Frivolous Friday, 2021.01.15, the Stan Rogers edition

I'm not sure how, but we're apparently All About the sea-shanties this week,  So here's a double-barrelled middle finger to the January 6th Capitol Hill terrorists, courtesy of a U.S. expat living in Maritimes Canada.  (Note:  All the Stan Rogers versions seem to be locked up by YouTube or Reddit, but this is a lovely, lively cover:  https://vimeo.com/182341839)

Oh, the year was twenty and twenty-one --
How I wish I was employable now! --
When viral tweets from the tangerine King
Riled the scummiest rabble I'd ever seen:
Hell-ban them all! I was told,
We'd take back votes that the Democrats stole,
Wave our guns, drink lib'ral tears.
Now I'm a D-list player in the Vlog-o-sphere
The last of Donald's Privateers.

When four red states flipped over to blue --
How I wish I was employable now! --
The Murdochs & Mercers & alt-right hive
Swore that two plus two added up to five:
Hell-ban them all! I was told,
We'd take back votes that the Democrats stole,
Wave our guns, drink lib'ral tears.
Now I'm a D-list player in the Vlog-o-sphere
The last of Donald's Privateers.

The "patriot" crowd was a sickening sight --
How I wish I was employable now! --
Some came armed with zip-ties or horns or bombs,
And the half of them driven there by their Moms
Hell-ban them all! I was told,
We'd take back votes that the Democrats stole,
Wave our guns, drink lib'ral tears.
Now I'm a D-list player in the Vlog-o-sphere
The last of Donald's Privateers.

The Ellipse spiels were the opening act --
How I wish I was employable now! --
Rudy and fail-sons and Papa, too
Each blessed the mayhem we came to do:
Hell-ban them all! I was told,
We'd take back votes that the Democrats stole,
Wave our guns, drink lib'ral tears.
Now I'm a D-list player in the Vlog-o-sphere
The last of Donald's Privateers.

We swarmed the building with the big white dome --
How I wish I was employable now! --
We smashed glass and doors, maybe foiled some locks
But quick-witted aides saved the ballot-box:
Hell-ban them all! I was told,
We'd take back votes that the Democrats stole,
Wave our guns, drink lib'ral tears.
Now I'm a D-list player in the Vlog-o-sphere
The last of Donald's Privateers.

I prowled the halls spoiling for a fight --
How I wish I was employable now! --
A trial-by-combat with Pelosi
Or a best-two-out-of-three versus AOC:
Hell-ban them all! I was told,
We'd take back votes that the Democrats stole,
Wave our guns, drink lib'ral tears.
Now I'm a D-list player in the Vlog-o-sphere
The last of Donald's Privateers.

We snapped our selfies without a mask --
How I wish I was employable now! --
We took our trophies and set out for home,
Not one of us packing a burner-phone:
Hell-ban them all! I was told,
We'd take back votes that the Democrats stole,
Wave our guns, drink lib'ral tears.
Now I'm a D-list player in the Vlog-o-sphere
The last of Donald's Privateers.

My name was added to the No-Fly List --
How I wish I was employable now! --
Tho' I was down with Capitol Police,
I was doxxed to the G-men by my teenaged niece:
Hell-ban them all! I was told,
We'd take back votes that the Democrats stole,
Wave our guns, drink lib'ral tears.
Now I'm a D-list player in the Vlog-o-sphere
The last of Donald's Privateers.

President Harris is the Anti-Christ --
How I wish I was employable now! --
I'll sign off now before I wake me Mom--
Click 'Like' and donate to my Patreon:
Hell-ban them all! I was told,
We'd take back votes that the Democrats stole,
Wave our guns, drink lib'ral tears.
Now I'm a D-list player in the Vlog-o-sphere
The last of Donald's Privateers.

Silly Saturday, 2018.11.24, the Kenny Rogers edition

On a late Sunday evenin',
At a start-up out of runway,
I sat next to The Greybeard,
We were both too tired to weep.
So we took turns a-sighin'
As the errors rolled from Jenkins,
'Til ennui overtook him
And he began to speak.

He said, "Grrl, I've made a life
Out of savin' founders' bacon,
Smellin' trouble brewin'
'Fore the pinks slips start to fly.
By the green hue of your skin-tone,
I can see you called your options
If you'll walk me down the hall-way,
I'll give you some advice."

So we headed to the break-room
And he kicked my butt at foos-ball,
Then opened up the drink-'fridge
And slammed a Mountain Dew.
Then the place got almost quiet
Once we set our phones to "vibrate."
He said, "If you wanna make the rent, grrl,
This is what you got to do."

[Chorus]
"You got to know when to ship it,
Know when to slip it,
Know when to refactor,
When to let things stand.
You never work ev'ry weekend
If the CEO's not there, too.
There'll be time enough for workin'
When the Round A lands."

"Now, ev'ry Greybeard knows,
That the secret to the pay-off
Is knowin' that ideas mean jack
When your team can't see them through.
'Cause every app. is Facebook
And every app. is Friendster,
And the best that you can hope for
Is your VCs know it, too."

And when he'd finished speakin'
He ordered up an Uber,
Buffed his LinkedIn resume,
Tossed his work-badge in the trash.
And once at his next start-up,
The Greybeard hit the jackpot.
But in his parting words I'd found
Advice that I could cash.

[Repeat chorus three times]

Frivolous Friday, 2016.04.01: Wishful, Wistful Thinking

We code-crunching types tend to think of ourselves as logical and data-oriented, but we're not above pipe-dreams of our own.

Understand that the last few workdays have seen a significant up-tick in traffic between my development stations and the server.  Alas, my younger, newer, PC with the snazzier OS is the one with the wifi hiccups.  (The 2nd-hand Dell from 2009 shambling along with Debian?  Rock solid.  Nat'cherly.  Get off my lawn, you snot-nose Ubuntu kids! ;~P)

Anyhoo.  As I babysit the second third fourth database restore of the day, I can look at a single complete stored procedure (and the start of a second one) that represents the sum total of today's "work" that hasn't involved email.  :~(  And I again internalise the problem with such intermittent bursts of down-time.  Namely, how they're good for housekeeping (e.g. backups or quick web searches in response to events like this week's Build2016 announcements), but not heads-down work. 

And (mentally) sandwiched between all today's nickel-and-dime penny-ante (yeah, I just mixed monetary metaphors--roll with it) is sugar-plum fancies of the (mature) software developer.

In my favourite fairy tale, the record-locking gremlin (or something equally time-wasting) has struck again, the coffee thermos is both empty and cold, and our heroine knows better than to make another pot at this point in the day.  And just as her shoulders droop in despair at the lateness of the clock and the shortness of her list of crossed-off tasks, The Programming Fairy Godmother appears.

The Programming Fairy Godmother (or, "PFG," as we'll call her from here on out) is dressed in a white silk ball-gown + tiara, both deliberately reminiscent of Ada Lovelace--though sporting horn-rimmed glasses like Admiral Grace Hopper.  (Hipster!).  In lieu of a wand, she carries a shining tablet computer (because tablets can do everything, amirite?)

"Despair not, my dear," she says.  "In all your career, you have faithfully treaded that fine line between over-engineering and creating technical debt.  You have sanitised your inputs.  You have, despite their appalling lack of appreciation for data integrity, maintaining empathy for the end-user.  Moreover, you have commented your code, unit-tested, spot-checked, made frequent source-control check-ins, and generally shipped on time.  For this you have earned a reward."

"Huh?" says our heroine.  "Uh, that's just doing my job.  You know, like a real programmer."

"Oh, honey, you have nooooooooooo idea..." replies the PFG, with a near-audible eye-roll.  "If you only knew what can bag you six figures plus stock options in Silicon Valley..."

"Good point," replies the programmer, "let's not go there."

The PFG holds up the tablet, which begins to play a PowerPoint retrospective of the programmer's career.  There she is as a much-younger student, waiting in line waiting for the printout of her program and output on fan-fold green-bar paper.   And regularly sneakernetting--as big floppy discs give way to smaller floppy discs, and then to CDs, and DVDs and flash drives, and occasionally, backup tapes.  Somewhere along the line, punctuated by the "RRRRRRRRRR--broingity-broing-broing!" of a modem, memories of sneaker-netting were interspersed with waiting for web pages to download.  Also, FTP, SFTP, SCP.  Backups.  Restores.  And, regardless of decade or operating system, our heroine can be seen twiddling her thumbs while her computer boots up.  Reboots to install the updates to the Adobe software updater--'nuff said.

If her fairy godmother had meant the presentation to be uplifting, she had failed miserably.  The programmer felt the weight of all the, well, waiting.  Minutes, hours, and (effectively) whole days of not being able to just tuck into the work at hand with her full attention--all flashed before her in a varied, yet monotonous panoply of wasted time.  

Being an Upper Midwesterner only recently relocated to Canada, the programmer bit back her disappointment and considered the possibility that she was being trolled by a supernatural being.  "Well, it's good to know that someone still appreciates the virtue of patience," she ventured once the excruciatingly soporific mini-biography had concluded.

The Programmer Fairy Godmother gave the programmer a blank stare.  "You're seriously kidding me, right?  No, kiddo.  I'm giving you that time back."

"Wuuuuuuut?" was the best retort our stunned heroine could muster.

"You heard me," said the PFG.   From the standpoint of your cubicle, time stands still until you fill all that otherwise wasted time.  Now get off that mocha-latté-padded butt and build something awesome.

So, with scarcely more than a "Thank you!" hollered over her shoulder, the programmer immediately scarpered the heck off.  Because her Momma might have raised a lazy, selfish git--but she for sure did not raise a fool.  And, despite wasting a, frankly, inexcusable amount of time screwing off on the internet, the programmer managed to manage her time well enough to build A Thing.  With (for a change) herself and her friends, and (incidentally) some of the rest of humanity in mind, thank you very much. 

When all was said and done, code just plain shipped.  Without answering to the mandarins of Marketing or Legal at every turn.  Without enduring infinite fractal Groundhogs Day-esque strategy meetings.  Without quashing the eternal food-fights over flat vs. skeuomorphic design.  (Or, worse, Helvetica vs. Suisse fonts.)  Without having to look over her shoulder for hockey-stick inflection-points in the adoption curve.

And, after a couple of iterations (and the inevitable hiccups), everyone involved was appreciably better off for the results, thank you.

Mind you, the programmer was never wined & dined by Y-Combinator or Andreeson-Horowitz.   She didn't publish self-congratulatory business self-help woo, much find herself on the TED/SXSWi circuit.   She never once did a reddit AMA or made the cover of Inc. or FastCompany...though she may have been interviewed by an intern for TechCrunch.  Or maybe it was CNet.  She can't remember now, but honestly it doesn't even matter--that piece never saw the light of day in any case.

But I think that we can safely say that this programmer, at least, lived happily ever after. 

Frivolous Friday, 2016.03.04: "darwin.config"

Frivolous Friday, 2015.08.21: Do it for Darwin

There are currently two categories of Darwin Awards.  There's the kind where the recipient has removed himself or herself (but mostly himself, as it turns out) from the gene pool.  And there's the Honourable Mention--a.k.a. still dog-paddling in the gene pool. In the midst of the huffing and--let's face it, pure schadenfreudish glee--of the Ashley Madison hack/leak, I can't help but see a Darwinian window of opportunity.  Humour me for a minute and hear me out, because I'm sorta-kinda-maybe serious here.

The thing that struck me the most about the news--okay, okay...the thing that struck me after I stopped smirking over the completely unsurprising revelations about Josh Duggar, Jason Doré, and Ottawa, Ontario--was how many blithering, mouth-breathing, knuckle-dragging idiots used "real" email addresses to register an AM account.  Like, email addresses that their spouses would recognise.  Or, more stupefyingly, their work email addresses.  Seriously, this is the level of stupid that warrants having one’s email privileges revoked.  Possibly for life.

Attention, I/T Managers of the world:  This is your moment.  

Having clocked in two years of desktop support and babysitting servers, I feel your pain.  And I was one of the lucky ones--we only had one virus on my watch, and that (mercifully) not even a Zero Day.  But I've heard your war-stories.  And I think we all intuitively recognise that the Ashley Madison species of idiot shares the majority of their DNA with the type of co-worker who's habitually guilty of:

• Installing malware (e.g. Napster, browser widgets, fake “virus scanners,” etc.) on their workstation #truestoryaboutnapsterbythebye
• Double-clicking any (and every) email attachment that lands in their Inbox
• Leaving files open (and thereby read-only to everyone else) on the shared drive
• Forwarding chain-email
• Adding misspelled words to the spell-check dictionary because they’re convinced that they’re right and Microsoft is wrong
• The Dreaded Reply-All ('Nuff said, amirite?)
• Font crimes (Again, ‘nuff said.)
• Being congenitally incapable of grokking the difference between CC: and BCC:
• Likewise, being congenitally incapable of printing double-sided copies of anything...or even switching their default printer during repairs
• Storing Every. Single. File. (and program shortcut) on the Windows desktop
• Using the same password for every system...and storing it on a Post-it taped to their monitor
• Insisting on access to systems/reports they never actually use
• Calling support because their workstation is "slow," only to have support arrive to find Facebook open and the browser scrollbar a millimetre tall
• Passive-aggressively weaponising the issue-tracking and/or project management system

I'm sure other SysAdmin veterans could expand the list in hilarious and/or toe-curling ways, but I think that I've established my point.  That point being that I/T folks now hold in their hands the power to effectively chlorinate the office gene pool--perhaps even for a generation.

I/T comrades, for the love of those of us who don't drag you away in the middle of critical system rebuilds (or at least playing FPSes for hours on end to, uh, "gather performance metrics" on said systems), get ye to the darkwebs! And bring thy RegExp A-game with thee!  Scan those lists!  I can (almost) guarantee that if you find your company domain(s) among them, the correlation between those AM sneaks and your laziest Luddites, your most slovenly sociopaths, your most vapidly venal office-critters will be statistically perfect.

In which case, you know what to do.  Take screenshots.  (Bonus points for correlating them with router logs.)  Send them to every single printer in the building and "forget" to pick them up.  Then wait for the radiation fallout to stop glowing, and you'll find that many of your work-day problems have taken care of themselves.  And, more importantly, you will have done everyone who can be trusted with a computer a huge solid.

My I/T brothers and sisters, it's time to step up to the plate.  This kind of opportunity doesn't surface often.  Personal codes of ethics aside, I think we can all agree that using your work email account to cheat on your spouse or significant other shows a breathtaking lack of professionalism--quite apart from the sheer sleaziness of it all.  Yeah, I don't want to work alongside that, either.

Frivolous Friday, 2015.06.05: Good-Bad vs. Bad-Bad

While the sun and breeze permits, I'm inching along on the upstairs painting project.  Meanwhile, Dennis has the somewhat more messy job of replacing the downstairs carpet with materials that don't actually date back to Disco.   (On the plus side, he has the luxury of power tools and a distinct lack of cats trying to sneak into his lap while he uses them.)  Last year, my motivation was to avoid another winter of having my soul bleached by white on both sides of the walls.  This year, we're both hoping to re-boot the October tradition of hosting a "Carve Pumpkins and Watch Army of Darkness" party--which would effectively double as the housewarming party we never had after we landed.

Army of Darkess, (a.k.a. AoD), being the third installment of the Sam Raimi / Bruce Campbell Evil Dead trilogy, is merely the main course of the party.  Historically, the challenge has been to find different "side dishes"  for it each year.  I say "challenge," because it's not always easy to find horror movies that manage to exist in that quantum state of being both Bad and Good at the same time.

Horror is easy to do badly, but the problem is that even when it's done splendidly, it's eventually riffed-on and ripped-off until the meme becomes stale.  (Although Mel Brooks's--ahem!--"homage" to Hitchcock's Psycho in High Anxiety was sublimely sick and brilliant at the same time.)  But that's pretty much academic anyway--pairing AoD with Hitchcock would be like washing down Kraft Mac 'n Cheese with vintage Grand Cru Bordeaux.  So that basically rules out reasonably nuanced, well-plotted stuff like The Gift, The Sixth Sense, or Ju-on. (I'd lump George C. Scott's The Changeling into that class, except that its biggest horror was the nepotism that cast Trish Van Devere as the love interest.  You'd think that a husband-wife team would have on-screen chemistry.  You'd be wrong.)

Then again, pure Jason/Freddie/Chucky slash doesn't fit the bill either.  If I want shallow, trashy, Shakespeare's- off-his-meds-again schtick, I'll dig up the Cliff Notes for Titus Andronicus, kthxbi.

The classics might be a viable bet--although guests my age likely suffer from a uniquely generational affliction of vision that superimposes the silhouettes of two robot heads flanking a human head over the bottom center of any black and white horror movie screen.  Mostly, though, you really can go home again when Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney, Jr., and Claude Raines are keeping the torches lit just for you.

Still, going straight for MST3K won't steer away from the overall theme of the day.  The safer bet, however, is to pair cheeseball with more cheeseball.  Yet even there, some discretion is required.  It's basically because cheeseball comes in about three different flavours:

• Cheeseball that knows it's cheeseball and just rolls with it.  Army of Darkness falls squarely into this category.  Snappy dialogue delivered with tongue firmly lodged in cheek.  Why burn calories suspending disbelief for a whole 90 minutes when the entire cast clearly isn't taking it seriously either?  See also Big Trouble in Little China.  Ditto Shawn of the Dead.
• Cheeseball that refuses to acknowledge its artery-clogging goodness--and thus ruins the whole taste.  No organic, gluten-free artisanal cracker in the world would make this kind of movie respectable, yet an entire studio is trying to convince us that caviar is really nuclear orange.  Into this category I'd lump Re-animator and the steaming $40M mess that Francis Ford Coppola made of Dracula.  Or even a (cough!) "classic" like the silent Phantom of the Opera, whose bizzaro dominance-and-submission subtext made it the 50 Shades of 1925.
• Cheeseball that is inadvertently, hilariously bad to the point of being watchable.  (Admittedly, this cheeseball pairs best with alcohol.) Forget Star Trek, Kingdom of the Spiders gave William Shatner most of the A-grade B-list street cred. he has today.  And I broke my two-glass wine limit the night we took Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus out for a swim.  (Which was probably why the shark vs. airliner thing was so darned funny.  At the time, anyway.)  Beware of the Blob is probably a solid candidate, but Mom had the great, good taste to turn the channel when it was on TV back in the 70s.  And strangely enough, I don't think it'll be on Netflix or even DVD anytime soon.  (Fortunately, there may be more hope for C.H.U.D.)

But as much time as it takes to track down appropriate sides to AoD, there's still time needed to actually screen them before we inflict them on our guests.  Because Cthulu knows we learned our lesson the hard way with Bubba Ho-Tep.  Never again.  [shudder]

Frivolous Friday, 2015.05.15: Acadian spring

During these last four springs spent the Maritimes, I've noticed some harbingers of the season that are different from those I knew "back in The Old Country." 

It's not that I don't appreciate green grass and dandelions and being able to hang out the laundry and hearing the chatter of birds (that aren't crows or gulls or  pheasants).  Oh, no--they're every bit as relished as they ever were.

• Fiddlehead ferns in the produce department at the grocery store
• The local lobster fleet heading out of port
• Klatches of pheasants no longer hanging around our front door
• Clam-shacks opening for business
• The almost impossible blue of the ocean on sunny days
• News that multi-kilometer-long chunks of ice are no longer threatening to dam up the rivers
• The lack of reports about ferry routes or the Confederation Bridge being closed off
• The DNR fretting--and rightly so--about anglers catching the wrong (i.e. farmed) kind of salmon in the rivers

Mind you, the up-tick of traffic in an already-bottlenecked Shediac downtown is not at all welcome during my grocery run.  That's when I have to remind myself that maybe it wouldn't be there at all if not for the shot in the fiscal arm that is tourist season.  All the same, I don't envy a town whose population jumps from 5K to 30K in the course of a few weeks.

And I don't care for the way the stretch of Highway 530 in front of the old boulangerie (bakery) turns into a "kidneys are overrated" washboard, I suppose.  (Yes, I remember frost-heaving in the roads back in WI, but it turns out there's an appreciable difference between sand and clay.)

I'm told that spring returns to l'Acadie later than in my stomping grounds of the Upper Midwest.  True, we're compensated somewhat in the form of a cooler summer and later autumn.  Alas, it still makes for a lot of impatience on my part--even without snow in the waning days of April. But, happily, it seems that Grande-Digue may even be ready to greet its guests and part-time denizens by Memorial Day. 

Frivolous Friday, 2015.03.27: Geeks and Bees

The winters of 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 have been a double-whammy for bees.  At least in our backyard.  Damp autumns, soggy plus dangerously late springs.  I'm not holding out much hope for the handful of hives barely visible in the backyard.  And I'm not at all happy about paying a ridiculous price to basically start from scratch in less than a week.

See, the problem is that the go-to source for imported honeybees, a.k.a. the United States, is pretty much off-limits (some Queens excepted) because of parasite/disease issue (and no doubt the usual tribal stupidities besides...glad we passed NAFTA and all...).  The most logical Canadian sources (Vancouver Island, southwestern British Colombia, and southern Nova Scotia) don't seem much interested in filling the gap.  Or, for all I know, they're just overwhelmed.  So obscene amounts of fossil fuels are expended to import honeybee "packages" (basically starter colonies) from--I kid you not--New Zealand.

From what I can see, the importers (at least the ones we're working with) are almost gratuitously conscientious about it all--even escorting the bees on their journey and making sure they're fed and all.  I'm not knocking them...however much I might envy their trip to New Zealand this time of year.

Okay, so I'm willing to meet Mother Nature more than halfway by tilting at the windmill of keeping honeybees alive into the next spring by dint of making sure they're healthy and well fed (to the extent that such contrary beasties will allow me to intervene).   I'm certainly not above hacking besides.  (Mind you, with electronics--i.e. logging temperature & humidity readings--you're fighting the triple-whammy of unreliable power supplies, the even less reliable elements, and the bees' propensity to shellac everything that's not comb with a substance known as propolis.   Making it all affordable for beekeepers working on precarious margins is another subject altogether.)

Those are the challenges.  But I would take it kindly if the governments of Canada and the United States would, in tandem, extract their craniums from their backsides and figure out how allow healthy, cold-tolerant bees to cross the border in volume.  Even back in Wisconsin, I found the reliance on southern (by which I mean less cold-hardy) bees silly.  Particularly when some of the most notable pollinator research in the U.S. is being done by the University of Minnesota.  I would argue that, all other things being equal, regional boundaries count for much more than national ones.

Given that one out of three bites we take has to be pollinated, my left brain fails to grok how this sort of thing is not a priority for any government.  Particularly for a government so obsessed about national security that it has time to care about who wears what during a citizenship ceremony or is willing to bomb people on sketchy second-hand rationales or wants to classify anything threatening the economy of Canada as "terrorism. "

Frivolous Friday, 2015.03.13: Tall tales for tourists*

Returning home from Moncton on Wednesday, I happened to fall in behind a truck towing a power-boat north on Hwy 530.  Now, Wednesday had, hands-down, the nicest weather of the week, so my first thought was that someone was being a just a tad optimistic.  But the driver eventually turned into the driveway of the local boat hibernation grounds, so I’m assuming that they were having some tweaks or maintenance done.  Which makes more sense, although I still think I caught a whiff of wishful thinking.

But it’s a reminder that we’re on the downswing of winter, even with the 25-40 cm of snow that next week is throwing at us.  Which means it’s time to start prepping L’Acadie for the spring rush of cottagers and summer rush of tourists.

The first order of business, of course, is to melt all the ice and snow.   Fortunately, Canadians have figured out how to harness their two national resources in tandem to accomplish just that.  My Gentle Reader is of course aware that snow and ice reflect sunlight.  But it might never occur to her/him to juxtapose the timing of maple syrup production with the end of winter.

Of course, tourists don’t visit New Brunswick in the winter, so they don’t see the huge parabolic reflectors that collect and concentrate the reflected sunlight.  (The reflectors are ferried away to Shediac Island around April 1st, which is well before anyone is willing to come venture north of the border to see if New Brunswick even has daylight yet.)  The energy is harnessed to boil the maple sap in ginormous underground vats.  Once the sap has been reduced and caramelised into syrup, it travels through long and winding pipelines.  Its transit transfers all that heat to the ground, which melts the snow and incidentally cools the syrup enough for bottling.

Clever, huh?

Naturally, the whole point of a tourist economy is to give people experiences they can’t have at home.  One obvious choice in these parts is moose encounters.  But for moose, the novelty of having their photo taken wore off even before the advent of the instant camera.  So to compensate for that, some areas have taken to lining their roads with tourist-friendly “Moose Crossing” signs.  Huge lettering, big flashing lights.  Facebook-friendly enough that people like pulling over just to photograph a road sign.  I probably shouldn’t let the proverbial cat out of the bag, but the moose are usually hiding just a skip off into the woods, laughing into their hooves.  Apparently, it never gets old for them.

Anyone who’s seen the tourism brochures for New Brunswick will likely recognise the Hopewell Rocks.   The current story is that they were formed over millions of years, but in fact the area was the development ground for the “crystal growing” science kits that were a thing back in the 70s.  (In the early days, matters got a little out of hand before the product was ready for the market and, well, there you go…)  Unfortunately, after the fad ran its inevitable course, interest dropped off.  So the Tourism Board fell back on the boring, hokey old “natural wonders” shtick to keep the credulous coming through the gates.

There’s a darker side to our tourist economy, however, and that’s the slaughter of countless lobsters for the p’tits pains d’homard (lobster rolls) that are the staple of nearly every eatery hereabouts. Mind you, the buoys and boats are just for backdrop—nobody around here actually fishes for them.  No, no:  It’s much more sinister than that.

Anyone who’s driven through Shediac on Hwy 133 can’t possibly miss the “World’s Largest Lobster,” and they can be completely absolved of assuming it’s pure kitsch—I mean, it’s right next to the Tourism Centre, after all.

What outsiders don’t know is that, every year, the lobster is trawled out to sea to make an appearance.  Because years ago, the locals were able to convince the lobster tribes of Maine and the Maritime provinces that the giant lobster is their god—a god that demands sacrifice.  So each tribe is required to provide a given amount of tribute each year.  Which in itself is bad enough.  But that set up perpetual war between the tribes, so that what it turned over each spring and summer is largely captives.  A horrible, horrible secret history of this place.  Which is part of the reason I refuse to eat the stuff on principle.

But don’t hold it against all of us up here, okay?  There is a movement afoot (aclaw?) to put an end to the madness.  Sadly, we all know how it is when humans develop a taste for religion and war:  We can’t expect lobsters to be better than we are, right?

On the more positive side, we go to a lot of trouble to spruce up the joint for visitors.  Mulching all the (unclaimed) skis and snowshoes lost under meters of snow.  Paving the snowmobile trails we’ve commuted over for months.  Cleaning half a meter or so of dead maple leaves from the half-submerged bathtubs just so the Virgin Mary statues don’t give us the side-eye when we put them out to soak up the summer sun.  Pulling out our flashcards and re-memorising our French and Chiac to do our part for “local colour.”  (Another guilty secret:   Everyone speaks English when no one from out of province is listening.)

And though we can’t eliminate the mosquitoes, we have been able to selectively breed them to apologise after they’ve zapped you.  (These critters survived the extinction of the dinosaurs, for cryin’ in yer Molson’s; there’s only so much even genetic engineering can do.)  Unfortunately, we haven’t figured out how to make it loud enough for you to hear yet.  We’re working on it.

So make sure your passport is up to date, and do give Acadie and New Brunswick a second look as you’re planning your summer vacation.  You’ll have plenty of amazing stories to take back to the folks at home, guaranteed.

- - - - -

* Credit due to Dennis for the inspiration of the Hopewell Rocks.

Frivolous Friday, 2015.03.06: Anthropomorphism is a two-way street

We humans (or "hoomins" in lolcat-speak) are narcissistic creatures.  We see our image in way too many things...and when we don't, we do things like Mount Rushmore.  So it's no surprise that someone could parlay people captioning cat photos into a multi-million dollar empire.  (Truth be told, pretty much everyone who's not Mr. Huh should be ashamed of her/himself for not thinking of it first.)

But every once in awhile, you'll encounter humour that turns anthropomorphism on its head...even in an age diminished by the retirement of The Far Side's  Gary Larsen.  One of the better samples is If People Acted Like Pets.  Also, Things Cats Do That'd Be Creepy if You Did Them. 

With dogs and cats, those folks are reaching for the low-hanging fruit.  Yes, I have a standard-issue Office Cat.  He keeps a fairly regular schedule.  There's the regulation morning lap takeover.  (And he acts like he's King of the World for jumping up, even after I've invited him.  Dork.)  Then it's usually nap-time until about 1.5 - 2 hours before Second Kibble Time, during which he becomes insufferable.  Mercifully, he equates opening the office door with feeding and zooms into the hallway...after which I shut the door on him (and his whining) and turn up the volume accordingly.  Then Second Kibble Time and then a second lap takeover and finally post laptime-naptime (which not coincidentally is the most productive part of my day). 

But the Office Finches I'm stuck with the entire time I'm clocked in.  We brought six of them north with us.  Four were already older than the average life-span for their species.  The other two--a Zebra finch and an African Silverbill finch--were very young.  So it was a shock a few weeks back when the Silverbill (first named "Belle" and then "Bill" and then "Belle" again because she liked gender-bending before finally laying the question to rest...along with several eggs) caught us off-guard by sickening and dying in less than a day.

The remaining finch (named "Harpo" for a raucous call that's all too reminiscent of the blond Marx brother's famous horn), freaked out at being alone.  So for three days I streamed YouTube bird songs to calm her down until I could make it into town to recruit an acceptable substitute for Belle.  I found it in a Society (a.k.a. Bengalese) finch with two toes that point upward instead of downward.  (It seems to do just fine, btw.)  New finch is a golden-brown (sort of a buff colour) which suggested names like "Buffy" or (in homage to my country-of-residence) "Timbit."  But I try not to be superficial, and held off to allow it to name itself.

And so, after Belle's dainty ablutions in the water-dish were replaced by wholesale splashing and drenched newspaper, new finch duly earned its tribal name of "Duck."  Yep--this one has a freaky side.  And I wouldn't want it any other way.

But just as cats and dogs hold up a fun-house mirror to human behaviour, the same can be said for finches.  For one thing, finches are maniacally social (not surprising for flock animals).  The only exception I've known in 18 years was a runty Lady Gouldian Finch named Irene who didn't like anyone...except a damaged little Silverbill rescued from the horrible PetCo on the north side of Rochester, MN.  She'd peck anyone else out of her personal space...yet "Vir" was allowed to sleep absolutely plastered up against her at night.

Less humourously, finches are pretty ruthless about enforcing the pecking-order.  They can literally bite the hand that's trying to help them.  They can be stubbornly picky eaters and throw away a lot off perfectly good food.  They can be dreadful parents (at least in the case of some Gouldians).  And sometimes even "normal" relations can become abusive.  (As much as they would have preferred to share the same cage, Harpo's grooming of Belle was enough to pull out feathers, and so they had to have adjacent cages.  They sat as close as the bars possibly allowed.)

But finches can also reflect the qualities that we "hoomins" prize most about ourselves.  When Dennis & I made the trek from Wisconsin to New Brunswick, I was more than worried about Skip, a Gouldian male who was extremely near-sighted.  The poor little dude spent most of the trip on the floor of the cage, but valiantly survived...and lived for most of year afterward despite being well into the upper end of Gouldian life-expectancy.  When Joe, another Gouldian, became frail and also extremely near-sighted with age, he kept his spirits and his song until a week or so before the end.  My hero.

There are the escape artists who who made me laugh even through the frustration of trying to catch them.   The Gouldian pair who kept up a steady Statler-and-Waldorf commentary through the Green Bay Packers radio broadcasts.  The Society finches who would have happily tried to brood a football until it hatched.  The Gouldian who generously let me top up her babies with finch formula at night...but glared at me the whole time as if I was feeding them Skittles & Mountain Dew.  The Society finch who could hang upside down like a bat.  The ones with whom I (apparently) made a communication breakthrough, because when I made a certain noise, they would respond in a specific way.  (I have absolutely no idea what we were discussing but...whatever.)

I miss them all.  Dreadfully.  But the current pair reminds me that there is plenty of quirk still left in the world.  They've already shown a tendency to yell bloody murder when I dork around with piezzo buzzers on the Arduino.  Sometimes they also yell at my music choices.  (Problem is, with finches, I'll never know if they're actually objecting to my tastes or just ironically shouting "Freebird!")

Yet I'm pretty certain that my code would lose something without their chatter and (mostly) harmless madness in the background.  And my sense of noblesse oblige would most certainly take a hit if I only had to think of my own care and feeding.  When you sometimes don't make it outside the house for a week at a time, it's a reminder that you don't necessarily have to surround yourself with humans to maintain contact with your humanity.  Or "hoomanitee," as the case may be.

Silly Sunday, 2015.03.01: The Programmer "Anxiety Closet"

Fans of the 1980s-ish comic-strip Bloom County will instantly recognise the term "Anxiety Closet."  It was the repository for a lot of pop-culture satire masquerading as neuroses of the overly-sensitive character Binkley.  One Sunday strip gave us a bonus peek into the Anxiety Closets of other characters in the strip--the most memorable being budding hacker/genius Oliver Wendell Jones being chased by a giant slide-rule.

Normally, I keep my nightmares to myself.  Mind you, some nightmares are pretty much public domain.  The "showing up at school/work naked (or trying very hard to get that way)" one?  Check.  The "it's the end of the semester and you realise you've been blowing off a class the whole time" one?  Oh, heck yeah--my subconscious mind has even upped the ante to multiple classes.  (Stupid brain!)

But what if certain subsets of the population also have nightmares in common?  In my case, I mean geeks--specifically programmers.  (I've had SCA-themed dreams, but to date, the only one that turned ugly was that nightmare about the only fabric store in town morphing into the potpourri-reeking fake-flowers-and-wicker-baskets frou-frou kind of craft store.  [shudder]  And I don't even want to think about the nightmares that ComicCon-/GenCon folks could have...)

Anyhoo.

The backstory is that in a couple weeks I'm due to give a presentation on Arduino.  The slides are done, so it's not like I'm behind.  Sure,  I don't have more than a few Arduino projects under my belt at this point.  Yet I personally know one person more qualified than myself to speak on the subject, and he seems to have zero interest in hanging out with Team Coder.  #lesigh 

Basically, it's just like that episode of M*A*S*H where Radar finds an abandoned, injured horse, and Hawkeye and B.J. are pressed into veterinarian service.  Except that first they have to catch the "patient."  

Hawkeye:  "You know anything about horses?"
B.J.:  "I rode a pony once."
Hawkeye:  "You're in charge."  

Moral of the story:  The bar for "expertise" can be set to a very relative--i.e. low--height sometimes.  My apologies for any destroyed illusions there.

So, yeah, I feel kinda like a poser...except I'm probably still in a position to save my fellow geeks a whole bunch of time reading/Googling--not to mention possibly some bling on hardware besides.  Which might explain why last evening's nightmare was about not being able to find the presentation slides on my laptop, rather than about freezing up under the gaze of my peers.

But while curating my resistor collection this morning, I had time to reflect on said nightmare.  Which is when I had a disconcerting epiphany.   It wasn't so much that I was worried about being worried about the presentation.  It was the awful suspicion that this might become an archetype for my dreaming mind.  And, worse, what if this is merely one species in the genus of programmer nightmares?  There are dark, dark regions in the left-brain.  Yet, like any self-respecting D&D dungeon, they somehow support a thriving ecosystem of nastiness:

• Project requirements include IE6/7 backwards-compatibility.
• Source control hiccup leaves code in partially merged state, but you don't catch on until you've made a whole pile of changes to your local copy.  #beentheredonethat
• Zero downloads from the App. Store.
• You think you're working in the test database, but it's actually the live copy.  #gotthatbadgetoo #twice
• The "ninja" co-worker your boss hired (over your objections) isn't sanitising inputs...but is rewriting core APIs that s/he doesn't understand...which is clearly most of them.
• The historical data that you didn't realise was critical when you archived it to tape won't restore.
• 1:1 assumptions during design magically turn into n:n expectations during beta. #crazytalkinorite
• User(s) demanding to know why there are "obvious" (to them) bugs in the app. that they agreed to review before sign-off...after they've signed off.
• Unscheduled system maintenance and/or power outage during a code roll-out weekend.
•  Apple/Microsoft/Google rolls out an uber-slick near-clone of your world-changing app. the week before you're supposed to close your next round of funding.

So there's that kind of thing lurking about the door of this programmer's Anxiety Closet.  It's probably best not to peer further into the darkness, amirite?

Frivolous Friday, 2015.02.20: Unsolicited advice to Lenovo

My Gentle Reader and I both realise that history's best, most passive-aggressive form of one-sided "communication" reached its zenith when the 1980s spawned the "open letter."  Granted, once the Intertubes became more or less First-World-Ubiquitous, the open letter--like any luxury-item--became downwardly-mobile.  And thus boring.

But in the original spirit--and on the authority of having been "contractor scum" at a certain company whose initials sometimes stand for "I'm Being Micro-managed" (exceptions made for T.P., M.A., D.P., A.B, and B.W.:  You all know who you are)--here's my advice to the company that took over their PC/laptop product-line.

An Open Letter to Lenovo

It's been a tough week, I know.  Trending Twitter hashtags for two days and counting.  Even Facebook has stopped gawping at the Kardashians and 50 Shades of Domestic Abuse long enough to pay attention.  Bad times.

Bottom Line:  You sold out your users to spammers and left them open to malicious hackers.  All by the cheesy expedient of pre-installing malware and an easy-to-fake root certificate.  I'm sure somebody must have paid you something to go to all the trouble of pimping your (theoretical) customers to spammers.

But, let's face it.  You're not even bush-league when it comes to selling out the people who use your product.  You have to get in line far, far behind Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, and their ilk for that kind of thing.  I mean, you weren't even bothering to steal passwords, account numbers, or sensitive personal information yourself.  How is anyone supposed to take you seriously?

Your problem is that you're thinking just like a typical I/T company.  Parochial hayseeds!  So narrow-minded, focused on only the eyeballs of the average internet user.  Unlike them, however, you're in a position to monetise so, so much more of your client.  Well, at least until the whole self-driving car thing takes off and then who knows?  That's what should be keeping you up at nightT The possibility of Google having a whole (computing) commuter--or more!--at their mercy.

I tell you, now is the time to execute on your strengths.  You're in hardware:  You can always count on economies of scale.  The future will soon bring haptic keyboards so sensitive you can take fingerprints.  By then, webcams will be capable of emitting low-intensity light.  Either one of those should be worth a fortune when you can sell fingerprints and retina scans by the thousand to identity thieves.

And that's just what current technology could be tweaked to do.  Just imagine the future!  Surely you can (cough!) "partner" (cough!) with the NSA, GCHQ, CSIS, or any sufficiently internetted tin-pot dictatorship to take up the slack for whatever your underfunded, offshored R&D Department won't provide.   For the slight inconvenience of letting them snoop on every twitch your users make, they can reciprocate by opening their books to you.

Think of the possibilities!  Trackpads and touch-screens capable of scanning your customers to the DNA level.  Then it's a mere triviality to wire the button-mouse to deliver a lethal jolt of electricity to young, healthy customers.  Have "sharing economy" contractor already on standby to Uber the corpse to the nearest organ-harvesting facility, and it's like printing money!

And that's just one suggestion for a possible sideline business.  Doubtless, your C-suite has a much more panoramic vision for monetising your users.  Down to the last cell, if possible.  That's why the suits are paid the big bucks, after all.

It's time to pull up your big-kid pants and get to work.  You have a lot of ground to make up before you can go toe-to-toe with the dark-nets or the Russian Mob or anyone else who knows how to use a computer to make money.  Your customers are already paying you a premium for the privilege of being abused--it's time to step up your game.

XOXO,

Doreen

Frivolous Friday, 2015.02.13: My balanced, nuanced perspective on coding style

Frivolous Friday, 2015.02.06: For this I went to Programmer School*...

So I'm slated to give a technical presentation next month.  (No, you can't know what it's about just now.  Sorry--it's not even officially on the calendar yet.)

When I did this sort of thing last year, I was slagged (mercifully, in private) for making my slides too "dense."  In PowerPoint terms, that means loading a single slide with more than one digestible hunk of red meat.  Which, alas, is particularly easy to do with text.

(Grumble.) 

Fine.

This time we'll do pictures.  Lots and lots of pictures.

Happy now?

Mind you, my camera skills are mediocre at best, and Microsoft Paint marks the upper limit of my digital artistic abilities.  (In fairness to Microsoft Paint, I believe that Ally Brosh's Hyperbole and a Half artwork is done entirely in Paint, which makes it totes legit, amirite?  So there, Adobe...)

And so far, my only "logic" skills have been used to suss out the appropriate graphics from the Intertubes.  Including references to:

• Back to the Future
• Barbie
• Ghostbusters
• Ironman
• Sex and the City
• The Wizard of Oz
• Young Frankenstein

And I haven't finished the presentation outline yet, either.  Which means still more mischief to manage.  [rubs hands together chortling evilly]

That'll show'em.

- - - - - 

* All thin-skinned pouting aside, I am jazzed that the folks I consider my mentors consider me enough of a peer to lend me their ears and eyes for an hour or so every year.  Nothing forces you to learn something like having to explain it to other people.  It's even more true when you're only a few y-coordinates up on the learning curve yourself.

Frivolous Friday, 2015.01.30: Snowstorm metrics

According to the historical record, satirising weather forecasters has been comedic fodder (literally) since before I was born.  Most notably by the craft's past-master, George Carlin, via his alter ego, Al Sleet, a.k.a "the hippy-dippy weatherman".  Per Mr. Carlin, Al Sleet retired sometime before (or perhaps during) the polyester pantsuit depths of the 1970s.  Yet he went out at the proverbial top of his game, having delivered the ne plus ultra of forecasts: "The weather will continue to change for a long, long time."

Far be it from me to rival the conclusiveness of Mr. Sleet.  Yet...the late Mr. Carlin was largely a denizen of New York City.  And, frankly, those of us who don't live in the BosNYWash Belt are sick of the attention their weather gets.  South Dakota is buried under 10 feet of snow?  Whole counties in Oklahoma are flattened during tornado season?  Pfffffftttt.  Weather doesn't happen, y'understand, unless the subways are at least 5 minutes behind schedule.

Contrast this past Monday/Tuesday with tonight/tomorrow, for instance.

This past Monday, shortly after I checked the weather channel and verified that they were still sticking to their 25 - 35 cm (10 - 14 inches) of snow story, I logged into Twitter to be greeted with #Snowmageddon hashtags--not to mention the stomach-churning knowledge that our degenerate age has now decided to start naming winter storms as well as hurricanes and tropical storms.  (Mercifully, my gag reflex was somewhat stifled by the oh-so-NSFW satire of The Lapine.)

Tonight here in L'Acadie, we have another 20-30 cm (8 - 12 inches) of snow on tap.   Of course, nobody in the east coast U.S. media is freaking out.  Because, well, it's not likely to stop your average New Yorker from going out for dim sum on a whim at 3am, so what's the big deal?  Selfies of a meter of snow piled up against your Manhattan condo door or it didn't happen.

Which leaves all of us outside such effete hot-house meglopolitan ecosystems groping for a yardstick (or a meterstick, north of the border) by which to gauge the severity of the incoming storm.   Having spent 40+ years in Wisconsin and Minnesota before transplanting myself to Atlantic Canada, I think I may have sussed out a few key indicators:

1. Is the grocery store parking lot full?  At 2 in the afternoon?  On a Tuesday?  (If the liquor store's parking lot is likewise that full...uh-oh.)  More to the point:  How distinguishable is the grocery customer base from the local Bridge Club?  (Booyah for the hard-won wisdom of our elders.)
2. Still at the grocery store, how many big blue bottles of water are heading out the door?  Or--and I solemnly swear that this literally happened to me today--did the dude with the two big blocks of toilet paper hold up the checkout line by dashing back to the aisle for a third block?
3. Are you already more-or-less taking your life into your hands every time you inch your itty-bitty car around a corner snowbank and already dreading the next time you have to drive*?
4. Do you see your neighbours leaving their windshield wipers in the "up" position?
5. Have tomorrow's ferry-routes between the mainland and the island already been canceled?
6. Have you already checked the electric company's "Outages" webpage?  And sanity-checked that it's bookmarked on your cellphone?
7. (This is the biggie.)  Has the game been cancelled?  (In Wisconsin I'm talking about the high school boys' basketball game; in Canada of course I'm talking about hockey...all the way down to the Mites-league.)

Really-and-for-true, I'm not whining.  I have the great, good fortune to live where other people vacation--and the still better fortune to work from home.  And I'm actually grateful for temps. well below freezing because it means no freezing rain. 

- - - - -

* Fun fact for non-Maritimers:  Where I live, they plant scrawny, top-heavy pine trees in the fall to guide the snowplow drivers in the winter.  When the banks are almost level with those trees...oh dear...

Frivolous Friday, 2014.01.16: Lies programmers tell themselves*

"It would be easier to do this in pure SQL than in PHP/Ruby/.NET/Node/Scala/J2EE/Whatever."  (And vice-versa.)

Pizza is a vegetable.  Because tomato sauce.  Also, walking down the stairs to pay the delivery person counts as exercise.

"You know what would make this place more productive?  A ping-pong/foosball/air-hockey table!"

90% feature-complete == 90% done.

"But I'm only changing one little thing..."

Faster hardware makes everything better.

"No worries--we'll document everything first thing after the release."

Caffeine is a suitable replacement for motivation.

"It works/looks just fine in Chrome, so I don't need to check it in Safari."  (Also vice-versa.)

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a programmer writing Python in emacs must be a badass coder.

"Another 15 minutes of work and I can check this in and go home."

jQuery and Node make JavaScript a grown-up programming language. ;~P

"I can finish this over the weekend when there are no distractions." 

- - - - -

* Shout-out to Dennis for a couple of ideas...and for confirming a few of mine.  Because, apparently, we're both pastmasters of self-delusion.  :~/

Frivolous Friday, 2015.01.09: You know it's cold in New Brunswick when...

I arrived home--laundry in tow--from a longer-than-usual Christmas holiday in Cheddarland to discover that the washing machine needed debugging.  Specifically, the flow of the cold water had slowed to a trickle, although water pressure was fine everywhere else in the house.

The local folks being (apparently) uninterested, I found a repair place in Moncton willing to venture out our way.  The deal was that they were supposed to phone Wednesday morning to arrange the actual appointment time.  So pretty much at the crack of ten a.m., the phone rang.  Dennis answered before I could reach it, and was thus conscripted into the role of local debugger.

After pulling out the washing machine, turning off the water, disconnecting the hose, and borrowing one of my screwdrivers to pull off the filter, it was discovered that the culprit was merely gunk in the filter.  (The hot water was not affected, it seems, because its gunk is likely residing in the heating tank.  Yum!)  A quick rinse plus a bit of manhandling (to un-mangle the filter that hadn't been cooperative about being removed) put all to rights.

No service call, no wasted resources.  Clearly, some folks will do almost anything to avoid climbing in and out of a truck on an especially uncongenial day...even for Canada.  Being what StackOverflow co-founder Jeff Atwood calls an "indoor enthusiast" m'self, I can't say as I blame him.

Frivolous Friday, 2015.01.02: The Rogers & Hammerstein edition

My Favourite Rings

Texts from my boyfriend sound like a glockenspiel;
Texts from my ex don't since I have blocked that heel.
Calls from my bestie play symphonic strings:
These are a few of my favourite rings.

70s Rock always means it's my mother,
(Though she'd prefer jazz, if given her 'druthers)
My manager's signaled by submarine pings:
These are a few of my favourite rings.

Pink Floyd's "Dogs" recalls pet vaccinations.
Journey's "Escape" warns me to make reservations.
Yoga is hot tonight if Peggy Lee sings:
These are a few of my favourite rings.

Blaring Mozart
Or marimbas
Or shredding of guitar:
I simply configure my favourite rings
So that I'll always know who you are.

Silly Sunday, 2014.12.14: Tribalism in computing

Once upon a time (roughly coinciding with the Carter and Reagan Administrations in the U.S.), I actually liked to travel by airline.  By which I mean that there was a time when I flew at least twice a year and didn't understand why airline jokes were a staple of stand-up comedy.

Enter three decades of cost-cutting, capped by the collective bed-wetting in response to a "black swan" event like 9/11.

Part of the reason this de-evolution is particularly painful for yours truly has to do with my transition from Liberal Arts graduate to programmer.  The Liberal Arts bit pretty much ensures my awareness of the history of my profession.  To wit:  Twentieth century computing was initially driven by things being launched from Point A to Point B.  Initially, those things were ballistic in nature.  But eventually, the assumption was that the landing would be somewhat less...ahem..."dramatic."

One convenient aspect of visiting Washington, D.C., is that the major museums are (mostly) clumped in one place--namely along the mall.  That includes the National Air and Space Museum.  There behind glass, I was tickled to find a retro metal IBMonster that once crunched flight &  reservation data.  Anyone who's discovered a new branch in their family tree understands that feeling.

And so it was that last week, when I was flying through YYZ (Pearson Airport in Toronto, ON), my proverbial cold comfort for a 4+-hour delay (other than an extra bag of almonds) was the knowledge that the blame rested entirely with the hardware side.

That lasted until one of my fellow passengers wryly informed the flight attendant that, according to the in-flight display, we were already en route to our final destination. 

D'oh!

And so, to my chagrin, I was reminded that what sociologists call tribalism can be just as rife the the left-brain-dominated world of computing as it can be anywhere else.  And just as challenging to overcome as any other bias.  Thus do computers make us more human.  In this isolated instance, anyway.

Frivolous Friday, 2014.11.21: Maslow's Hierarchy for programmers

amirite?

/ \

/   \

/     \

/       \

/         \

/           \

/ Source \

/  Control \

-------------------

/  Debugger  \

-----------------------

/     Runtime      \

----------------------------

/       Compiler       \

--------------------------------

/      Code Editor       \

------------------------------------

- - - - -

* If you weren't required to take something like Psych. 101 as part of your GenEd. requirements, here's the original: http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow.html