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downward to daylight
Saturday, September 13 2008
Fifty feet, that's how long the trench draining my greenhouse foundation hole ended up having to be in order to reach the surface while maintaining a continuous slightly downslope trajectory. The idea with all such drains is to head "downwards to daylight," which shouldn't be all that difficult at the top of a region full of gorges, cliffs, and escarpments. But I'd sited my greenhouse at the uphill side of a wide shoulder of flatland, and every inch lower I dug my foundation translated into over a foot of necessary horizontal drainage.
At this point, what with the Poison Ivy, knuckles grated on broken stones, skin dried out from overexposure to clay, painful intrusions of dirt beneath fingernails, sore joints in all my fingers, and fresh new blisters between old callouses, my hands are essentially wrecked. I can still type on a keyboard, but I'm hopeless with, say, a guitar.
Today as I was digging I had a thought about Sarah Palin, the terrifying Republican nominee for Vice President. Like many members of the coastal latte-sipping liberal elite, initially I'd found her selection comic. Here was a Christian fundamentalist with essentially no experience being placed within a heartbeat of the Presidency just because she had a vagina. And then it turned out that maybe she hadn't given birth to her retarded child and her oldest daughter had been impregnated by a confessed redneck who likes to "shoot shit." You couldn't make this stuff up! But then it turned out that it was just the liberal elite who were getting McCain's joke; everyone else seemed to take it seriously and McCain's number started to improve. Laughing is a reflex that tells your community that the ominous things you were feeling initially wasn't actually going to cause anyone injury. But what happens when you laugh your head off only to discover that your boyfriend Dave really is having sex with a dead one-breasted whore in a cave?
Interleaved with work on that project is an ongoing web development project which has resulted in a helpful new tool allowing me to copy data from one MySQL table to another using a stored map of field-to-field relationships. After each row is copied, the primary key of the added row in the destination field can be used to back-populate the source table as a foreign key. And I've also added a place to enter a block of freeform SQL (complete with dynamically-replaceable tokens) to create rows in other tables as needed following each insertion. This tool solves a lot of the development problems associated with integrating two different outsourced database projects into a common database where information in one table will eventually have to be replicated to others to satisfy all the component outsource applications.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?080913 feedback
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