White Lightning Axiom: Redux

Oh, Jumping Jehosephat! Jovial Joker Jacob woke up at 3am and pretty much kept us awake as he tossed and turned for the next three hours. We tried to subvert his devious plan of exhausting us and allowing his sister to usurp control of the Haupertonian City-State, but to no avail. Fortunately, we had assumed that her impromptu nap yesterday was a planned event on her part, so we were prepared. No coup today! We gave him a half bottle of milk and he slept past 6am, thus enabling me to let the hounds out and cutting off their support troops. In any event, I still managed to get to work by 0745. This will be a short week, no more than 8 hours a day. So many things to wrap up before the Great Migration.

At work, I was greeted by the fact that the settlement processing I had launched on Friday had failed when I got to the adjustment phase. As it turns out, the thing that is supposed to make the inserts into the database unique, was not unique. The incoming data showed that the selected data could indeed be duplicated if there were two different types of identical data. An adjustment and an order can have the same date, id and line number. Curses, foiled again. I am happy that I am not responsible for the schema development, but the resolution of this error could take all day.

Once again, I have neglected to do my timesheet for my employers. The employers who cut my check that is. My contractual employers got their timesheet his morning. It will the last time I do my timesheet for them through the supplied mechanism since they have changed to a new product called PMOffice. It is an abomination. I feel badly for these folks who must manage and report on this mess. Even the technical staff here is having issues on the profound micro-management required to make this thing work. I find that no matter how much money, education and tool you throw at a cultural problem, a broken society stays broken until there is a dramatic change. Dramatic enough to make the denizen question the underlying truths on which their society is based. Here, it is sloth and jealousy with just a peppering of anxiety. Hard nuts to crack.

I skipped the lunch thing today. All I brought was 3 tomatoes. I gave one of them to C* since she seems to enjoy them so much. The other two were absolutely delicious. I cannot tell you how good these things taste. They are NOTHING like the little rubber balloons of grainy pulp that I get at the grocery store. I had a cup of coffee (french vanilla, light by my standards) and a cup of tea. I'm sure I'll be in dire straights by the time I get home tonight. Just the right condition to start emptying the fridge. Good thing, I have 3 lamb chops that need cooking ... I think they will make an excellent starting point in my quest to eat my way through the fouled joke I call the Refrigerator of Certain Rot.

While I'm on vacation, I'm not entirely sure that I will be doing much blogging. I may be able to squeeze in a topic here and there, but hearing the blow-by-blow of two day drive to Minnesota's midlands may not be 'good reading'. More on that later.

# posted by mdmhvonpa @ 10:35 PM