Category: January 2018

I just got an email from the local poodle society looking for a new family for these two poodles. And OMG they look exactly like mine! I can’t even tell the difference. If you told me this is a photo of Kai and Rosie I would TOTALLY believe you. Kai is the bigger one in the back, Rosie is the smaller one in the front…

But actually their names are Boot and Tinker.

John – don’t have a heart attack, I’m not going to adopt these poodles. But it’s hard to even look at the photo. My brain says those are our dogs!

I broke our online application at work this morning – the one that I’m in charge of, that our customers use to submit reports to us. I didn’t realize I had broken it until I got an email from a customer at noon.

Then I had to try to figure out how to fix it before I had to leave with some coworkers on a business trip at 1:00 (more on that later). Luckily, it’s not too hard to delete bad code as long as you remember everywhere you put it.

This was the offending code:

<tr><td><b>AI</b></td><td>${role.agencyInterest.aiNumber}</td></tr>

You may be wondering why an environmental scientist with zero coding training or experience is even dealing with stuff that looks like that. And I’d be wondering right along with you.

But here’s the thing – my team gets automated emails that we have to act on, and the emails don’t include the ID number that we need in order to do anything. So then we have to search an ancient database with a terrible interface to try and find those ID numbers. Which is a major pain in the butt.

There’s other identical code in our application that tells it to go to the ancient database and find the facility name and other useful information, so it stands to reason that it could also go and find the ID number, as long as it has the right field name for the ID number. So this should have worked. I know the field name, and this is the exact same syntax.

But apparently our application doesn’t like searching for ID numbers in that old database any more than we do.

One thing that California does better than New Mexico (gasp, yes, California is better at a few things) is spring flowers. I love the west coast spring with the dew in the morning and the unexpected showers.

I always think of New Mexico springtime as dry and harsh, with dirty wind.

Yes, that happens! That is not fog – that is high winds blowing sand and dirt in the air. You can barely even see the nearby mountains (nearby as in – walking distance).

But I’m telling myself spring can be lovely here too. For example, look at these pictures I found from spring of 2012, our last spring here before moving to California. These were taken at the biopark in Albuquerque, the first week of April, 2012. I don’t know what I was doing last spring, but I’ll definitely need to remember to go to the biopark this spring!

Ok that was nice, but I still want to go to Hawaii. Right now!

This is too funny! I was writing an email to John just now, and I was logged into my work email online from my personal computer (which I almost never do) and I forgot I was in the work system rather than my personal gmail.

I wrote, “I am making this shit up as I go”, in reference to trying to learn my job without anyone here to train me, because we’ve had so much turnover recently.

A second after I hit send, I got this:

I’ve got a ton of draft blogs, and I’m going through them to try to get them either deleted or published. Here’s one entitled, “This is why”.

I clicked on it, curious to see what it’s all about. Because that title is so full of promise!

This is why. Here’s answers to everything I ever wanted to know! To everything we all ever wanted to know! The answers to the universe and everything. Right here in this draft blog post.

But this post was empty. Word count = 0.  Turns out we’ll never know why. Sorry.

But here, have another random photo:

One of the approximately 5 people who occasionally read this blog emailed me to complement me on my writing and suggest that I write short stories. I assume she means fiction, which I could never do.  I haven’t any idea how to make up a story. I couldn’t tell a convincing story if my life depended upon it.

And I assume she also means something in print form, or perhaps at least with a larger readership than approximately 5, and maybe illustrated with a bit more effort than simply throwing up random, unretouched snapshots at the end of every few paragraphs.

That’s not happening either. I guess I’m just lazy. So here is my blog. Consider it my collection of short stories. Very short, short stories, unedited and, for the most part, unread.

I occasionally repeat myself too. Sometimes on purpose, as background, so the blog entry makes some small amount of sense as a stand-alone. Other times accidentally, because I usually can’t post my ideas right away. Then I forget which ideas I’ve actually posted.

I don’t think this blog would appeal to very many people. Most blogs are edgy or confrontational or informative or hilarious or glamorous, or some entertaining mix of all of the above. And yet, I would enjoy reading a simple blog like this one.  How would one find such a thing?

Oh, and here’s a random recent photo.

Doesn’t it seem like Christmas was forever ago? It is still January.

This is a surreal place in south-central New Mexico. It looks like snow, but it’s not, it’s gypsum.

We saw people actually trying to sled in it, but it didn’t look to me like that was working very well.

It’s surprising to me that in all the years I’ve lived here, we’ve only been here twice. The first time was over the Christmas holidays at only a few months after I first moved to New Mexico in 2005. Here’s a picture of Laura and I from back then. 12 years ago!

And here’s some pictures from this recent 3-day weekend.

An online application owned by my department (that I’m in charge of) has been sending me nightly “failure” messages since December 20. I’ve been reaching out to both our internal IT and our contractor who built it, and have not been getting anywhere. The issue has to do with the application pulling data from an internal database, and the contractor (who is very good) could not fix it because they do not have complete access to the database.

Meanwhile the internal IT employee who had been assigned to our application went AWOL. I mean, totally. She simply quit coming to work, and did not reply to attempts to reach her. Shortly before Christmas she announced to her boss that she was leaving early that day in order to get married (and no one even knew she was engaged) and then no one ever saw or heard from her again.

Of course we’re worried about her – what if something bad happened? But we know she has family in the area, so we have to assume she’s ok and she just didn’t want her job anymore. HR is processing a dismissal. She’s an experienced programmer, why would she want a dismissal on her record when she could have simply filled out her resignation paperwork? Or maybe she got a great new job already and just didn’t care?

Meanwhile, every night at 2 AM I get a failure notification email from our software. Then suddenly, after nothing for 2 weeks, my email explodes with IT chatter. VPN, java stack, oracle, grab values, exception trapping, unique constraints, Test vs QA vs Prod, DB schemas, and “Can you have one of your DBAs look at that sproc?”

I don’t know what any of that means, but I do know what this wonderful line means: “I just checked over the…contract…and database support is covered under “problem support” in the contract SoW. (I mistakenly thought that was not the case).”

Translation: We don’t have to rely on our internal IT because we have the money to pay the contractor to fix my software. Yay!

Hi, I just wanted to jump online for a moment and let you know that I am feeling better today.

Also, the digital antenna worked, so John was able to watch the games yesterday. Here’s the thing I don’t understand about football. If you’re watching because you enjoy the games, and don’t care too much about who wins, then fine, it seems like it could be a fun pastime. But if all you care about is who wins, aren’t you just setting yourself up for failure most of the time? What team wins the superbowl most of the time? No team. You’re going to lose in the end! And even if, by some unlikely event, you don’t lose one year, every other year you’re going to lose. So why put yourself through that every year?

I’m wondering if it’s possible to bet on the football games? (That’s how little I know about these things.) But I was thinking – I should bet against the Vikings. Then no matter what happens, we would have something to be happy about!

And one more thing – apparently it did snow in Placitas too. John sent me this beautiful photo this morning.