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pine cone erosion control
Monday, September 17 2018
Initially in the new workplace today I assumed it was going to be another down day of me finding things to do, learn, or tweak because otherwise my missions were accomplished. But then I saw an email with a very thinly described task for me to do. I jumped on it immediately. It was another "extract all the usable attachments from this exotic database" project, though in this case the database was MSSQL, a technology familiar to the developers in this shop. It seems that stuffing attachments into binary columns in a SQL table is a common strategy. As I dealt with this particular database, I was amazed by how poorly designed it was. It wasn't just that the names of entities sloshed back and forth between singular and plural. There was also the issue that the data for a single customer had been broken up into five or six separate databases for no apparent reason, and there were identical tables in some of the databases. Without any obvious relations between the attachments I was extracting and the tables containing the entities that they pertained to, I had to do a fair amount of analysis of things with a mix of ad hoc queries and mental simulations. Eventually I cracked the way attachments related to entities: a generic foreign key called iReferenceID connected each attachment to the primary key of another table, and what that other table was could be determined by joining on iFolderID to a folder table and then from there joining on iAppID to an Application. The Application names in turn provided a clue about what table the entity related to the attachment happened to be.
It greatly helped that I had written an attachment extraction Python script already; with a few modifications, I soon had it happily extracting attachments from an MSSQL database. I'm finding that code-switching between dialects of SQL isn't as difficult as I'd expected. I know MSSQL pretty well even though I haven't used it in more than eight years; it was the first SQL I learned, though I never really mastered it like I have MySQL. Happily, though, much of the expert MySQL knowledge in my head backports nicely into MSSQL.
Back at the house this evening, clouds had gathered threatening rain, so I quickly hauled another load of split firewood to the woodshed and then, as rain started gently falling, I split one of the few chunks of wood remaining in front of the woodshed. It was so hot and humid at the time that even that modest amount of work had me glistening with sweat. Gretchen thought it might be rain, but no, it wasn't raining quite that hard yet. When I told her it was sweat, she screamed in horror.
Down at the screened-in porch, I haven't done any work in weeks. But I still go down there occasionally to perform one of those rituals I occasionally develop that I obsessively continue doing until there is some shock to my schedule or mindset. The ritual I do down there is similar to the one where I place pine cones on Sally's grave. This spring, my weird feelings about my remote Mercy For Animals job compelled me to create a mound of pine cones nearly three feet high on that grave, though I pretty much stopped doing that once I was fired. My new obsession has me placing pine cones on the ground just east of the screened-in porch, in the place where water falls in a line from the roof. The ground there was the only ground visibly disturbed at the end of the project, and I felt the need to make it look less disturbed and I also wanted to protect it from erosion (which can be a problem when water falls from a roof onto bare soil). Pine cones are a great material for protecting soil; they easily absorb the impact of rain drops or even small waterfalls, and they easily absorb both water and soil, which soon anchors them in place.
This evening I finished reading Bad Blood, John Carreyrou's account of the Theranos debacle. I may never open that book again, so I put it on the bookshelf in my laboratory right next to Cold Fusion: The Scientific Fiasco of the Century. It was a little sad to no longer have a book to obsessively read. I love the laptop I keep in the bedroom, but there was something special about reading a physical book without the possibility of distraction. Mind you, I'm not one of these people who has any nostalgic or romantic connection to old forms of media. I think (for example) that vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, and VHS cassettes are a ridiculous waste of storage space, and I feel almost the same way about books. I love that all the non-digital media in our house would, once digitized, easily fit within the volume of a cigarette pack. If I were moving to a desert island, you can be sure I would only be taking media in that form.
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