Behind These Eyes - March 2001

Wednesday, 7 March

Since every word requires its own symbol, Chinese script is immensely complicated. It possesses some 50,000 characters...

Dictionaries, too, are something of a nightmare. Without an alphabet, how do you sensibly arrange the words? The answer is that in most [Chinese] dictionaries the language is divided into 214 arbitrary clusters based on their radicals, but even then you must hunt randomly through each section until you stumble across the spelling you seek.

The consequences of not having an alphabet are enormous. There can be no crossword puzzles, no games like Scrabble, no palindromes, no anagrams, no Morse code. ...To this day in China, and other countries such as Japan where the writing system is also ideographic, there is no logical system for organizing documents. Filing systems often exist only in people's heads. If the secretary dies, the whole office can fall apart.

--Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue: English & How It Got That Way

Urk. Another gap. They happen so easily...

I've still been heavily into writing my US-to-UK Musing, in fact even more so over the last few days because I could see the light at the end of the tunnel. Last night I had Mike read through it. Tonight I've fixed the problems he spotted, added a (very thin) final polish to it, and now taken the extraordinary step of actually posting it. I'll be very flattered if you take a look at it, but I won't be hurt if you don't actually read it, because it's (a) very long, and (b) not exactly pertinent to you. But if you do go so far as to read it, I welcome any feedback you may wish to provide.

Of course the idea is, eventually, to get the US-to-UK Musing to appear in searches on the major search engines, so that someone for whom it is pertinent might actually find it. Mike had pointed out that most search engines allow submission of a site to them for indexing, so I had a look at AltaVista. They do indeed allow submission of a site--for $200. My my. Google's turned out to be free, so I submitted my url this morning. (Of course about an hour later, while looking through my access logs, I noticed that Google's bot had already paid a visit--two days ago. Ooops.) Anyway, this means that sometime within the next million years or so, searches on Google will find this site. In fact they already do, indirectly; they find me on Mike's old Demon space.

While looking through the access logs, I also noticed that someone came to the work site from Monster, browsed around a few pages (notably the Philosophy section), and downloaded one of my CV versions. This passive jobhunting is a really cool thing! I also had an email a few days ago from a recruiter who wanted to talk to me about a network manager job...in London. Ah well. There'll probably be a lot of that.

Meanwhile, life as usual. I haven't updated the various book pages lately, so having done so today, the reading queue has had a good chomp taken out of it--it has dropped by four books. Of course that's illusory, because there are a lot of Mike's books that aren't in the queue but are sort of in the queue to get into the queue, if you follow me. I've only put books of his in the queue that are in the immediate-read category. Otherwise it'll just get silly, because I'd put nearly every book he has into the queue.

Currently (as you might have twigged from the quote) I'm reading another Bill Bryson. Every word in it is either screamingly funny or fascinating, and sometimes both. This has the net effect that by the time I get to the end of the book, Mike will have read most of it too, vicariously. ("What are you giggling at?")

Meanwhile, outside, spring is continuing to do its thing. The days are getting longer at an almost visible pace. Unidentified things are flowering in the garden. A large cluster of something daffodil-ish or tulip-ish is about 8 inches high and threatening to flower. Something purple, possibly crocuses, have established a thriving colony. The fact that my old stamping grounds have just endured a two-day blizzard that dumped a foot or two of snow doesn't hurt my enjoyment of spring at all...

Created at 23:26

Sunday, 11 March

Spring!

And here's a picture, to illustrate spring.

Whoops! My mistake! That's not a picture of spring; that's a picture my dad sent me yesterday, showing the 17" of snow (120 KB) they got overnight Friday and into Saturday. That is, by the way, a picture of a car; you can see the windshield wipers (which have been left standing up to make it easier to clear the snow from the car later) and also the antenna. At least I assume that's what they are.

Gosh, I don't miss snow.

Here are the pictures I meant to post. We took these in the back garden this afternoon (Mike having shown me the trick of opening the back door even when it's stuck). Today has been one of those forbidding-grey-clouds kinds of days, where the sun occasionally peeks out and makes everything look dramatic.

	Daffodils 1 (152 KB). To start, here are the (presumed) daffodils. Clearly they're about ready to flower. Very nice.
	Daffodils 2 (130 KB)
	Daffodils 3 (134 KB)
	Daffodils 4 (101 KB)
	Mini-daffodils 1 (116 KB). These are two clumps of some sort of mini-daffodils that have already flowered.
	Mini-daffodils 2 (201 KB).
	English ivy growing wild on the ground (118 KB). Most frustrating, considering how difficult this stuff is to grow in the US, in a pot, inside, with constant coddling!
	English ivy on a tree (141 KB). This is what the stuff does all by itself. You can't properly get the scale from this photo. Does it help if I tell you that the leaves lower down on the trunk are the size of my hand?
	Leaf buds (109 KB). The ornamental trees in the neighbourhood have already flowered and their leaves are starting to open. The regular trees and bushes aren't far behind. These are the leaf buds on the hedge. (In this picture you can see the threatening sky quite nicely.)
	Purple croci (170 KB). Presumably these are some kind of crocus, anyway. They flowered more than a week ago.
	Padlock (76 KB) on the garden shed door. Looks really cool to me, utterly commonplace to the British.
	One of the neighbourhood cats (133 KB). And a bit of me, I'm afraid. And also a cameo appearance from Mike's shoe.

Let's see, what else am I doing...

On Friday, I listed myself on a few more Monster-type employment sites, just to see what happens. Of course I'm in the middle of several quite fun and absorbing projects at work, so I almost hope they don't turn up anything. Even if something did come up, I wouldn't be able to leave H&A until at least after the NetWare-to-NT migration is finished; it just wouldn't be right to leave before that's finished. Not that I'm likely to be faced with that problem anyway...

Yesterday, I set Tom & Linda up with email accounts in my domain, so they can each have their own email identity. Then, because they now have three pop3 accounts, I set them up with MailWarrior, the pop3 client I use. It's pretty good. Most importantly, it can be set up to check multiple pop3 accounts, and can flexibly send email from any of those accounts. It also allows you to see a list of your incoming messages before downloading, which is handy if you're using a modem, because you can choose not to download any that are very large, or delete spam messages without ever bothering to download them. It also can be set to warn before downloading messages over a certain size threshold, so you don't have to preview for size if you don't want to. Anyway, hooray, another person freed from the shackles of Outlook!

At the moment I'm using MailWarrior 3.5. On Friday I tried a newer version, 3.61, but it freaked out at me. I have it set up to check 3 accounts, but in the new version, only one of them would work; the other two kept insisting they had the wrong password. Strangely, from the log window, it looked like it was trying to use "HumptyDumpty" as the password, although it's possible that the app displays this instead of the real password, rather than the traditional asterisks. In any event, only the default account would successfully connect, so I backed off to 3.5 again.

At work, the new server arrived and has finally been minimally set up (enough that I can connect to it and take over from here). This is the server that will eventually be the main Boston server; it's the destination in my NetWare-to-NT migration. With it in place, I can finally get going on the migration proper.

I'm also just about to roll out the new (presumably last) version of Lisa's Macros. No really, this time I really am just about to roll it out. Of course just on Thursday I had an idea for a new feature, so I spent much of Friday working on it...but I think it'll be done by Monday lunchtime or thereabouts. Also, the various inputs I've been waiting for, on the wording of some of the templates, has now been finalized, so my waiting for other people to finish is over. This means a Tuesday-ish rollout to a small group of staff.

Meanwhile, with some trepidation, I tackled Deepness in the Sky, a monstrous tome of about 750 pages. It's a prequel to another extremely large (and very good) book that I've already read, so I've had my eye on it. It has turned out to be a very fast read; I'm already in the mid-600s somewhere, and things have just gone past the flash point, so from here on it'll be agony every time I have to put it down.

Created at 22:43

Tuesday, 13 March

So, I forgot to mention in Sunday's entry that we went to the supermarket in the afternoon. In addition to the more usual food items, we ended up with jam doughnuts, an apple pie, strawberries and cream, four chocolate-and-cream sandwich meringues, a box of Viennese chocolate whirls (chocolate sandwich cookies¹ with cream between), a package of mint crisp chocolates, a package of Smarties (not like American Smarties--more like oversized pastel-coloured M&Ms), and--the pièce de résistance--a box of six Mr Kipling "Exceedingly Good" Red Nose Cakes²!

...And we weren't even hungry!

We did manage to resist getting another sticky toffee meringue thing. That ought to count for something, I think.

Pete called yesterday and claimed that I haven't called them since I moved here. Can that really be possible? I don't specifically remember any instances of dialling there, but then I don't specifically remember having lunch today, so that's not especially meaningful. Well, if I haven't, I blame email. Pete's on line just about all the time, so it's easy to pop off an email. Plus I never know where the heck he is. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.

The daffodils I mentioned in Sunday's entry bloomed first thing Monday morning. No big surprise there.

Oh, and last night I finished Deepness in the Sky. Wow. Various people have asserted that it was better than Fire Upon the Deep (the book to which it is a prequel). I was sceptical because Fire Upon the Deep was excellent itself. Well, they were right; it was better, bordering on incredible. Which means I have to update the book pages...And add everything else Vernor Vinge has ever written (that I don't already have) to the Buying Queue.

In the end I did roll out a new version of the macros today, and promptly noticed two bugs. Well, sort of bugs. Fixed 'em, anyway.

¹In the interests of fairness, I should mention that the use of the term "cookie" here is in dispute.

²These are...um...well, never mind. It's probably best if you just don't ask.

Created at 22:15

Friday, 16 March

In New Zealand even the telephone dials are numbered anti-clockwise. This has nothing to do with the laws of physics--they just do it differently there. The shock is that it had never occurred to you that there was any other way of doing it. In fact you had never even thought about it at all, and suddenly here it is--different. The ground slips.

Dialling in New Zealand takes quite a bit of concentration because every digit is where you least expect to find it. Try and do it quickly and you will inevitably misdial because your automatic habit jumps in and takes over before you have a chance to stop it. The habit of telephone dials is so deep that it has become an assumption, and you don't even know you're making it.

--Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

On Wednesday, as part of my NetWare-to-NT migration, I had to create some groups and move a lot of users around, which meant an hour or so of just using the mouse. Later that afternoon my arm started hurting. By Thursday morning it was really bad. I assume it's RSI, but it's nothing like what I experienced last September. That was a pain in the wrist and a tingling hand. This feels more like my funny bone got whacked and just never stopped hurting.

Anyway, it's unpleasant enough that since yesterday morning, I've been typing in lower case and using the mouse with my left hand. Wow, am I ever not left-handed!

If I leave it alone, it mostly feels better after a while, and Advil seems to help quite a lot (although you can never really tell, can you; how can you know how much it would have hurt?). But as soon as I go back to the mouse and keyboard, it comes right back.

So today I took about half the day off and went into town, thus accomplishing the dual purpose of keeping me away from the keyboard and also getting some errands done. Although, as is par for my particular course, I didn't accomplish any of the things I specifically went into town to do. Mostly this was because I got a spontaneous haircut. (Still hadn't handled the haircut situation, you see. It's been four months since my last haircut and it was driving me crazy.) I have been scoping out the hair salon situation, but really haven't reached any conclusions. One of the ones I saw today didn't look terribly busy, so I thought what the heck, and asked if they could take a walk-in, which they could. Unfortunately the not-busy-ness turned out to be deceptive, so it ended up taking nearly two hours (during which, I should point out, they offered me tea). But the end result is that I am now somewhat less fluffy than I was this morning.

So, my first British haircut. Well, first British haircut in Britain, anyway; my first British haircut ever was on Enchantment of the Seas when I went from really long hair to really short hair. Interestingly, this haircut had a lot in common with that first haircut. British hairdressers generally go to school for three years. Consequently they really know what they're doing. Watching them is like watching the chefs you get at a Japanese teppanyaki restaurant, the kind where the cooking surface is integrated into your table and the chef cooks in front of you. They have the same confidence with their tools, and the same really practised, fast-chopping movements. Samurai hairdresser! Hwaaaa, snip, chop, your hair is cut! Whoosh, swish, flip, your hair is dry! Hwaaaaa! <bow> And they don't even have to look while they're doing it! And they never seem to hold any of their tools by the actual handles. The hair dryer in particular they like to hold by the barrel.

I always like it when they say, "You can do this yourself, you know". Sure I could, if I had three hands and could stand behind myself!

I was pleased to see that there seems to be no expectation of small talk. I wonder whether British taxi drivers expect to converse during the entire drive...

Interestingly, one of the hairdressers, who presumably spends a lot of time on her hair and knows how to get it just so, had hair that looked exactly like my hair did this morning. On purpose, it would seem! ...Goodness! Maybe I've been a fashion plate these last few weeks without realizing it!

...Nah.

Created at 00:35

Sunday, 18 March

On the grounds that it was a beautiful sunny day, Mike suggested we wash the car, which hasn't been white for a long time. I filled a bucket with hot water while Mike put his shoes on.

"Ready?"
"Except now it's hailing."
"Really?"
"...Oh. Never mind."

So we washed the car. Toward the end it started hailing again. Well, sort of. Actually it hailed snow. They weren't proper hailstones; it was more like small snow pellets were being hurled at the ground.

Mike didn't seem to see anything unusual (or funny, come to think of it) about the thin green layer of primitive plant life growing on most of the rubbery surfaces of the car (e.g. the window seals). He advanced the theory that it was growing in the layer of dirt--you might call it a biosphere--that had accumulated on the car. I'm not buying it. This is a fascinatingly damp place. I don't know quite how it manages it, because the humidity really isn't any higher than it is anywhere else, but this green stuff grows on everything. Tree bark, fences, the asphalt on the road, paving stones in the yard...they all acquire this slick of green stuff. It must be the humidity in combination with never really getting cold. Except then what's Florida's excuse?

I've been very good all weekend and have not, not, not used the computer. Strange how procrastination loses its appeal, now that I have no choice about it. Nevertheless, the hand isn't all that much better. It doesn't hurt when I'm not using it, which is an improvement, but I suspect that it'll be pretty annoyed by about midday tomorrow. I think I'll stick with the left-mousing arrangement.

Created at 23:35

Wednesday, 21 March

Happy equinox!

In honour of the occasion, we are having...snow flurries. Hmm. The daffodils are looking rather bewildered and, I must say, quite reproachful. They're clustered in a worried little huddle, their heads bent together, looking for all the world like they're grumbling to each other. Then a breeze comes up and they all look at me, as if to say, "And what do you plan to do about this intolerable situation?"

As usual, watching the snow fall is quite pleasant and relaxing, mostly because (a) I'm not out in it and won't have to be, and (b) it's too warm for it to stick, so it won't cause a nuisance. It's the huge-snowflake snowball kind of snow¹, which is especially pretty to watch. It's so relaxing, in fact, that it almost makes up for the white towel, one of a set of four, that I turned an interesting shade of light green in the wash today. I guess now it's one of a set of one.

Something rather worrying happened today: A fat packet from my tax accountant showed up in the mail. It contained a revised MA tax return that I should have submitted instead of the one I did. I knew there was a revised return, but assumed the one I got was it, and that the original had never been mailed. This packet was mailed to me nearly a month ago. I'm not quite sure what happens next...

(Of course since writing the above, I've notified my accountant of the problem, and he has already put together the necessary paperwork to rectify things, and has mailed it to me. Now that's service. If it were up to me, I wouldn't even have gotten around to seriously considering beginning to put it off yet.)

Lots going on at work, not surprisingly. Part of the NetWare-to-NT migration includes thinking of, and then dealing with, all the subsystems we have that depend on NetWare. One of these is a black box called a FaxPress, a network-based device for sending and receiving faxes electronically. We bought ours in, oh, must have been 1994, when NT was just a gleam in Bill's eye. Consequently our FaxPress only supports NetWare. We therefore bought a shiny new one (well, to be honest, it's probably a dull matte) and I've been getting it set up. This is complicated only because it has far-reaching side effects, and there are a lot of details. I need a WinInstall for the new client (check); I need a new cover page (check, but it fought me); I have to write instructional handouts to give the users (check); I have to make sure the automatic charging back of faxes to clients will still work, which involves an app we wrote that accounting runs weekly (check); and then things really get fun. Our incoming faxes are all automatically converted to email messages and routed to their recipients. This doesn't happen by magic; it's a complex process, and it all still has to work from the moment we switch over to the new box. We use DID (Direct Inward Dial) telephone lines so each user has their own fax number. The FaxPress understands DID and uses the number to determine who the fax was sent to. Special hardware is required to allow the FaxPress to understand DID; the old unit's hardware may or may not work with this new unit. It also involves software to convert the faxes into email messages. Our existing gateway software almost certainly won't work, so I have to implement a new one, which is completely different. And then, just to drizzle icing all over things, there are the unaddressed faxes to deal with--those that are sent to the main fax number, not a particular user. I wrote a VB app to simplify the manual task of routing these. Will the app still work with the new fax-to-email gateway's output? Almost certainly not.

So, as you can see, it's complicated. I really enjoy it, though. There's a deep satisfaction to be had from taking something as complex as this, and successfully anticipating every dependency and detail. Ideally, the users will just get a warning email, then an instructional handout, and then an AutoInstall. There will be no disruption in the arrival of faxes in their email In Boxes. They'll hardly know anything changed.

Of course the downside to this is that as far as anyone else can tell, upgrading a FaxPress entails nothing but replacing one black box with another...

I've also been working to get our FTP site usable by the general staff. This meant, basically, providing them with an easy way to get instructions whenever they need them, and instructions they can easily fax to clients. It also meant developing the site itself--deciding how to handle security, and establishing various processes for creating FTP user IDs and whatnot.

And other things. They keep me busy.

Today the BBC reports that Bill Bryson and family are returning to the UK. Apparently he thinks it was a mistake to go back to the US.

¹This is the only kind of snow they get here. By distinguishing it as "snowball snow", I would probably sound rather Eskimo-like to the British. In fact they are so accustomed to all snow being snowball snow that when, some years ago, the rail service was paralysed by a heavy snowstorm and a spokesperson, when pressed to justify their failure to keep the trains running, explained that it was "the wrong kind of snow" to clear properly, the British found this so funny that the phrase "the wrong kind of snow" has entered the national subconscious.

Created at 00:20

Saturday, 24 March

Still not done with this bout of RSI, I'm afraid. It varies in intensity, but I'm a bit concerned because now my left hand is complaining about the unaccustomed demands I'm putting on it. Yesterday my right hand was the worst it's been in a week, but today it's about as good as it's been since this started up, so I don't quite know what to think, especially because I spent most of today at the computer, in defiance of common sense. Wait and see, I guess.

My ill-advised computer tinkering today has mostly been fiddling with MixPix. I've been thinking about posting it here as downloadable freeware; after all, why not? I wrote it partly because (a) I couldn't find a freeware wallpaper shuffler that did everything I wanted, but mostly because (b) it was fun; but if someone else could get some use out of it, I wouldn't object to that. So I started working on a help file for it, but as usual, the process of documenting features brought to light many small potential improvements, and a few new features, so trying to write help for it has proved a moving target.

Aside from today, I've been quite good about minimizing computer usage outside work, which means I've been ploughing through the reading queue like there's no tomorrow. On which subject, I've noticed that as I finish books and give them ratings, there have been a disproportionate number of highly-rated ones lately. I haven't become a softy (perish the thought); the high ratings are because I'm reading the cream of Mike's books. Consequently I'm in bibliophile heaven; everything I read lately is at least very good, and some have been absolutely stunning. It's going to be a shock when I eventually have to return to the usual hit-or-miss success rate with new books.

Our unseasonable bout of winter passed quickly; we're back in the 50s during the day. The daffodils nod their heads together--"Now that's more like it," they seem to say to each other.

And just a few minutes from now, we'll arrive at what has always seemed to me to be the real boundary-marker of Spring, namely the end of DST. (No, you didn't forget. The UK Springs Forward a week earlier than the US does.) Hooray! I love Spring Forward. Yes, I know we lose an hour tomorrow, but who cares? What a trivial price to pay for suddenly having daylight until past 7PM for the next six months! Yes, I know it means sunrise is an hour later but let's face it, I'm selfish, and I don't have to get up early, so Spring Forward is an unalloyed delight for me. So there.

(A bit later)

Ooops. It turns out that Spring Forward already went by; the UK does it at 1:00AM, not 2:00. My computer doesn't know that, though; probably Microsoft didn't know, so NT's time zone hasn't adjusted my system clock yet. Will it do it at 2:00? Or does Microsoft not know that the UK springs forward a week earlier than Redmond? The suspense is killing me.

Aha, it did jump forward at 2:00. It's quite eye-opening to be outside the US. Just about all the software I use was written in the US, which I've never thought twice about, but when you're in another country it can be quite annoying. Some apps can't be changed from their US-centric assumptions; others are vaguely aware that some places Aren't America but don't quite get it right, like NT just did. I never realised how irritating it must be to have every app you install pre-configured with the wrong defaults.

Created at 03:41

Wednesday, 28 March

It would seem that I've had too much tea tonight.

I went to bed nearly two hours ago, you see. I really am sleepy...but I'm not asleep. My brain is racing. Two things to add to the MixPix documentation. Ideas for changes to MixPix itself. Endless rehashes of MixPix issues for which I don't yet have solutions I like. Modifications to the FaxPress user documentation. Ideas for modifications to the FaxPress client configuration. Things--about four by now--to test or investigate first thing in the morning. (Install FaxPress client to myself and test its performance and speed across a slow WAN link. Possible ways to handle cross-office billback automatically, so that we could have just one centralized FaxPress [huge $ savings if possible!]. Test how this FaxPress version handles non-native attachments. Research the problem with the IE upgrade wiping out a few users' Favourites. Remember to provide Jill the archive app hack I wrote, but test it first. Modify MailWatcher to look for giant files in the async directory queues. Whoops, that's 6 already. Blah, blah, blah, ad practically infinitum!)

And as if that's not enough, the INTP list is talking about the INTP-INTP relationship topic again, and I keep composing (brilliant, witty, illuminating) replies in my head.

And I keep zinging around among these topics like Speedy Gonzales on a sugar high.

When you have an idea while trying to fall asleep, you can sometimes be confident you'll remember it in the morning. But this many? I don't think so, especially considering the usual swiss-cheese state of my brain before about lunchtime. So I've finally given up, and come back to the keyboard to exorcise the quick and easy items, at least, from my head.

It's rather cool, coming into the living room at night after we have shut everything down. With the lights off, it looks like a command center, even with the computers turned off. There are LEDs and red lights and green lights just about everywhere you look. Some of them are even flashing! Oooh!

Tangentially from which, on Spring Forward day, we realized that there were a potential total of something like 11 clocks just in this room. (Three computers, digital camera, mobile phone, VCR display, TV, our two watches. Oh, and two actual clocks.)

Right. Back to bed, I think.

Created at 01:04

Friday, 30 March

London was the place she liked living in most, apart, of course, from the pizza problem, which drove her crazy. Why would no one deliver pizza? Why did no one understand that it was fundamental to the whole nature of pizza that it arrived at your front door in a hot cardboard box? That you slithered it out of greaseproof paper and ate it in folded slices in front of the TV? What was the fundamental flaw in the stupid, stuck-up, sluggardly English that they couldn't grasp this simple principle? For some odd reason it was the one frustration she could never learn simply to live with and accept, and about once a month or so she would get very depressed, phone a pizza restaurant, order the biggest, most lavish pizza she could describe--pizza with an extra pizza on it, essentially--and then, sweetly, ask them to deliver it.

"To what?"
"Deliver. Let me give you the address--"
"I don't understand. Aren't you going to come and pick it up?"
"No. Aren't you going to deliver? My address--"
"Er, we don't do that, miss."
"Don't do what?"
"Er, deliver..."
"You don't deliver? Am I hearing you correctly...?"

The exchange would quickly degenerate into an ugly slanging match which would leave her feeling drained and shaky, but much, much better the following morning.

--Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

I am pleased to report that things have changed since Douglas Adams wrote the above. In fact, they have improved so much that early this week, a leaflet for a local pizza place was put through the mail slot--advertising delivery. Free delivery, no less, which isn't always the case even in the US.

So, tonight, the kitchen being in a rather depleted state, and we both being seriously disinclined to bestir our lazy selves and go to Tesco's, we took our lives into our hands and ordered from them. The pizza arrived after only half an hour, and was quite good, so it all worked out well in the end. Well, there was one little surprise (for me) when it had jalapeños on it. I keep forgetting that "chillies" here can mean generic hot peppers or jalapeños specifically. It was fine, though; it turns out I've been eating them all along at Pizza Hut without realizing it (they are a very dark green at Pizza Hut, not the vaguely pickled appearance I'm used to). So I guess I like jalapeños!

Of course having pizza delivered resulted in a small cultural problem: I just can't get used to the idea of not tipping. Tipping is apparently not the norm except at very posh restaurants. But every time I don't tip, I feel like a complete heel. A cheapskate. Scum. I want to slink away and hide my worthless carcass from the sight of decent people. (When Pete and Mel were visiting, back in October, poor Mike was completely outnumbered by frantic Americans compulsively aching to tip someone, anyone, possibly everyone. Every time we did anything, we'd ask Mike: "Should we tip for this? No? Really? Are you sure?!" He finally took pity on us and let us tip after dinner at a Thai restaurant. Amazing what a relief it was. We immediately purged our guilty consciences by leaving the cumulative total we felt we ought to have tipped over the course of the day. That was probably one startled but happy waitress.)

Here it is, nearly 11:00, and I've only just now knocked off work. What can I say; I got on a roll. The internet connection has been very sluggish in the afternoons and evenings the last few days, and today it cut out entirely for about two hours, so I had to work on things that didn't require connectivity to work. That put me in mind of the two modifications to old apps that I thought of the other night when I couldn't sleep, so I dredged them up.

The first one, an archiving app, just walks all the directories on a drive, looking for subdirectory trees (i.e. a directory from the root, and all its subdirectories) in which none of the files have been modified since a date the user specifies. This was easy enough, with only one bug that took any length of time to find (and it was stupid, so I'm not going to say what it was). Anyway, it's still a quick-and-dirty, but useful enough that I sent it to Jill to try in the real world.

The second one, MailWatcher, is the one that sucked me in for the majority of the evening. I wrote it more than two years ago, put it in place, and haven't touched it since. It runs all the time, monitoring the post office directories in each office for particular symptoms of common problems (mostly lost connectivity, high file counts, and enormous files). When we upgraded to GW5, in late 1999, the post office directory structure changed slightly, not breaking MailWatcher but rendering it somewhat less useful. It's been on the get-around-to-fixing-someday list ever since. Today its number came up! Not only did I revise it to work better with the new directory structure, I expanded its scope to watch for additional problems, and greatly streamlined and genericized the code.

I hadn't looked at MailWatcher for such a long time that I had to figure out how it worked all over again. So once I had it in my head, I didn't want to stop, because who knows when I'll have a chance to work on it again? And then I'd have to do the ramp-up all over again. So I kept going until everything I'd wanted to accomplish was done.

All in all, it was a Good Programming Day. Lots of fun.

I finally couldn't resist the temptation and fired off an email to the INTP list, in response to the INTP-INTP relationships topic. Interesting that I could dash off that email in just a few minutes, when I've been thinking about posting a Musing on the topic for months now, but can't really get a good start on it. Ah well.

Created at 23:26

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