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the fate of Gretchen's lady parts
Thursday, October 5 2017
Gretchen drove up to St. Peters Hospital in Albany today to meet the doctor who will be performing the surgery to remove the infected parts of her reproductive system. He gave her a thorough exam and then said that the best course of action would be a complete hysterectomy, removing everything upstream from the vagina. Evidently the entire thing is tainted by infection. The procedure could all be done laparoscopically, with the cutting tools coming in through tiny perforations in the abdominal wall and the removed organs extracted through the vagina. It all sounded pretty extreme to me when I heard about it, but Gretchen is excited to know what is going to happen and when. She's also delighted to forestall any possible cancer in the organs to be removed.
Meanwhile I was scheduled for five meetings in the remote workplace. The first, the daily standup for just the backend team, is one we now routinely skip, and we did that today, but that still left four meetings. One of these was a rather tense meeting with a whole department in which it was my job to talk them down from hiring an outside contractor, and it was the first mid-sized (6 to 8 people) meeting where I felt like I was doing most of the work.
At the end of the day, we had a nice relaxing "IT happy hour" meeting, which we'd changed from being about learning to instead being an interview with a member of another department. Today's interviewee was Kate, who cheerfully serves as something of a project manager for our print and web publications. It turns out, though, that she's fairly technically savvy as well. For example, when confronted with a form builder I'd built that only allowed for the definition of forms in JSON, she quickly mastered JSON to create a whole series of forms. Another thing that happened during happy hour was my showcasing the recently-restored musical talents of my Ahmend Mohamed clock.
Happy hour continued for me after the meeting, though I also kept working. But the scotch didn't seem to negatively impact my ability to get things done. By 10pm, I'd solved a problem that had been vexing me for over 30 hours: the inability to use TLS 1.2 (an encryption protocol) on our web server, which runs Centos 6.7. TLS 1.2 was essential to getting the Stripe payment processor working, but (according to Stripe) the only way to get TLS 1.2 on a Centos 6.7 machine was to upgrade it to Centos 6.8. Doing that would require rebuilding the server, a hopelessly complicated task on a machine with dozens of databases and perhaps hundreds of websites. It turned out that Stripe was wrong, and there were a few magical incantations that could make TLS 1.2 start working even on Centos 6.7. The most important of these was yum update nss openssl curl. This incantation did have the unfortunate side-effect of killing the homepage for an uncertain amount of time, though restarting Apache seemed to fix that.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?171005 feedback
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