Nerds like bacon (periodically):
And I like bacon, so we’re all in agreement.
I’m Allergic to Global Warming…Literally
I knew that my allergies were really really bad this year, worse than I ever remembered. I would start to question whether my allergy medicine was working or not, but then I would read somewhere else about how bad allergies were in general this year. It does make me feel a little better to think that it’s not just me, it’s everyone.
It turns out that there is a reason for all of this. I’m allergic to global warming. No joke. Basically, rising global temperatures and changing climates are resulting in warmer springs, which leads to higher pollen counts.
This article reads like the script of a horror story. We have some choice quotes like, “Pollen from ragweed, which triggers most cases of spring hay fever, is projected to increase up to 100% between now and 2085”, “ragweed pollen could become up to 70% more allergenic”, and “climate change, it turns out, is likely to favor trees that give off pollen as opposed to those that don’t”.
AAAAAH!
Now, all of a sudden, it’s personal. That’s certainly something I didn’t think about when looking at those lush scenes with dinosaurs….dinosaur sized ragweed spewing dinosaur sized pollen year round.
No thank you, my friend. Me and my scratchy red eyes are voting for an ice age.
Another Monday, another set of quotes
Evie, laughing: “Aunt Rachael…cracking me up!”
Me: “Oliver, your big sister put her hair in the water all by herself.”
Oliver: “Mfgh!”
Me: “He said, ‘wow!'”
Evie, skeptically: “I’ll take your word for it…”
Evie is really learning how to use her words. She can be encouraging, as in “Good job hurrying Grandma!” when we are trying to get out the door. She can be so polite when she wants to, such as “Daddy, thank you for the big fork, but I would prefer a small fork.” On the other hand, she can also be not-so-polite, as in “I said I wanted strawberries, how dare!”
Evie had to go to the ear doctor a lot before she got her tubes in her ears. We tried to think of ways to make the visit a little more fun, and the ear doctor came up with the game of looking in her ear and seeing who was in there. “I see Elmo in this ear!” Evie got a big kick out of that. I’m still not sure if she understood that Elmo actually wasn’t in her ear. But anyway, we continue the game to this day, when we are doing checkups with her doctor kit.
Evie: “And in your ears daddy, I see…hair.”
You have to take a lot of abuse as a parent.
In Chicago, cupcakes come to you
I like cupcakes. Me and cupcakes go way back. However, like a lot of cupcake lovers, I’m pretty lazy. I don’t want to have to go track down the cupcakes; I want them to come to me. Finally, my dream is realized.
Flirty Cupcakes is a new company in Chicago that actually sells cupcakes out of an old ice cream truck. I declare this brilliant!
I like ice cream as much as the next guy, but if that cupcake truck has a unique song, I’m running twice as fast to get me some cupcakes.
Unfortunately, for the time being you have to check their twitter and chase them around the city, but they plan to expand. So here’s hoping for a cupcake delivery truck near you!
I am a programming god
I understand that most of you won’t understand this, but that’s okay. This post is for me!
At work I was put in a rough situation. If you tried to dream up the hardest, most ridiculous scenario for a programmer to be in as some kind of thought exercise, it would probably be better than what I had to deal with.
- The bug dealt with a goofy setup of a program that is pretty bad to begin with. So dealing with the program itself would be bad, but it was made worse by having the most counter-intuitive setup you could think of.
- The program has a huge history to wade through, with tons of legacy databases, none of which I am familiar with. So the tree sort of gets lost in the forest.
- The program uses abstract terminology that I’ve never encountered.
- The API to the program is in a proprietary language which I don’t know.
- The person who wrote the original code now lives in a different country.
- I was working under a deadline, namely, the end of the day. No pressure.
- I don’t have the program to interface with here at work. The guy who does have access to the program, doesn’t have a debugger. So neither of us are really in a position to debug.
- Did I mention that the program I’m supposed to access is in a different state? So, we are trying to work via a web conference. I can see his screen, but he can’t see mine. I basically send him files to try, which inevitably doesn’t work, rise, repeat.
- The guy on the other end of the web conference with the access to the tool isn’t a programmer, nor does he know anything about the program to interface with. So we are like the blind leading the blind.
So, to summarize, I have one day to fix a bug in code I didn’t write that interfaces with a horrible, backwards, customized, proprietary program which I’ve never used and don’t understand, and also which has a lot of history and obscuring details. On top of that, I don’t have direct access to the program, but I’m using an intermediary to type things for me in a different state, which I watch through a web meeting.
And I did it, baby. I did it. It took like 6 hours, but it got done. Booya!
And you reading this, much like my boss, probably had no clue how hard it was. Oh well.
Shane Halbach 