“I need a vacation. I hear Sydney is nice this time of year.”

—plicease at 4 November 2011 16:33

“Coworkers are in desperate need of remedial Perl programming training.”

—plicease at 3 November 2011 14:34

“@denseclarity also try "stuff"”

—plicease at 2 November 2011 08:06

I have been bumping into an offshore employee located in Belarus at work, and I have to say working with him is exceptionally pleasant. He is polite and he works really hard. I wish we could replace Bad Code and High Highness with some more like him.

In other news, I received a promotion thanks to my good work on the Perl API (client side). I am going to be responsible for the Core API (server side) as well as the people working on the Core API (two contractors in India at the moment). I've never had minions before.

I'm going to Australia for Christmas, which is about as far in the future as I want to look at the moment. I am really looking forward to being back down under, although of course it will not be long enough. Two weeks is never long enough, but then neither was four years :) We are going to go swimming and I am going to eat only meat pies and lamingtons^[1]

1. (not actually true)

“Birthday din dins with Lena at Russian restaurant”

—plicease at 29 October 2011 22:31

“I tried using google voice search to find peanuts using that teacher talk but it didn't work.”

—plicease at 28 October 2011 14:37

“One of my coworkers is a zombie, the other is bill gates. Halloween.”

—plicease at 28 October 2011 13:41

“I think I just agreed to more work. Oops.”

—plicease at 28 October 2011 13:30

“People don't seem to believe me when I say driving in LA is easier and less aggravating than driving in Maryland.”

—plicease at 25 October 2011 16:26

Made two trips to California this year. The first was on a business trip to the NetCon all-hands meeting in San Jose. It was on a Monday, so I flew out the Friday before to hang out Tyler. I had been wanting to go to La Brea Tar Pits to see the dusty old bones. They had lots of wolves and a whole team of folks processing the remains on display.

They also had some mammoths and mastodons.

Here is one of the pits that they are taking remains from. It was stinky but interesting. I like old stuff.

There are lots of gum trees (eucalyptus) in southern California. I am a little torn, as I love gum trees and they remind me of home, but they are not native and in California they are a bit of a pest. There are so many invasive species in Australia that have wrecked havoc on the native critters that I am not crazy when I see Australian species being a pest outside of down under.

The second day we went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) for a Tim Burton exhibit. It was a lot of fun. I kept seeing pieces and thinking to myself “I had forgotten that he had done that”. I had also just seen Ed Wood the week before. They were quite militant about ensuring no photographs were taken. Coincidentally, LACMA is right next to the tar pits we had been just the day before.

We meandered through some other parts of the museum. Outside they had this great interactive sculpture that was a hit with the little ones.

My second trip to California also piggy backed, in this case, Lena had a conference at the Disneyland Hotel. I flew in on the Friday, rented a car and we went to Disneyland on the Saturday. I am a bit conflicted about Disneyland. I don't view Disney very positively as a company, but Lena and my mum are both very fond of the place, and there is something friendly about the place. When I was growing up, we went several times.

My favourite is Mr. Toad's Wild Ride, I think because I identify somewhat with Mr. Toad? Is that weird?

The submarines have been mostly supplanted with Finding Nemo's Wild Submarine Ride.

The Jungle Cruise is about 95% bad puns and 5% animatronic ducks.

Me and the pirate ship. I don't think it is a pirate ship, but everyone seems to call it that anyway.

It was nearly Halloween so there were lots of Halloween decorations. Speaking of Halloween they have also updated the Haunted House.

On our second day in the area we went to the Richard Nixon Presidential Library. Richard Nixon has a bad rap because of the way he left office. He was an outspoken anti-communist, but in his library he honours a number of communist leaders, like Brezhnev and Khrushchev here. He was complicated. He also created the Environmental Protection Agency and ended the offensive biological weapons program by executive order.

The grounds are really pretty. Nixon was born in the little house the other end of the reflecting pond that was built by his father, and he is buried near that. It is not a bad final resting place.

They also have the helicopter that Nixon road away on after he resigned. It is a famous image I am sure you remember it. Lena took this cool photo of it.

We went to Jack in the Box after the library, and I was almost ready to call it a day, but Lena found these cool ruins on the Internet so we drove down the 405. It's the Mission San Juan Capistrano. I like old stuff.

pretty little court yard with bells.

Stairs.

A place to sit.

Lena had a fun time photographing me through this window.

They also had some fish.

“Looking at old stuff in California.”

—plicease at 23 October 2011 20:04

“@plicease no animations could have such clear desire for bread crums that people throw at them ;)”

—lenviol at 23 October 2011 16:15

“Lighting”

—plicease at 23 October 2011 04:01

“Lena says thoes are real ducks, but I am pretty sure everything in Disneyland is either animatronics or plaster.”

—plicease at 22 October 2011 15:53

“LAX here I come”

—plicease at 21 October 2011 15:43

“Do you remember the Big Broadcast of 2006? No? Me either.”

—plicease at 19 October 2011 17:59

I had been waiting weeks for Bad Code to do three code reviews so I visited him in person yesterday to ask him (as politely as possible) to get off his ass. He promised to take a look at it, but as I was leaving he said something to the effect of “thanks for bothering me about this”, which I want to be charitable and think that he meant to say “thanks for reminding me” due to the fact that he as inept as social skills as he is at software engineering. It's disrespectful though, and there is no excuse for it.

The latest insult though was when His Highness Paul III sent me a defect telling me that it was “mine”^[1]. Not true, as it turns out when I went to visit him later that day I described the cause of the defect he said “oh I just fixed that”. “ah,” I didn't say, “so the defect was in fact ‘yours’.”

Bad Code did in fact finally approve my code changes.

I can't be too angry at then though, because I resolved four defects today. Not bad considering I only showed up at 2:30pm.

1. he has this tendency to pass the buck

“What is with everything having to be a "thing"? Is that a thing?”

—plicease at 18 October 2011 17:44

“I was going to be working late and then all of a sudden I resolved 4 defects in the space of an hour, and one of them was even mine.”

—plicease at 18 October 2011 16:21

“I was totally unawares that smart match was "broken" and a "heaping pile" because I had never had the need to use it. I still like //”

—plicease at 18 October 2011 09:19

“@plicease lol. That's interesting!”

—lenviol at 17 October 2011 23:19

“Japanese Wikipedia describes Toad as a "vassal" of the Mushroom Kingdom, where as the English Wikipedia says he is a citizen.”

—plicease at 17 October 2011 16:17

“Hoping that upgrading the wireless driver on my T410 will end the infrequent but persistent BSODs.”

—plicease at 17 October 2011 12:04

“Bad Code is all "what you want me to do my job? No way!"”

—plicease at 17 October 2011 12:02

“Dreading the commute this week with my NPR station in pledge week mode.”

—plicease at 16 October 2011 20:52

“Mega Man II cart + Retron 3 = fun memories from growing up with a funny green cast.”

—plicease at 16 October 2011 18:07

Yesterday I did a presentation on the project that I had been working on for other developers on the team. My manager and my former manager were present. Failing the second coming of Alan Turing interrupting the proceedings, it really couldn't have gone any better than it did, and many people congratulated me on the presentation and the work that I had done on the project. A couple of people even said they understood the project better now than before the presentation, which I think is an even better compliment. I had been nervous about the presentation since I agreed to do it several weeks ago. In elementary school I totally forgot what I was going to say during a speech contest in front of the entire school. Yesterday though, I felt comfortable as I looked at people's faces. PHP Guy even nodded in approval when I said that all feature and bug fix checkins for the project should include a test case. My manager asked when we were going to have a ruby version because he prefers dots to arrows. My manager has a tendency to offer suggestions that are really not that helpful, but the truth is we can do a ruby version when there is an internal need or customers are asking for it, so that is what I said. After the presentation I thanked Bee Man for his help and teamwork on the project and the presentation.

“subversion says ............................................................................................................................”

—plicease at 11 October 2011 19:42

We have this really annoying utility module SomethingOrOther::Util, and anytime I get a defect from QA in the past they were using this subroutine from it:

sub printHash
{
	my $obj    = shift;
	my $indent = shift;
	my $fh     = shift || \*STDERR;
	
	foreach my $key (keys %{$obj}) {
		print $fh $indent . "$key = " . $obj->{$key} . "\n";
		if ("$obj->{$key}" =~ /HASH/)  { printHash($obj->{$key}, $indent . " ", $fh); }
		if (ref($obj->{$key}) eq "ARRAY") { printArray($obj->{$key}, $indent . " ", $key, $fh); }
	}
	
	print $fh "\n"
}

It's not a terrible function I suppose, but there are so many better ways to do this that handle corner cases and that in no way require reinventing any round transportation devices, and it does demonstrate the not-invented-here syndrome that I face everyday. I also think that util modules are often (but not always) a sign of poor design. The other day I removed that subroutine from the customer facing version of Util.pm, along with a whole lot of other cruft. Defect today came in from QA about the API today and they were using Data::Dumper instead. Small win.

“@ozlishe Microsoft should really let Skype know that because every time Skype gets the focus it asks me to upgrade again.”

—plicease at 10 October 2011 08:49

“@plicease no-just every second Tuesday of the month-like the rest of Microsoft products.”

—ozlishe at 10 October 2011 08:14

“Really Skype? You need to ask me to upgrade every two minutes?”

—plicease at 9 October 2011 18:52

“Hard to type and eat a lime ice block at the same time,”

—plicease at 9 October 2011 13:25

“BBC's embargo of videos on their website sucks.”

—plicease at 9 October 2011 09:47

“mmm strawberry ice block.”

—plicease at 7 October 2011 20:57

“I think I will take this weekend off”

—plicease at 7 October 2011 19:03

“Although my windoze did just BSOD maybe they hacked me to get even and I didn't even realize.”

—plicease at 7 October 2011 16:34

“Had a technical argument over email at work now I am not sure if I won them over or if they all died unexpectedly at their computers.”

—plicease at 7 October 2011 16:31

“CentOS 5 / RHEL 5 I will be so glad when you die.”

—plicease at 7 October 2011 10:50

“Everything they write here is a GD regex. They have no imagination or sense of quality.”

—plicease at 7 October 2011 09:11

I've been frustrated with a bug in logging code owned by Bad Code. There were two bugs, one was that an empty string would cause the script to barf with the particularly helpful "*** Error / Unknown Error ***" message, the other was that if you had a colon in the message it would alter the severity level of the script and ignore most of the message. Went over to Bad Code's cube and explained the problem, to which he responded “I don't understand what you are talking about”. Then I literally (and I don't mean figuratively like when people say I literally died) repeated what I said with deliberate talking to your grandparents five minute spaces between each word and he changed is avoidance tack by saying “I guess I can see how you might consider that a bug”. The thing doesn't f***ing work and you could see how you might considering a f***ing bug? He then proceeds to explain why the bug is there, which I understand but when he asks if I understand I say “no” because I don't understand how you can argue it isn't a f***ing bug.

Karim stopped by today to to tell me how much easier I had made his life. I've taken a liking to him. I am hoping that I might be able to count on him with the revolution comes.

“Sometimes I think Bad Code just hates our users. It would explain a lot.”

—plicease at 6 October 2011 13:01

“This is Bad Code's response to something that is clearly broken and doesn't work "I can see how you might argue that is a bug."”

—plicease at 6 October 2011 12:43

“Noticed zelda vc 3ds has original bad translation intro unlike vc wii which is corrected. I like the original better.”

—plicease at 4 October 2011 21:29

“Still no protests in Australia.”

—plicease at 4 October 2011 18:21

“Dear Apple fanboys: my condolences on the iPhone 5”

—plicease at 4 October 2011 18:19

“My project is going to be distributed under ISC license (functionally equivalent to 2 clause BSD). I am excited about this.”

—plicease at 4 October 2011 12:24

“Multiple versions of LWP at the same time now such a good idea.”

—plicease at 2 October 2011 17:40

“I invented a new dance called the epileptic zombie last night.”

—plicease at 2 October 2011 11:37

“Videographer has a spot light bolted to his camera that makes me feel as though I am escaping from the big house.”

—plicease at 1 October 2011 22:14

“Two weddings today. One involved a lot of praying. The other is fictional.”

—plicease at 1 October 2011 17:27

“On the road to New Jersey and I realized I forgot my 3DS and my camera once again.”

—plicease at 30 September 2011 17:20

I stumbled into my high school computer science “teacher” on the facebook, and this is a first, I may have finally found someone I dislike who actually don't want to add.

“"nothing says democracy like a royal decree"”

—plicease at 30 September 2011 10:01

“I wonder what the most common county name is in the United States. There are eight Oranges. CA FL IN NY NC TX VT VA”

—plicease at 29 September 2011 23:03

I just booked tickets to LAX in October. Lena and I are going to Disneyland and the Richard Nixon library. I amuses me that they are just 15 minutes apart.

“@plicease lol! You really are weary of the drivers Maryland!:)”

—lenviol at 29 September 2011 08:40

“I dreamt that a park ranger was teaching an elephant to ride a bike on a busy road, and the elephant kept making a wrong turn.”

—plicease at 29 September 2011 08:34

“There really is no excuse for how bad Maryland drivers are.”

—plicease at 28 September 2011 20:05

“Being a pedestrian in Annapolis is sucktastic. Who builds a city with sidewalks but no crosswalks?”

—plicease at 28 September 2011 11:11

My friends Brad and Sherry got married in Georgia last weekend. We weren't able to make that celebration, but we did make the New York reception, which turned out to be a wonderful excuse to catch up with most of my friends from the six years that I lived in New York. Joanna and Padrock were there, which was nice because it allowed Lena to meet them for the first time. Now my only friend from my New York years she hasn't met is MegO. One day we will have to make a trip up to Boston so that I can catch up with her and so Lena can meet her and her family.

We headed right for the Hudson Valley this weekend and we had lunch at the German Deli. The German Deli is in fact not called the German Deli, and hasn't been since before I even moved to New York in 2000, but the name is always what people at The Company called it, and so the name has stuck. I had the beef brisket, which I always have, and I always sort of wish that I had ordered the bacon blue cheese burger. They also have Darrel Lea liquorice, all the way from Australia, so I had that for dessert.

I thought it was going to rain mercilessly (though in the end it didn't), so I suggested that we go up to Hyde Park to check out the Vanderbilt mansion and the FDR home and library. The Vanderbilt mansion is much as I remembered it. The tour was free apparently because it was National Public Land Day. The FDR home and museum has a brand new visitor centre, with a pretty tile floor that acts as a map of the region back when FDR was still alive. One of the guys there said that the Vanderbilts looked down on the Roosevelts, and I remember making the observation when I visited both sites with my family back in 2000 that it was better to be rich than to be President. The inside of the FDR house was covered with pictures of navy ships shooting at each other. FDR was clearly obsessed.

“Rainy tower on NJ tunpike”

—plicease at 23 September 2011 19:01

“It's raining like the dickens here. Where does that expression come from? Was Dickens especially rainy?”

—plicease at 23 September 2011 18:09

“Managed to get my changes checked in before code complete :) "Graham wins"”

—plicease at 23 September 2011 16:14

“None of the people I need to talk to are actually in the office today. Why did I bother coming in?”

—plicease at 23 September 2011 11:32