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Happy Birthday in a minor key
Tuesday, May 16 2017
It was mercifully a little warmer today, which isn't much of an issue in the morning when I'm walking the dogs (as, in Gretchen's absence, I was this morning), but it plays a role later in the day when it's nice to have the laboratory window open. I'd stayed up late last night and had only had about three hours of sleep, so I was concerned how well I'd do during my day in the remote workplace. I also might've had a slight hangover, though I'd exercised enough restraint last night that mostly what I felt was that feeling one has when one has had insufficient sleep.
I was feeling dirty and crusty in addition to whatever was happening inside my head, so I thought I'd take a nice shower before work. That's a good way to reset and prepare for a workday.
I had a little problem getting myself psyched to build a donation editor, so later in the afternoon when I got some feedback for the console of my data integrity crawler, I was delighted to have more work to do. I needed some way to provide AJAX-powered country suggestions when a user starts typing either a country code or a country name. I ended up building a completely generic system for producing such suggestions. What was great about it was that I just began working on it without any real plan, attacking each issue as it came up. I barely needed to consult references at all and it worked almost the first time I tried it. It's amazing at this point how well I understand this stuff. If I can think of something using this technology, I can then sit down and plink away at a keyboard for a few hours writing instructions to be run on two different computers in three different languages, and it will work.
That task took maybe three hours, and I was so engrossed in it that I never took a break to check the news or anything. And when I finally did (down in the bathtub, mind you), I read about the latest bombshell from the ongoing disaster of Donald J. Trump's presidency. Finally unbound by a relationship with the presidency, it seems that recently-fired FBI Director James Comey was revealing (via surrogates) various disturbing incidents. The one revealed this evening was that Trump had tried to pressure Comey into abandoning his investigation of then-National Security Advisor (and notorious conspiracy-theory-advancer) Michæl Flynn, and that Comey had noted this in a memo at the time. If true, this would amount to a grave obstruction of justice. And really, who are you going to believe, the contemporaneous notes of James Comey or the things coming out of Donald Trump's inflamed pie hole?
While I was in the bathtub, I read something on my smartphone that mentioned the song "Happy Birthday" (you know the one). I began singing it to myself and realized I was singing it in a minor key. Stranger still, I couldn't figure out how it really is sung. I kept starting over and it kept being dark and ominous. Eventually something snapped, and I got it right. But not without several failed attempts.
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