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| Wine Barrels |
It’s almost Halloween, and that’s had me thinking about snow, remembering the Halloween Blizzard of 1991. So I’ve been working a little more than usual to get everything battened down for the winter. Not sure why, but this year I’ve been thinking about snow more than most years. And some forecasters are saying we’re going to have more snow than normal. In any case, I broke down and bought a snowblower, so if there’s not enough snow to bother shovelling, you can blame me.
The week? Well, it started out rough. There was a panic at work over some bugs that were being talked about. But it turned out the guy making all the noise hadn’t even installed the version that was supposed to fix those bugs, and was griping about problems we already knew about. Then there’s a long-term project we’ve started planning, and one of the cowboys on the team was ready to go off and solve the problem. But I’ve been slowly grinding along methodically, fixing over a decade of patches made to some of the same code, so I questioned whether or not it would actually “help” me to have this person working on the project. Apparently criticizing this person is Just Not Done, since when I spoke up in the meeting, things suddenly got very quiet. But I seriously think that his “two weeks for stage one” will mean six or more months work from other members of the team who will have to go back and clean up the quick and dirty hacks that will let him get the job done so quickly.
By Wednesday, I’d mostly put all that frustration behind me. I wrote up some documentation of the problems I think we’ll have to consider that will make it more than a two-week project, pointed out that the bugs that had people worried were actually all fixed, and had gone back to what I’d been planning to work on Monday morning. Two days lost, but I guess I learned something about team dynamics if nothing else. And I managed to hold off on the complete course of self-medication until Friday, when I knew I’d have time to recover from the side-effects.
I’m still posting pictures from the Hastings trip last weekend to flickr. Haven’t gotten out with the camera since then, even though the weather’s been pretty darned nice, and there were probably lots of becostumed gals running around last night that would have made interesting photographic fodder. And I haven’t started unpacking the books yet, because I’m waiting for the floor in the library-to-be to finish curing after the third coat went on on Monday. I think I’ll wait until next weekend before I start tackling that project.
- Donncha has an explanation of Why you need the Adsense Competitive Ad Filter on your site. [holy schmoly]
- The C++ FQA Lite is a collection of frequently questioned answers about C++. An example section on defective C++ covers major shortcomings in the language, and the author states:
I believe that for any new project, there’s a much better language than C++.
It’s a darned good read while waiting for a compile or six. On a similar note, this “tutorial” on How To Write Unmaintainable Code gave me a chuckle. [flutterby] - The GeekWithA.45 points out An Excruciating Truth… to Ron Paul and others who don’t understand that
Whether America remains free and prosperous will be determined by whoever controls The Lightning; which is some critical portion of war suitable energy resources.
I’m with him in thinking that it’s damned good we’ve got Ron Paul in Congress, but the good doctor is not presidential material. [kim] - At work we discussed Stephen Green’s I Was a Card-Carrying Libertarian: Confessions of a Black Sheep Republican. One of the things that really saddens me is that (as pointed out in the Geek’s article) libertarians are outnumbered by vegans 3 to 1.
- Back in my high school days, I considered building the equivalent of The ThinkGeek Annoy-a-tron. But the other day I found something almost as annoying left for me by the people I bought my house from (almost four years ago). Turns out they’d put a fresh 9V battery in a smoke detector, but rather than putting it somewhere obvious, it was tucked in the rafters in the basement. When the battery got low on Tuesday this week, it started chirping. About once a minute or so. Took me until Wednesday evening to track the damned thing down. It got me wondering why somebody doesn’t make a smoke detector that’s easier to deal with when the battery is going dead.