Jay McGavren's Journal

Diana, Lenny and I are watching her folks’s house over the weekend… We meant to bring a Dreamcast for entertainment but forgot it, so when we were at the mall I picked up one of those Jakks Pacific plug and play controllers with games embedded in it. (We chose the one with 5 Namco arcade games over the Atari 2600 paddle with 17 games in it.) Not too bad for 20 bucks, though I’m a little disappointed that it runs off batteries (4 AAAs) and has no 2-player options.

Len and Connie (Diana’s dad and stepmom) have 3 dogs who are for the most part quite lovable. The dachsund is a royal pain in the ass, however. Right now she’s running all over the house barking, and it’s a matter of time before she wakes up Lenny (who has been sleeping for much of the day thanks to his cough). I want to punt that dog into next Tuesday…

Sedona

Diana, Lenny and I drove up to Sedona today - wow, it was gorgeous. But I’ll get to that in a bit…

First we stopped by Montezuma’s Castle, one of those Native American cliff dwellings. It was built by a tribe called the Sinagua, but European settlers assumed it was the work of the Aztecs, and misnamed it accordingly. The structure actually turned out to be kinda small (just 20 rooms) and tourists weren’t allowed inside, so that was a little underwhelming.

The highlight of that sidetrip, oddly enough, was a tame squirrel (probably fed too much by tourists) who hung out near us for a bit. Lenny saw him and excitedly began shouting “mouse, mouse!” When Mouse (I’ve decided that’s his name) wandered off, Diana and I had to stop Lenny from calling for him: “Mouse? Mouuuuuuuse?” As we left I helped Lenny wave “Bye-bye, Mouse!” in the general direction of the park, which seemed to satisfy him.

And then we headed to Sedona. Ahhh, Sedona. Imagine a small but bustling city built in the center of the Grand Canyon, and you might begin to get a picture of what this place is like. Dazzling pine-studded rock spires in a rainbow of whites and reds on all sides, and highways running within a hundred feet of their bases. It was civilization and nature merged, and it was magnificent.

Sedonans have made considerable effort to preserve the beauty of the landscape, even going so far as to make ordinances that require buildings and signs to blend in with the surroundings. I doubt that I shall ever see a McDonald’s with cactus-green arches anywhere else.

Evidently I’m not the only person who thinks the place is magical. New age-types believe the place is filled with “vortexes” that soothe the body and mind. As such, the place is overrun with hippies. There are crystal shops and “healing centers” everywhere. I saw a guy with shoulder-length hair and a tunic carrying an acoustic guitar near the downtown area, and a group of grown men and women sitting Indian-style in a circle on a lawn elsewhere (doing I know not what).

Anyway, we managed to avoid all of that lot, and had a great drive through and around town (though I cursed the fact that I left my camera at home). We stopped at a cool outdoor souvenir shop with its whole premises covered in trees, and bought a crystal to add to the collection in Judy’s window. Then we stopped in the hillside Javelina Cantina for dinner, and watched the sunset turn the red mountain behind us even redder. When we finally emerged at dusk there were a dozen bats flying overhead. Diana tried unsuccessfully to show me her trick of getting them to swoop after a rock she threw in the air, but I was happy just to see them (I’ve never seen bats in the wild, believe it or not).

All in all, an excellent trip, and one I’ll remember for a long time. From now on, I’ll probably take anyone who comes to visit me in Arizona to Sedona. We don’t need no stinking Grand Canyon.

Bird flu...

High on my worry list these past few months - bird flu in Asia. Few remember the strain in 1918 that killed 20 million worldwide, but if bird flu mutates into a strain that can infect people, the death toll could be higher this time. And if Diana’s working in a hospital at the time, odds are she’s gonna bring it home.

Guess all we can do is stay healthy, get vaccinated every year, and hope for the best.

Grrrr...

My technical design document:

If the file cannot be opened, call the Error method of the Log Manager with the message “Could not open [file name] for reading.” and return an error value.

The Indian developer’s code:

$log->error(“Could not open [$file] for reading and return an error value”)

Look, I’m impressed that they know as much English as they do (by and large). But that doesn’t mean they know enough to be used for outsourcing.

And then they’re making mistakes that I wouldn’t make no matter what my native language is. Here’s one example:

Never mind the illegibility of that statement for a moment; why did they test for the same value three times?

It would have been a lot easier (and cheaper) to just code this myself.

Gulp...

My name didn’t appear, but my current project was among a handful of priority projects mentioned in a State of the Business letter BY THE CEO.

So much for flying under the corporate radar.