My project manager is originally from India (I think), and while his English is quite good, it’s not perfect… He was planning to call me later, so he told me he’d “give me a tinkle”. :P
That was funny, but communicating with the Chinese guy on our team is definitely not - his accent makes him really hard to understand, it takes him forever to get a point across in meetings, and the XML specification he made for us recently (which we’ll have to publish to customers eventually) was riddled with misspellings.
These are both really smart people, but there is definitely a language barrier.
Welcome to the world of international business. :P
Read more...I kid you not… The program I’m analyzing contains the following line of code:
set you_smell 'Y'
I think that’s supposed to indicate that there’s a problem with the system connection. Of course, in other places they indicate that with the “hosed_ua” variable.
I want to go upstairs and inflict serious bodily harm on the person who wrote this unreadable crap…
Read more...The ad I posted in the Arizona Republic to sell my sofa has been out of the paper for nearly 2 weeks, yet I’m still getting calls. WTF?
Read more...Just woke up from a nap and remembered my dream quite clearly, which is a rarity, so I’ll recount it here.
I had several MP3s of Diana’s songs - not ones she’d downloaded, ones she’d recorded in a studio. But I had filed them under the wrong name, so I was moving them to their own folder.
In another part of the same dream, I owned some kind of futuristic jet that was parked in my driveway - it was reddish-orange and could do 30 knots per second (which is really fast, though that’s not how they measure the speed of planes). My youngest brother, John, was showing me how to activate the teleporter so I could leap into the pilot’s seat. (This was an instantaneous teleporter - not like that crappy Star Trek one.)
He was also showing me a Palm Pilot adventure game he’d written. It had cheesy 2D graphics on the Palm, but when he hooked it up to the XBox, it turned into an amazing VR game with theater-quality sound.
There are even more details than that, but they’re a bit hazy.
Read more...Anybody else notice that the title track from Enigma’s new Voyageur album has a sample from Tone Loc’s Funky Cold Medina? :)
Read more...Sweeeet...
I just got handed responsibility for Apollo, the biggest, nastiest database of the four we’re covering on this project. I’ll be handling “reverse engineering” of the existing program, design for the new version, and Java coding for this part.
Why am I happy about being handed such a huge mess? Because it’s the most important mess. As of now, this project cannot complete without me.
I wonder which desk I’ll get upstairs once I’m promoted? :)
Read more...Babbling...
This journal entry has been processed with babble.pl, a standalone program that does the same thing. The nice thing about my setup, though, is that I can pipe into it from files, or from the clipboard, or anything else with a quick command.
Er…
This journal entry has been processed with babble.pl, a simple script I wrote for scrambling text. Any text before it continues printing. The result is something that almost, but not quite, makes sense.
I based this off of Babble, a a simple script I wrote for scrambling text. Any text you give the script, it prints out, but at random points it will jump to another occurrence of the same word within the clipboard, or anything else with a quick command.
Er…
This journal entry has been processed with babble.pl, a simple script I wrote for scrambling text. Any text you give the script, it prints out, but at random points it will jump to another occurrence of the same word within the text before it continues printing. The result is something that almost, but not quite, makes sense.
I based this off of Babble, a standalone program that does the same thing. The nice thing about my setup, though, is that I can pipe into it from files, or from the clipboard, or anything else with a quick command.
Read more...“Kiss me”, I said, because it was the most natural and obvious thing for us to do. And she did. Diana’s a good kisser. :)
Wow, someone I can be myself around, without fear of reprisal. Imagine that. (Actually, now that I’ve experienced it, I wonder why I ever put up with anything else.)
Read more...I was horrified to see Chris Rock cast opposite Anthony Hopkins in the appropriately-titled Bad Company a year ago, but it looks like there’s more odd couples on the way. The upcoming Disney film Home on the Range features the voice talents of Judi Dench… and Roseanne Barr. Jesus.
Read more...Tim Berners-Lee has been knighted for his invention of the World Wide Web. This puts him in the company of Sir Isaac Newton, among others, and I’d say he deserves it.
As far as I know, Sir Berners-Lee still drives an old Volkswagen to work every day, though. :)
Read more...