every time we get a heavy rain, they make sure there are enough recyling bins (presumably heisted from vacant cubes) out on the atrium to catch the drip-water from the leaking roof.
yep, it’s these little gestures that show they care and that remind me i work for a fortune 100 company.
coffee is a beautiful thing.
folks, this is what happens when you decide “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” in regards to keeping your damn software up-to-date. when it does finally break, nearly a decade and a half later, no one can fix it. why? because you have a vendor app that was written with Borland C++ 4.5, and i can’t get my hands on that to create a debug version of the exe, that’s why. and XP doesn’t want to let a 16-bit windows debugger run (there is probably a workaround for that, but dear fucking god! you’re still using a 16-bit system!).
honestly, we even keep the damn cobol on the back end at the current version, and that language used to use punch cards. not to mention that it pre-dates, well, me. but no. i’m stuck supporting your shitty little system and learning all about obsolete versions of languages, since you never saw fit to upgrade from FoxPro 2.6a and your app apparently uses Clipper to read dBase III tables. it’s not even comprable to learning latin; i’m learning etruscian instead.
i’d smack whomever is responsible for this system never being upgraded or having the business moved to a different system. but i don’t know who they are and i suspect they are in iowa.
i’ll admit it: i was worried. watching the rays tee-off on daisuke did not put me in a good mood. nor did getting called by work help. add a toddler with a cold (that he has kindly shared with me) and, well, the game faded to the background. everytime my attention flitted over to the tube, despair seemed inches closer. clock ticking, pendulum swinging, noose tightening and various other clichés come to mind. resignation slowly started to creep in (cause, well, the rays are good). i was distracted. the game faded further into the background.
should i have known better? part of me did, i think. i can never count them out, even when i should. even if i do, i’ll still watch to the bitter end, unlike those undeserving fucks who walked out on earlier games: i’ve sat an hour in the rain in an empty ballpark, just because it hadn’t been offically called yet. and that for a regular season game. i’ve watched this team backed into a corner in the ALCS and seen what they can do. still, i was distracted. i had to work. my attention waivered. we were down 7-0. shit.
still, i should have known better. finished up with work, for the moment and, wait a minute…we scored! then, papi. holy fuck, that was beautiful. the heart saw it half a minute before the eyes did. after that, you just know. there is no way a comeback like this starts and doesn’t get finished. i still missed parts: drew’s home run, for instance, cause work called again and the boy was still not feeling well.
but i listened to the end. outside, in the back yard, with radio, pipe and whisky. usually, i’ll read while i listen to the games, but the book was closed for this one. for a game like this, radio is the way to go. you anticipate everything more, every moment holds more tension, more promise. plus, you get to listen your team’s announcers and some good old biased commentary; rather than the hired talking heads on the idiot box. the excitement is intoxicating. tied going into the ninth. masterson is on the mound and in a jam. nerve-wracking. but he’s there to throw sliders and throw them he does. double-play, dear god that was huge!
bottom of the ninth. pedrioia is out. papi is out. youk is…safe! and an error! bless you youk, for fooling longoria into thinking you run fast. youk on second, 2 out, bay is predictably walked. drew is up. so am i. you have to stand up for this sort of situation. three balls. one strike. then, magic, again. line, shot, hop-the-wall…double!!! victory!!! it always feels a bit silly to dance by yourself in the dark night air. so what? this deserves a dance of joy.
saturday is next. doesn’t matter anymore if we win or lose (though i’d prefer a win), cause we sure as hell aren’t going down without a fight. that’s the beauty of this game; you just never know what you’ll see.
dear fucking god are people stupid. well, we released version 2.0 of our app just before the holidays, and finally sunset the old, creaky, obsolete and occasionally just incorrect DOS apps it built to replace. guess what? in the year that version 1.0 was in production, it turns out approximately three people were actually using it. so, with this release, we’ve got all the problems of the initial roll-out. meaning, no one knows how to use it, there is no training and none of the users can figure it out. because they are, by and large, stupid. did i mention that? the calls to the help desk are starting to wind down, but i still have to call these assholes. and i hate it. hate it. hate it. there is a reason i am a programmer and it’s not a love of technology. no, instead, it’s because i don’t have to deal with people. now, they are forcing me to do it. fucking bastards. they didn’t give me a large enough raise for this sort of crap.
man, that went fast.
so, despite being on FMLA leave, i find myself, once more, working. apparently, one of the projects i’m on decided to start having issues right after i started leave. and, it seems my boss got chewed out by our VP because i’m out of the office. what was i thinking? obvivously, i should have scheduled my son’s birth after the production release date (i’m sure perse would have been happy to carry the little guy for another month and a half). didn’t i know the project was in danger of going red?
the end result though, is the shit hit the fan and i get to clean it up. since much of my time is currently allocated to shit cleaning anyway, i suppose i’m best qualified for the task. i mean, i still have to test, but it took me (sleep-deprived and all) a whole, maybe, 3 hours to analyze the problems and fix them. obviously, my expertise was needed.
so, what happened? well, i got two defect tickets to tackle. one was an oversight: a derived field in the host extract module that was left alone because calcs would, well, calc the correct value. alas, there is a particular output that is pre-calcs and thus needs the correct value straight from the host. took a whole ten minutes to analyze and fix.
the second defect resulted from the fact that a drunken monkey designed the structure of the test environments. basically, the host has one more test environment than the server world. not only do they not match, but while the server progression is linear, the host code promotion is, well, a zig-zag. basically, i did’t realize they were moving code to the next level, and that lower levels don’t pick up all the higher levels. apparently, this is supposed support parallel development, but i’ll be damned if i can see how it does. it’s supposed to allow them to run QA and INT cycles concurrently, with out INT being affected by the changes in QA. but, QA is going to hit PROD first, so why the fuck would you not want those changes picked up? seriously? what the fuck? so, basically, by moving my code to QA, INT stopped working, because it was defaulting to running the production code. i cannot emphasis how fucking stupid this is.
assholes. i might have been able to do this a bit faster, but seriously, anyone else on the host team could have figured it out. but, they weren’t specifically assigned to it, so why should they look? better to interrupt my leave time, obviously. i’m particularly pissed off about the last problem because the people running the test job should have known what was happening.
other news from this week:
and just in time for a 10AM meeting! oh boy.
great. so, my internal work IM seems to have lost connectivity. we’ll add that to list of today’s frustrations. along with the fact that WID never deployed the latest version of our service to the INT box. oh, it went to QA and was released in production last week. but it’s still not in INT. what the fuck? we’ll tack on to that the request i just got for documentation on this service, so the people who took over maintainence of it (last fucking year) actually have some clue as to what it does.
this is on top of the frustration of not being able to test my own work. seems to be working in lower environments, using the same code. and it doesn’t seem to be data driven, as, well, transactions that should hit well established error processing code (ie: none existant policies) aren’t going through. i have no information at all as to what is going arwy. which is leading me to believe the transaction just isn’t being run at all. bugger.
but what i really want to say is that disney is evil. not just in the usual “disney is evil” sense. they’ve gone beyond that. today, i saw a commercial for some show called “my friends tigger and pooh”. apparently, this is a cgi cartoon about a little red-headed girl who solves crimes with tigger and winnie the pooh. seriously. what in the name of all that is holy is this crap? who thought this would be a good idea? i’m not even a big fan of pooh. but shit like this is just wrong.
disney: dedicating to rooting timeless classics in a very specific time! woo hoo!
i think it’s time for a drink.