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how to work around such annoyances
Wednesday, October 9 2019
For obvious reasons, I don't do a lot of reading at work, though sometimes my attention is drawn to an article that I cannot help but immediately absorb. Yesterday it was this amazing story of how massive coal companies have forever destroyed West Virginia's economy. It's not just that they've cut down numerous mountains and dumped them into valleys or that the people they've afflicted are now the heart of the opioid crisis. It's also the little things, such as the smart children of coal miners being discouraged from taking AP classes because of concerns they will be bullied by the children of mine bosses.
Today I quickly exhausted my supply of impeachment-related news, but then I found a fascinating article at TheAtlantic.com about the mysterious disappearance of the Malaysian Air MH-370 back in 2014. Spoiler alert: the best theory now is that it was a case of pilot suicide, which is something that happens with surprising frequency.
Today after successfully fixing a few tricky bugs I'd recently introduced to my data importer, I turned my attention to the implementing a concept I call "linkage" to my on-screen report displays (these take the form of an HTML table, resemble a spreadsheet, and can be exported to CSV). Linkage was an essential feature I added to the reporting system of the old Mercy For Animals contact database, because it allowed reports to be run using as inputs the values produced by other reports. Carried to its extreme (which I more or less did), this creates a whole framework for a thoroughly-hyperlinked system for exploring data. Implementing this in the nascent reporting component on my data importer was, as everything is, complicated by the fact that I was working within the Angular Javascript framework. In that world, you can't dynamically create hyperlinks that call known Javascript functions, particularly when you are in a component that is different from the one where those functions reside. You end up having to create complicated communication systems between components, proving yet again that Angular doesn't actually solve any of the problems any competent developer needs to have solved. But, over time, any competent developer figures out how to work around such annoyances. I'm well into the "acceptance" phase of my Angular-induced Kübler-Rossian grieving.
Today was a Ramona-at-work day, and, aside from trying to catch two different squirrels, she was well behaved outdoors. Bird migration season has begun, and there were small groups of geese flying southward in V-shaped formations. Today there were also a pair of hawks flying around almost aimlessly over the field behind the office complex. They were calling at each other as if they were concerned about something, though they might've just been flirting. (Though I don't do it, it's common for humans to dismiss as instinct in animals what, when we experience it, we interpret as evidence of God.)
When I returned home this evening, I immediately started a fire in the woodstove and then undertook some fruitless LoRa experimentation. The only way to really get warm was to take a nice hot bath. During that, I read about the pre-Cenozoic distribution of marsupials and tried yet again to find an explanation for the presence of odd-toed ungulates in South America prior to the Great American interchange. (The best hypothesis for this that I have so far is that such ungulates had evolved in the Northern Hemisphere during the late Cretaceous and made it to South America when it was briefly connected to North America by some sort of Caribbean landbridge in the late Mesozoic or early Cenozoic.)
Migrating hawks. Evidently not red-tailed.
Ramona was sure there was a varmint in this log in the woods behind the field behind the the strip of woods behind the office complex.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?191009 feedback
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