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silence beneath the treed bear
Monday, July 3 2017
For the first time since the shakeup five days ago, I felt like I had a handle on what I was doing. The improvements to the task manager (which we now refer to as "the Taskinator") have pretty much automated the essence of the now-missing head of the IT department. And with transparency (I use the word "glasnost," though my colleagues are probably too young to be familiar with this Russian term from the end of the Cold War) comes enough accountability to provide any bosslike motivation. Indeed, the more "gameified" the Taskinator gets, the more effective the department will run.
My most important discovery today came as the result of a series of experiments. CSV exports of unicode data (names and text in foreign languages) were consistently being garbled, producing embarrasing when automatically-printed letters were produced from such data. I had been unable to produce this garbled data myself, so I had the person who deals with it more directly send me a series of emails with various actions of increased manipulation. But I never got around to looking at the results. Towards the end of the day, we had a conversation that suggested that her workflow always resulted in the opening and resaving of CSVs downloaded from the web, something that screen sharing confirmed. She would go to download a CSV in Chrome, immediately open it from inside Chrome into Excel, and then do a save-as. This meant that every CSV she ended up working with (even ones she didn't know she'd manipulated) had been produced by Excel, not by whatever engine had done the original CSV export. Making matters worse, Excel (even recent versions of Excel) do not support the export of unicode (UTF-8) CSVs. So by the time this employee started working with any CSV downloaded from the web, foreign characters were already garbled. It's relatively trivial for her to change her workflow such that downloaded files do not all pass through Excel, but if she wants to actually edit CSVs with foreign characters, I will have to find an Excel replacement. Late tonight I discovered that LibreOffice Calc will work, and there are probably others. Meanwhile, it's astounding that Microsoft isn't supporting unicode CSV export. I get that they love proprietary file formats, since it leads to lock-in. But web technologies do not like proprietary formats, and all my in-house web tools export CSVs (indeed, this is probably true of many modern office environments). If Microsoft refuses to support non-proprietary unicode file exports (such as UTF-8 CSV), globalized offices with web-based tools (such as mine) will have to continue their migration away from Microsoft products.
This evening at about 9:00pm, I was done for the day, so I made myself a cup of hot tea and prepared to take a bath. That was when I heard frantic barking in the woods. It was Ramona, and she'd probably treed a bear. I initially thought maybe I could go retrieve her, but as I approached through the gloomy forest, the noises I heard indicated something was happening that would require the intervention of more than just me. So I went back to the house and fetched Gretchen from the teevee show she was watching with Andrea (Claws). I said that the plan was for us to walk directly to the dogs without saying anything to them or to each other, pull them away or attach leashes, and leave. Gretchen agreed, and the operation went off perfectly. Neville was a bit confused by our wordless approach as we arrived on the Farm Road, and we became more interesting than the critter in the tree. Once we had both dogs, Gretchen suggested I look to see what it was they were so interested in. Sure enough, it was a bear, maybe 30 feet above the ground. He never came down while we were there. Back at the house, we made our pet door entrance-only for the next several hours.
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