all my work was moot, since Amanda was more flexible, more easily extensible and had fewer niggling little problems. On the other hand, Amanda is considerably more than 500 lines of code.)
So awk and sed and to a large extent the shell scripting languages went to dodo-vile for me. I started churning out 10-line, 20-line, 30-line perl scripts for everything under the sun.
I've wandered away from EmbPerl again. I guess I had other things that wanted to get expressed. But I'll close with a final thought about programming in general. It is my belief that the power of a programming language is measured by the ease with which you can do stupid, pointless things in it. Thus, EmbPerl:
[- $tim = time % 10 -] [$ if ($tim % 2) $] <BODY BGCOLOR="lt blue"> [$ else $] <BODY BGCOLOR="red"> [$ endif $]
This changes that background color of a web page based on whether the time is in an odd or an even ten second block. Really pointless, very easy.
I'm sick of it. How many times have I gone in search of a nice, highly recommended piece of software on the net, only to get caught in an endless round of signup forms? We are beginning to learn the true cost of "free" software-- loss of privacy.
It doesn't matter to me that every one of these sites has a link to their privacy policy. My privacy is gone the moment I have to answer a lot of impertinent questions. Sure I can often check the box that says that I don't want to hear from anybody about this software. But I still have to trust a wide assortment of differing people and policies. And some sites don't make any such promises.
(By the way, this is one of those moments when I really wish I had a digital camera-- There was a fantastically cool looking reflection from my closet doorknob that I wanted to share with the world. It is now gone and even if it returns tomorrow, I'm not sure that the magic feeling of seeing that brassy semi-circle of light will still be there.)
And the questions are getting increasingly impertinent! One site was REQUIRING both home and work addresses and phone numbers. I really sure that I'm going to give that information to somebody who needs to have a privacy policy link. Another site insisted that I give a fax number. Right. I don't even HAVE a personal fax number. Ok, I could fake it up with mgetty on my Linux box, but why? This was a piece of software I was downloading. There was no conceivable reason why these people needed my fax number to enable me to test or use their software. They didn't want to fax or email me any registration information.
Sun Microsystems wanted my job title before they would let me download their Y2K scanning program. Why? Is there no one out there running Solaris on their personal machines? Sun would like us to think that Solaris X86 is a viable home desktop system, but I guess that if you are looking for Y2K solutions, you must be doing it for your work.
I'd like to propose a minor revolt against signup forms for free software.
Naturally, these guidelines are for personal downloads. For professional downloads you must consider how your answers affect your company. I'm not saying that there won't be questions that are just as impertinent when you are downloading in a professional capacity. It is just more important to consider the ramifications of your actions when you are acting as a representative of your company.
And you still have to consider those ramifications when you are doing this for personal downloads, too. You have to evaluate the pertinence of the questions using your best common sense. In particular, if you feel that there might be legal ramifications to entering incorrect information in response to any question, then you should obviously consider the question pertinent and answer honestly or refuse to download.
Refusing to download is my prefered advice. Obtaining free software should never make you feel uncomfortable. If the process makes you feel uncomfortable, then consider that to be a cost for the software. In my case, it is almost always far more than I want to pay.
This one is dedicated to Tony. He should recomember (That's a portmanteau word, in the spirit of Lewis Carroll -- recollect and remember merged into one.) a dream experience that he related to me when we were both much younger and living on Beale AFB in California.
I was having a dream last night. The contents of the dream aren't important. (No, it wasn't anything that I'm embarassed to relate in a public forum.) At one point in the dream a tour group showed up at the place where I was working. The tour guide, whom I never saw-- I could only hear her voice, was describing the machine that I was working with.
Suddenly, there was a loud "pop" sound and her voice lost a lot of fidelity and in fact started sounding like she was talking over a cheap radio. And what she was saying changed too.
It took a few moments for it to sink in, but that "pop" sound is my clock radio turning on. And the tour guide was the woman who does the morning news blurbs on the moldy-oldies station that I have my radio set to. The day was beginning and I was awake.
This left me with some questions about dream states.
Today I am launching a feature in Fafnir's Hoard of an irregular opinion piece. Ok, so it's not really an opinion piece. Nor it is a regular rant off page to help me blow off steam. It's just a page where I will sometimes, hopefully regularly place some thoughts about things that interest, annoy, or just plain occur to me.
Today's Episode: How early do you know how your day is going to be?
Today I got my first clue on my bike ride into work. I ride a recumbent (ATP Vision R-40-- pictures to be scanned at some point in the near future.) and I've got these ultra chic fenders for diverting water away from my oh so tender hinney. I've also got "Power straps" on the pedals because I didn't want to have to wear a particular pair of shoes in order to ride my bike. On a recumbent your feet stick out in front of you and it is hard to keep them on the pedals without a strap or clips or clipless or something.
Anyway, on my way in to work, I had to stop at a street light. I took my foot out and put it on the ground. When the light changed I did something wrong and the strap got caught in the front of the fender and ripped the fender right off. Joy.
I've been riding this bike for three years and have only had the pedals interfere with the fender or front wheel once, way back when I was still adjusting to having my feet out in front of the front wheel. These days I don't even think about it.
Ok, so that was the fabu start of my day and it went down from there. I left work around 6:30 pm solely because I had managed to get the last dire emergency turned into a mere critical problem, which could be put off until tomorrow.
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