aubreyturner.org

But not spindled, and only moderately mutilated…

I went to the dentist’s office yesterday afternoon for a cleaning and exam.  When the dentist when to adjust the chair for the exam part, it was like some sort of gremlin had infested its electronics, because it decided to recline me all the way back to horizontal (or perhaps further) and then it came back up and tried to bend me into a pretzel.  Eventually, the thing decided to return to normal and the dentist decided not to press any more buttons.  It was like some sort of comedy gag.

I was watching a report this morning given by a reporter from the Dallas Fox station currently in Houston.  I couldn’t help but be somewhat annoyed by the tone of the people he interviewed about the availability of supplies.  There seemed to be a lot of frustration along the lines of, “Where is FEMA?” 

Instead of wondering where FEMA was, my first question to these people would have been, “Where is your 72-hour kit?” 

If you look at the Ready.gov page on preparing a disaster kit, you will notice several references to three days (or 72 hours):  (highlights added by me)

They didn’t just pull this number out of their asses.  It takes time for local government to organize a response to a disaster, which is why it is each and every person’s responsibility to take care of themselves for the first three days after a disaster.

Further, FEMA’s mission is not to provide direct service to disaster victims, but instead to provide assistance to local government in obtaining supplies and funding to make it through the disaster.  Or at least that was the case until the wailing and moaning of those who were woefully unprepared for Katrina.  So those who are asking, “Where is FEMA?” might ought to instead be asking “Where will the City of Houston be on Wednesday morning?”

My mother’s phone company has been offering DSL for about a year now.  Other than satellite, they are the only option for high-speed internet where she lives.  I’d been contemplating getting high-speed internet for her for a while, but the costs bothered me:

I suppose I’ve been spoiled by the options that are available here with Verizon FIOS and with the cable company.  But when you consider the subscriber density between the two areas I suppose it makes sense that it’s a lot more expensive to provide DSL out in the country.  So after the last visit when I was unable to ever completely download all of the Vista updates that her computer needed (130MB) I decided to go ahead and pay for her to get DSL (the 128/128 package) from ETEX. 

They completed the install last week, and it was active when I got there on Saturday.  I have to say that while it certainly can’t compete with FIOS, it was certainly much more usable than dialup, and I did verify that we were getting the full bandwidth that we’re paying for. 

Most importantly, though, is that I can now use remote support tools to help my mother when she calls with a problem.  The first thing I installed on Saturday was UltraVNC.  And it’s already paid off.  She called me yesterday evening complaining that something didn’t look like it used to.  I was able to connect back to her PC and take it over and fix the problem in a couple of minutes.

Those of you who have ever had to do tech support for a non-technical relative will appreciate just how handy VNC is in diagnosing and fixing problems.  If you try to do it just over the phone it’s a really frustrating experience.  It’s kind of like trying to fly an airplane where you can’t see the instrument panel and the person at the controls doesn’t know what anything is or how it works.

Everything counts in large amounts.—Depeche Mode

I was on a conference call this morning where a director-level executive was giving a presentation and I was kind of surprised when he included the above quote.  Pop culture is infusing itself into the strangest places these days.

And for those of us who survived the 80’s, here’s the video:

It looks like it’s going to be one of those kinds of days:

I’ve noticed a correlation between mold counts over 1500 and feeling like crap.  On days like this I don’t seem to get much done since my head seems to be floating somewhere around the orbit of Venus.

Update: As more proof, I offer the fact that when I went to get the mail at 11:00 I noticed that I’d forgotten to close the garage door after taking out the trash at 6:30 this morning.  I’m usually pretty religious about closing it to prevent anything from being pilfered.  Luckily, nothing seems to have been taken, although in my current state I could probably walk by a baby elephant and not realize it until 10 minutes later.

It’s good to see someone finally come out and say that setting the drinking age at 21 is a bad idea that’s causing more harm than good.  The Amethyst Initiative is hoping to stir up some real discussion on the topic:

Launched in July 2008, the Amethyst Initiative is made up of chancellors and presidents of universities and colleges across the United States.  These higher education leaders have signed their names to a public statement that the 21 year-old drinking age is not working, and, specifically, that it has created a culture of dangerous binge drinking on their campuses.

For one thing, it seems silly to me to have different ages of ‘majority’ for different things, and I think that the majority of 18-21 year olds would probably agree.  And since they think this way, the majority of them seem intent on circumventing the law and drinking anyway.  So what we end up with is generations of young people who think little of ignoring a law.  Ultimately this corrodes the public’s respect for all laws. 

Of course, just lowering the age to 18 isn’t going to completely stop binge drinking and other stupid behaviors.  What we also need to do is to exercise some common sense and remind parents to teach their children how to drink responsibly.  The idea that children should never touch a drop of alcohol until they reach a ‘magical age’ is silly.  You wouldn’t give a car to an untrained teenager just because he or she turned 16, and likewise we shouldn’t just be sending 18 or 21 year olds out into the world without any experience with responsible alcohol consumption.  In this one instance I am willing to concede that Europe does this better than we do.  A beer shandy or a small glass of wine isn’t going to stunt the growth of a young teenager and it lets the child take part in an adult activity in a responsible way.

Anyhow, I must admit that I’m not perfectly partial when it comes to the drinking age.  I was about 16 when the drinking age was raised from 18 to 21.  While I wasn’t that interested in drinking per-se, I was furious that I’d followed all the rules and was being punished for the transgressions of others.  It left me with nothing but contempt for all involved, and I immediately set about disobeying the new law.  In fact, I drank more between 18 and 21 than I did after I turned 21.  I suspect this isn’t what the idiots at MADD had in mind when they pushed the higher drinking age. 

The files are checked into the source code control system, the build/config document is finished (I hope) and the handoff meeting is scheduled for tomorrow.  The code that I’ve been working on for the past nine or ten months is being transferred to a more-dedicated developer to finish up the last few odd and ends (finish implementing a couple of ‘nice to have’ methods and packaging it for a production deployment).  It’s kind of sad, though, because this will probably be the last bit of code that I get to write ‘officially’ on a project.  But it’s not unexpected, because my job has changed to the point that it’s impractical for me to write any significant amount of code.  My schedule is no longer my own, it seems, and I spend all day talking to other people about requirements and code, rather than actually getting anything done. 

For example, this is what the current week looks like:

Every one of those little boxes represents time spent talking to somebody about something unrelated to the project I’m handing off tomorrow (yes, technically I’m writing this from inside one of those boxes; in this case I got lucky and one of the key players never showed up, freeing up part of an hour, which I just used to check in the last of my files before starting this entry).  Without all those meetings I could probably have done the code in a third (or less) of the time it actually took.

From now on, any coding that I do will be for personal projects and it’ll all have to be after hours (which doesn’t preclude doing stuff for work; it just means that it can’t be on anyone’s official schedule or anything).

Bitter is complaining about a candidate for Virginia Attorney General who is spamming her and who won’t respond to requests for removal.

In a similar vein, I’m pretty annoyed by the spam I’m getting from Chief Justice Wallace B. Jefferson of the Texas Supreme Court for his re-election campaign.  The reason I’m annoyed is that I never gave anyone permission to send me emails about Jefferson’s campaign.  Worse than all that, the email address is one created specifically for use with the Fred Thompson presidential campaign.  I’m not sure who to be more annoyed with: Fred Thompson’s website for selling my email or Jefferson’s campaign for using a list without doing any opt-in confirmation. 

The emails are being sent on behalf of Jefferson’s campaign by StreamSend and they include link tracking URLs and email tracking image bugs.  The whole thing has a stink about it.

While I was gone I had a pet-sitter look in on the dogs three times a day.  They suffer a little bit from separation anxiety because I work from home and I’m always around, so they’re not used to spending a lot of time by themselves.  Boots doesn’t have too much problem being left alone and I’ve left her here for 8-10 hours without problems (although she did tear up the door frame once, but that was during a thunderstorm).  Malcolm, though, had some issues when I first got him.  But I thought he’d gotten over them.

So I was a bit annoyed to come home to find he’d destroyed a pillow.  What’s worse is that he’d been good up until the last minute.  The sitter had been here at 6:00pm and there was no problem.  He tore up the pillow sometime between when the sitter left and 7:30pm, when I arrived.

Looks like I’m going to have to take them to stay with someone else or put them in a kennel in the future if I’m going to be gone for more than a day.

I’m currently in Austin and I just finished day one of a two day seminar on the Agile software development methodology and how it might be applied in my company.  It’s an interesting idea, and there are some good concepts in it, but I’m not confident on how well it will work out in the long run.  We seem to have a nasty habit of always adding new processes and methodologies and never getting rid of the old ones.  It’s going to take some serious culture change to make it work. 

We’ve been promised a module on estimating and planning for tomorrow, which I am particularly interested in with regards to how to estimate an overall cost and date for a given project.  Because no matter how much upper management clamors for agile development, they still think in terms of “When will it be done?” and “How much will it cost?”