|
|
|
beards are appearing on television personalities
Tuesday, September 11 2018
It was yet another cool, dreary day, at least initially, though by the evening it had warmed up to into the upper 70s. At work, I continued fighting with the Sybase migration begun yesterday, eventually achieving success by migrating the data temporarily to MySQL along the way from Sybase to Microsoft SQL. While getting Sybase to talk to Microsoft SQL had proved impossible, I found that the lovely nerds working in the world of MySQL had developed usable tools (in this case MySQL Workbench, which can be a bit flaky) for talking to and converting to and from both, and (unlike with the other, more commercial products), none of their code was designed to encourage customer lock-in. It also helped that I am deeply familiar with MySQL. Once something exists as a MySQL database, I know many ways of manipulating (and meta-manipulating it). In the world of MySQL, there are no proprietary data dumps that cannot be read by a human and there are no GUI wizard making demands in undefined language about things you have no sense of how to obtain.
Despite that victory, though, I soon learned that this migration wasn't actually supposed to be a migration after all; it was supposed to be an ongoing integration. Sybase .db files would be FTP'd every night and my code would have to turn them into Microsoft SQL databases. Such automation would require a system significantly less interactive than, say, the import wizard of MySQL Workbench. I needed to somehow make use of Sybase's poorly-documented dbunload command, which, in its most useful form, seemed to produce a .sql file of data definitions and import statements that then looked a directory of CSV-style data dumps.
For lunch today I went to the place that has the good vegan taco and got me one of those. The place was mobbed, and it took a good twenty minutes for my burrito to be made. As I stood there waiting and half-reading my phone, I took note of the virtuosic movements of the skinny young woman running the place. She was in constant motion, delivering trays with one hand while clearing a trashcan with another. I half expected her to flip glasses in mid air as part of consolidating them to make carrying them more efficient. You know what I mean: the quirky habits and tics of someone who has become an expert at his or her job, doing things with extreme efficiency mostly from muscle memory. Working that way looks to be fun, though I can't say I've ever achieved that level of well-practiced physical competence. I have a tendency to avoid repetition in the things I do in life, yet it's only with repetition that such physical flourishes emerge.
Gretchen had asked me what I wanted for dinner, and when I got home, she had it waiting for me: spaghetti with a hearty red sauce full of soy curls and mushrooms. We ate it while watching Stephen Colbert, who is now sporting a small beard, as is Alex Trebek. Evidently our culture just experienced a stylistic transition making facial hair acceptable on television personalities for the first time in decades. It was only a few short years ago (2014) when we encountered Stephen Colbert on a plane to Belize with a quickly-grown beard he would soon have to shave off before starting his gig hosting the Late Show. I know facial hair is much more popular among millennials than it is among older generations; perhaps the power of their overwhelming demographics is enough to topple rules that have been in place since the 1950s.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180911 feedback
previous | next |
