Jay McGavren's Journal

Oh. My. God.

Just spent half the afternoon trying to update a field via this legacy app I maintain, only to find that it reads the value from an update file and then silently discards it. (And that’s what it’s “supposed” to do.)

And then while trying to explain my own dumbassery, my co-worker realizes that the field she told me needed fixing wasn’t even the right one. Arrrggghh!

I’ve heard from a couple places now that smaller doses of caffeine throughout the day are better than a single jolt in the morning. So I’m trying to switch to green tea, which is supposed to have less…

But it seems like four times the kick, and not in a good way. I feel like my heart is going to pump its way right out of my ribcage. And it’s definitely due to the tea - this is the second occasion it’s happened.

Diana had similar effects several years ago. What the heck is in this stuff?

Looks like my company has purchased a license for a commercial wiki to use internally. Finally, a means of documenting database tables and applications that isn’t too painful to actually use… I’d been generating HTML from POD, and that was my unique solution - everyone else had their own.

Local aspects of modules?

Everyone’s so up in arms about re-opening core classes like Kernel and String in Ruby… Why not just apply changes to a target module only when viewed from within the current module or class?

class Bar
	def baz(fizz)
		fizz * 2
	end
end
module Foo
	local class Bar #Or some other keyword.
		def baz(fizz)
			fizz * 5
		end
	end
	def buzz
		puts Bar.new.baz('a') #'aaaaa'
	end
end
puts Bar.new.baz('a') #'aa'

That way you could tweak behavior to your heart’s content without worrying about the expectations of the other libraries you were using. This seems so obvious I’d be surprised if I was the first to think of it, so someone please let me know what problems have been encountered.

Move your ass.

If you are reading this, odds are…

• You are one of the richest 5% of Earth’s population.
• You live in the most peaceful era in human history.
• You are at least reasonably healthy, both mentally and physically.
• You have more educational materials, literature, music, and movies available to you, several times faster and cheaper than your parents did.

All of the above are threatened on multiple fronts.

You need to realize immediately how unbelievably fucking lucky you are. And that your luck may not last forever.

Then you need to go out and do something for humanity with the incredible resources at your disposal.

Do NOT waste one more day. You don’t know how many you have left.