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video party
Friday, December 16 2016
With all of the week's tricky work behind me, I could spend the day engineering obsessive fixes to little things in the customer relationship manager that is my main responsibility. Today, for example, I waged a minor jihad against javascript alerts, the little modal windows that popup to tell you something is wrong or cannot be done. In a web browser, alerts make all other windows and tabs inoperable, and on a big archipelago of displays it's not always immediately obvious why. It's nicer to have such messages appear on the web page itself. But since you can keep on doing things after such a message appears, it's important for it to draw attention to itself. In the past I'd used javascript to quickly ramp through the brightness of background colors in the message-containing part of the page, and that was also the technique I was using for the alert-replacements I implemented today. I found that by slipping some complimentary colors into the series (that is, a single bright green in a series of reds), it wasn't noticeable if the steps proceeded quickly, but it made the experience more jarring and attention-grabbing.
[REDACTED]
Da, the head of IT, has the thankless task of dealing with humans so the rest of us in IT can be safe to mostly deal with computers. But he also does other thankless jobs like running our daily video chats and coming up with team-building activities. There aren't many of those, but it being the holiday season, he thought we should do a Secret Santa thing. So we all signed up with a website that simulates the pulling of bits of paper out of a hat (and also helpfully provides affiliate links to products in the Amazon.com catalog). My santee (if that's the word) was Ni, the only woman on our IT team. Normally I only make (as opposed to buy) gifts for friends, a habit that dates back to when I had more time than money. This behavior is so ingrained that I continue doing it even when it would be so much easier to just buy gifts. So today I decided to paint Ni a painting on a tiny (3.5 by 2.5 inch) canvas. I pored over Ni's Facebook and Instagram pages looking for pictures of her pet lizard Taz. Her social media presence was small, and the pictures were few and of low quality. After seeing a few grainy pictures of Taz, I tracked down a better picture of a bearded dragon that looked exactly like him. This might be a vaguely racist thing to say, but it seems bearded dragons all kind of look the same. And they're terrible drivers.
I obsessed perhaps a little too long on the painting, but (as I've mentioned), on reptiles it's important to get the spacing and regularity of scales correct or the illusion vanishes. Here was the result:
Late tonight, my computer started beeping and blooping in the way that suggested I was being called into a Google video hangout. My colleague Ca was at The Organization's holiday party and had decided we should be there too, if only remotely. The video feed was horrible, and though I couldn't hear anything, I could make out a few people I knew. Before long, those of us who had joined the chat remotely were ignoring the feed and just talking among ourselves. We were all drinking beer or booze, and then I started openly smoking pot (from my stash of very-low-quality material). We gossiped, bantered, and did all the things we would've done had we been in a room together, and it was a lot of fun. I ended up staying in that video chat past four in the morning. By the end it was just Da and me, and Da is famous for barely sleeping at all.
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