Archives, eh
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# What's new, pussycat?
Screen shimmys and harp music plays as we go back to:
Two years ago
me: And a field for ‘Marital Status’ of course.
Marketing: Well, we don’t really ask for marital status when taking bookings or brochure requests. We ask it in the passenger survey, but hardly anyone ever fills that in. So no, we don’t need that field.
Eighteen months ago
Marketing: But can we have some way of linking two customers together as a Household so that we don’t send marketing to both partners?
me: Sure.
Three weeks ago
Marketing: We’re doing a health check on the database, how many records have x, y, z and Marital Status filled in.
me: Well, you know, we don’t record marital status because you didn’t want it, because we don’t really even ask it, except for that one question on the survey hardly anyone ever fills in. I can bodge up something that tells you how many people are in Households, which more or less means married. And then the rest are kind of participants in Schröedinger’s Civil Ceremony.
Marketing :Oh, ok, just give us that then.
Today
Marketing: Can we get an extract of all the single people so we can market to them?
me: You don’t ask for marital status, remember? Except in that one place on the survey form hardly anyone ever fills in.
Marketing: Oh yeah. By the way, we’re dropping that question from the survey.
Two months from now
Marketing: Hey, how many single people versus married people are there in the database?
me: I am the Angel of Death. The Time of Purification is at hand.
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# Nervous
You know those scenes in the Zeddier-grade of movie and dubbed anime, the scene when the party has just entered the house/castle and right before the horrible, screeching sound of the door closing like a Doom Bell ringing out peals of..well…doom; right before that someone says “It’s quiet…almost too quiet”. You always knew that within a couple of scenes that tempter-of-fate — who was probably sauntering, you just know it — will be a corpse hanging from some variety of branch/ceiling frame/yard-arm. I do. I would even if it wasn’t the fact that I saw some of those scenes at such point in the development of my juvenile brain that I see those scenes whenever I close my eyes. No wonder my bastard of a mind is so against me, it’s karma for what I did to it. I still see that hand dangling from Max’s car when I try to sleep.
It is those scenes that I recall with no small trepidation when I finish a chunk of work that just seemed to work as I stream of consciousness’d it down into the IDE i. I arrived at work today and the one bit of functionality that almost no-one uses was causing locks all over the goddamn database. When I say “almost no-one”, I of course mean “everyone whose opinion is vital i.e. the exec team”.
I rewrote the bit that turns an arbitrary set of user-selected search criteria and output fields into SQL; the original code was written by me, than rewritten by someone else after I left the project, than rewritten by me again when I came back so that it wouldn’t cause syntax errors on every single query. Now it is being rewritten again so that the SQL doesn’t, in a word, suck. But it just seemed to work too quickly, I had expected to take two or three days to get it to work the way I wanted. I am nervous.
Who is that yonder, laughing at me like I was the brunt of some hilarity?
i Speaking of which, good luck with NaNoWriMo those doing it. Not I. As those subscribed to my feed can attest, I have enough trouble doing a few hundred words into a blog on a daily basis.
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# Links for 2005-10-28
- Marvel & Stephen King & a Dark Tower comic book series
Dear Stephen King: Please resolve something at the end of this series. For my sake. Relieve me from Ds whining. Please. ✴ - Leak Free Javascript Closures ✴
- Indieum – The Indie Music Aggregator ✴
- HOWdesign.com – Doing Business
Apparently, it isn’t just to make your life hell ✴ - ONJava.com: AJAX: How to Handle Bookmarks and Back Buttons ✴
- A Force More Powerful
They should hook up with Greg Costikan ✴
- Marvel & Stephen King & a Dark Tower comic book series
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# Links for 2005-07-26
- Bullshit Bingo
I suspect the game would be over too quickly for it to be any fun here at $company ✴
- Bullshit Bingo
