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bad omen on the way to work
Friday, September 21 2018
As I was driving down Dug Hill Road, I saw something in the road that I thought might be a piece of wood, so I aimed the car to straddle it. At the last instant, the thing moved and showed itself to be a squirrel. I hit the brakes but it was too late. Cunk-cunk, the squirrel was dead just like that. Squirrels like to go out on the roads to eat the nuts that have been broken up by cars, but all too often they end up broken themselves. Like the La Brea Tar Pits, the thing that makes them attractive underlies the thing that makes them deadly.
Hitting an animal with a car is never something I want to be doing, and I took it as a bad omen. Furthering the ominous nature of the morning, the Subaru's battery and brake warning light both illuminated on the dashboard as I waited in Old Hurley to make that turn out onto US 209 northbound. That car already has a number of simultaneous problems, and now I had to worry about whether or not it was sound enough to get me to and from work today.
In this new job, some of my data migration projects require so much storage that they've actually eaten through most of the 0.5 terabyte SSD in Bunny, my workplace laptop. So I wanted to use the 1 terabyte mechanical drive that had been in the laptop as a second (slower) drive, much the way I do with drives in my computers back at home. I had a USB-C adapter and a USB hub, so this morning I put it all together and then deleted all the partitions on the mechanical drive using MiniTool, which required a reboot. But when the computer came up, it acted like it couldn't find a bootable partition. Had I accidentally reformatted the computer's SSD? I'd been careful to only format the 1 TB drive, but if that was all I'd done, what was going on? It crossed my mind that hitting that squirrel on Dug Hill Road might've been a kharmic disaster. I certainly didn't look forward to explaining to my new employer that I'd already destroyed the hard-won development environment I'd built on the computer they'd entrusted me with.
Fortunately, when I disconnected the USB adapter, the computer booted just fine (though I did have to tell it not to bother with whatever tasks MiniTool wanted to do first). Somehow I managed to format that 1 TB drive, though not without some heart palpitations along the way. I've seen this sort of thing before, where Windows insists on booting one drive based on contents on another, and things can get really confusing when both drives are attached to the system at once.
Things went better in the workplace today than they had been going. For the first time, the guy who is nominally my boss took some time to brief me about some things (and to even apologize for not having integrated me with the team earlier). I learned the origin stories for items in the diverse portfolio of applications and what I can expect to be working on soon. Technologies I will be interacting with include Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, C#, and ExJS.
One of the things holding me back was that I'd so far been unable to get the C# services working on my laptop. Everyone had been talking about how difficult those were to configure, and that I would certainly need help with those. So today, Victoria (the only woman in the company) spent some time to get me all set up. We kept running into obstacles along the way, and it took us nearly three hours before the services finally produced JSON, and when they did, it felt like a celebration was in order. I'm used to working in Linux environments, where configurations are generally in text files in various predictable places. In Windows environments, conversely, configurations are hidden in nested menus in several different control panels, applications, or settings windows. It's infuriatingly easy to hide crucial configurations in a GUI. Ultimately, the two things holding us up the worst were 1. putting environment variables in
User Variables instead of System Variables and 2. failing to check off all the sub-options in the Turn Windows features on or off window (the one accessible from the Programs and Features control panel).
Victoria had had lunch before all that, but I hadn't, and it was now nearly 4:00pm. So I walked to the vegan burger place and ordered myself an "onion lover" burger. It being a weird part of the afternoon, no other customers were there, but the owner was there (she recognized me) and there were two young staffers. While I ate my burger, several young women came in and began deciding what to order. The owner asked if they had any questions and soon let the cat out the bag that the restaurant was indeed vegan, but that the burgers would be convincingly meat-like. This didn't scare the young women away, and they ordered food and sat down. I think it helped that the thing I was eating at the time was clearly delicious.
Alex (my keywording contact) and I were the last people in the office, and before I left, he and I talked about my future in the company. He said he'd been hearing good things about my work and encouraged me to have a meeting soon with the head honcho to transition to being a full-time employee instead of a contractor. He and I also discussed the curse of all the diverse technology, some of which consists of executables written in Delphi Pascal. There's one guy who knows about this Delphi code, and there's a real risk to the company should anything bad happen to that guy. Meanwhile, oddly, that guy is in the process of rewriting that old code in Delphi.
Happily, my Subaru got me home without complaint, and I didn't run over any more creatures (that I know of). I soon climbed into bed and took a nap.
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