The Twilight Report

days become weeks

Thu, 05 Jan 2012 00:13:00 GMT

I don't think I have ever looked forward to going to Australia so much. I think maybe because this is the first time I was coming back since living here for four years. Living here wasn beutiful, but sometimes not quite right. I told my mum that I wanted to live in Australia for three months of the year with more conviction than usual. Maybe in a year or so I can make an arrangement with NetCon for this. Ideally it would be before my mum sells grandma's house so I'd have a place to live. I think we'd keep the house so long as there was someone to live there. I was living there until I moved back to the states.

I have a few more days left down under. I've done everything that I wanted to do on this trip and I have enjoyed every day here. I'll be ready to go back when it is time.

smoke

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 18:30:00 GMT

Smokey Sydney after the fireworks.

Same shot this morning.

nye

Sun, 01 Jan 2012 13:22:00 GMT

Happy New Year!

Lena and I saw in the new year in Sydney. Hello to everyone stll in 2011, catch up already :)

nikon new year

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:08:00 GMT

Rumor about the Nikon pro level camera replacement (commonly referred to its probable product name “D4”) popped up today on the usually reliable nikonrumors.com. The D800 (which will be Nikon's replacement for the D700, which I own) is expected to be announced at about the same time, probably early next year. I jokingly told Lena that she might inherit my D700 if the D4 specs are sufficiently drool worthy. The differences between the rumored D4 and D800 seem to be more significant than the differences between their predecessors the D3s and D700, as Nikon attempts to differentiate the two lines. The D800 will have a higher megapixel sensor aimed at gear heads who think that is important whereas the D4 will have high fps and low light capability which professional photographers appreciate.

english

Thu, 24 Nov 2011 15:29:00 GMT

electronic gadgets

Fri, 18 Nov 2011 16:25:00 GMT

Electronic gadgets I plan on taking on the flight to Australia with me for entertainment:

Nintendo 3DS + Super Mario 3d Land
Kindle Fire (for movies? I won't be getting it till Monday probably so not really sure how useful it will actually be)
Kindle 2 (for books)
Thinkpad T500
Bose QuietConfort 3 Acoustic Noise Cancelling headphones

... and I will probably just sleep through the flight anyway.

I was listening to the radio yesterday and someone made a comment about 2007 being the stone age of technology, because we didn't have “apps”. Call me crazy, and phone apps are handy for some things, but I still appreciate having a computer with enough processing power to run applications without having to use trendy abbreviations. Do I sound like an old person yet? I know that the rate of change on technology accelerates that process.

test

Wed, 16 Nov 2011 23:06:00 GMT

Way back, between when I was working on ChipBench and when I was working on EinsTimer at The Company, I had a temporary assignment with the lawyers to clear a third product (BooleDozer) so they could sell the source code to another party. A lot of the other developers I talked to disparaged the lawyers, and having to work with lawyers. I enjoyed the work and the lawyers, or at least one of the lawyers that I worked with. It was a nice change from the work that I normally did, and it wasn't random, I was qualified for the work.

Today I was asked to do some testing, which turns my usually approach to everything on its head. Usually as a Software Engineer, I get defects on my code, or worse yet on Bad Code or His Highness' code and I have to fix it. As a Test Engineer, I get to push buttons and try to break stuff and open defects when I find broken stuff. The best part is that defects instead of feeling like a burden feel like an accomplishment. I opened three defects today. Awesome. And I don't have to fix them. Awesomer.

Will I want to go back to being a Software Engineer tomorrow?

Oh, and I sent the defects to Bad Code. Awesomest.

film

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 01:04:00 GMT

My dad once told (I think it was) Lena that I was a film snob. In some respects I take it as a sort of back handed compliment, yes, I do think film is an art form, but no, I can enjoy trashy films too in the right context. I've been watching the Robocop movies for example, the first one was surprisingly deep, although they look really dated. It's like the future except people still have wood paneled station wagons and laptops the size of desktops. I wouldn't really recommend any of them, but ever since I read an article explaining that the first movie was full of Christian symbolism I decided I needed to see it. My mum downloaded the 25th anniversary episode of the (Australian) ABC's At the Movies for me, because I can't download it being outside of Aussie, and I really appreciate the thought. David picked two movies in his best of the last two and half decades that I had actually seen, All About My Mother and Lantana, both of which were good examples of film as art. I really miss their reviews. They consist of detailed analysis of the film, followed by a heated argument about the relative merits of the film, and then they rate them to within half a star of each other despite said heated argument. I care less about the stars though, and more about what they have to say. I like how they deconstruct film as an art form. Lantana was such a good film that I invited my friends over when I was still living in New York and fed them Australian lamb while forcing them to watch it. I thought the film was amazing, and my friends were too polite to say otherwise if they didn't like it.

australian politics

Sun, 06 Nov 2011 15:33:00 GMT

Australian politics explained using youtube cat videos.

qantas

Sat, 05 Nov 2011 13:35:00 GMT

Dreamt that I was flying to Sydney on Qantas, only there was a mix up in the booking and when I got to Kingsford Smith International I got transferred to a regional airport which didn't actually have a landing strip so I had to take a bus. They didn't let me get out at SYD, even though that is where I needed to go. When I got to hicksville, a gay bar tender was hitting on me, to which I responded that I was flattered but not interested.

Qantas was probably on my mind because of the recent lock out and government intervention, or maybe because they just signed up with NetCon as a customer. The last time a gay man was interested in me in that way though was way back in college when creepy Clint and and creepy Trina followed Guthrie, Tyler and myself around, apparently because they lacked anything better to do in their directionless lives. Trina was engaged to an unseen character who by all accounts was the punch first and ask question later type. She had the unrequited hots for Tyler who was at the time already spoken for, but even if he wasn't probably not interested. Clint and Trina initially took a dislike to me, but one day Trina called me up pretending to be Clint to play a trick on me, but she got to know me better in the course of the call and decided that I was not a bad person. I retrospect the whole calling me up pretending to be someone else thing should have been a red flag, but instead I told her not to do it again and forgave her. I was the unwanted fifth wheel in a love triangle mostly between Guthrie and Ellen and my sad tale of woe somehow endeared myself to Clint in particular. He decided that not only was I gay, but my friendship with Guthrie had homosexual overtones. I've always been comfortable with my sexuality, so you can make up your own mind. In short, Clint and Trina are the sort of train wreck that really ought to be avoided by anyone with any sense. Tyler recognized this almost immediately. I was sort of neutral on the two of them, being obsessed with my own drama hinted at by the whole Guthrie and Ellen situation. Guthrie though, he was the one who let them into our lives. That train wreck was his fault.

belarus

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 21:29:00 GMT

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]

(not actually true)

rt: california

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:58:00 GMT

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.

(more)

insult to injury

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 00:29:00 GMT

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.

he has this tendency to pass the buck

graham presents...

Fri, 14 Oct 2011 13:41:00 GMT

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.

util.pm

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 13:59:00 GMT

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.

bad code

Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:16:00 GMT

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.

mr. laeser

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 21:14:00 GMT

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.

anaheim

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 02:08:00 GMT

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.

rt: new york

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 00:28:00 GMT

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.

(some more photos of the Vanderbilt grounds)

bad code

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 12:28:00 GMT

I think the reason Bad Code is such a terrible software engineer is that he has never worked on a system that was easy to use so he assumes that his code also has to be as hard to use as possible. The reason his royal hiness Paul III is a terrible software engineer is that he is a passive aggresive twat.