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three different things made of shit
Monday, May 3 2021
In the remote workplace today, I had a lot of work to do, but I was stymied by three different things made of shit. The first was a piece of software written by a colleague of mine that automates the import of a dBase database into a Microsoft SQL Server database. You'd thing a program would be available on the web to do that, but there is none. There's something that creates SQL statements. But then I'd have another step in the import process: running all that SQL, which might add up to more than the allowable byte count of SQL Server Management Studio. (There might be a command-line way to do this, as with mysql, but this software isn't designed for the command line.)
The other pile of shit was the fecal mountain that is npm/angular, coupled with the monstrosity that is the frontend built by the Ukranian outsourcing team. For me, it was difficult to make changes to the code base because every time I made a change, a recompilation typically took at least three minutes. Three minutes is a long time when you have flow and just want to interact. This is also why I quickly gave up on Adobe Photoshop (any version) and Microsoft Word 6.0 on a 25 MHz Macintosh IIsi (yes, overclocked) back in the mid-early 1990s. By the end of the day, I was conducting rigorous experiments to determine why compilation was running slow, especially in comparison to the $3500 Mac Powerbook of my colleague Richard. (He was getting 4-second compiles, and the best I could do was about 30 seconds.)
The final piece of shit was the Core 2 Quad given to me by my then-colleague Dan in June of 2017. I wanted to install Windows 10 onto an empty drive on it so I could determine whether or not my installation of npm on the on the other Windows 10 machines was somehow acursed. But the damn machine was cursed, refusing to boot past the BIOS menu. I would eventually learn this was a freak symptom of the Windows 10 installation thumbdrive I had inserted, but it cost me quite a few minutes of trying and retrying.
[REDACTED]
This evening Gretchen and I (but not Powerful or the dogs) drove over to Jeff & Alana's place off Sawkill Road for some post-pandemic socializing. After some aggressive post-pandemic hugs, we stood around in the kitchen chatting for awhile, then moved into the living room. One of the cats was curious and came out several times, while the other (his mother) retreated in terror to some dark corner. We didn't have a real dinner, but there were enough chips, crackers, dips, spreads, and even a sort of pizza to feed us all. Most of the conversation was to catch up on all the things that have happened. Meanwhile, Jeff's eclectic sequence of music played from the stereo. When Alana asked what a particular tune was, I just happened to know. "Calexico," I said. Jeff was surprised that I knew anything at all about music, since, while around him, I'd never indicated that it was important to me. Other topics of discussion included thruples (particularly one in Greene County), radio station music, and the next stop on Powerful's education train (a master's degree in Albany).
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