Archive for the ‘Rant’ Category

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My contract is up at the end of this month, and they’re not renewing it. They have an open position for a direct hire, but I applied for it and I haven’t heard anything back. So I thought for self-preservation purposes, I’d better start looking to see what else is out there.

First step is to see if my pimp has anything. Ok, enter http://www.[pimpname].com/ into a browser, and get “Safari can’t find the server”, but first there is a weird little flash as if it is getting redirected. So I try curl on that address, and get:

<head><title>Document Moved</title></head>
<body><h1>Object Moved</h1>This document may be found <a HREF="http://spusitinf0
02/Pages/index.aspx">here</a></body>

And I repeat the experiment with a telnet to port 80, and find they made the exact same damn stupid mistake in the Location: header in the 302 message.

Do I really want to entrust my career to people who make mistakes like this? I don’t think so.

Posted by Paul Tomblin on July 4, 2008 at 00:54 GMT under Job Experiences, Rant.
3 Comments.

I bought a Maxxum 7D as I mentioned I might earlier. I decided that while it’s not the latest thing, it’s half the price of a new camera, and I can use my existing lenses. It arrived today. Only one small minor inconsequential detail. None of the buttons beside the LCD screen work. So I have no way to change any settings, review pictures, look at histograms, or basically do anything other than take pictures at 800 ISO. I’m hoping against hope that there is a setting on one of the bazillion switches and dials on the camera that is locking out those buttons, because otherwise I’m going to have to hope like hell that the seller’s “we guarantee against mechanical defects” guarantee actually means something.

Posted by Paul Tomblin on July 3, 2008 at 21:13 GMT under Rant.
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Yesterday I glued the seams on the deck of the kayak. Today I’m supposed to be taking off the wires and filling in any seams that didn’t get filled. I took a look at them, and there are some major problems and some minor ones.

Major problems:

  • The tail section didn’t go together correctly. It was so bad that I’ve had to cut the glued seams with a carpet knife. I’ve tried to slide a bit a scrap wood under it and using a combination of nails, tape and clamps tried to get it to sit right and I’ll have to re-glue it later.
  • Two places on the deck, around where the bow and stern temporary forms are, the deck has actually slumped down too low and is too wide for the hull. I’m hoping that after I glue the under side and put it back on to dry, I can somehow manipulate those sections to sit right, but I fear that I’m going to end up carving the wood along the shear line to make it fit.

Minor problems:

  • lots of glue spills on the outside of the boat that need to be scraped and sanded off
  • some HUGE glue spills on the inside of the boat, some that went down into the hull will require lots of work to get off
  • Most of the epoxy has set up correctly, but some is still rubbery. Hopefully that’s just a matter of time, and not that I somehow didn’t mix the hardener in correctly.

It’s times like this that I have to keep reminding myself that nobody else will see all the flaws.

Posted by Paul Tomblin on July 2, 2008 at 20:53 GMT under Kayak Construction, Rant.
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A while back I mentioned how much I love “kill -3″ as a Java debugging tool. Today I decided that instead of having to put a redirection in the start up script for each app in the system, I’d change the logging class so that it would do a “System.setOut” to redirect standard output. And that’s when I discovered the horrible truth - that while setOut redirects things that are printed with System.out, it doesn’t actually affect the JVM’s actual standard output. WTF?

Posted by Paul Tomblin on June 30, 2008 at 20:32 GMT under Geekery, Rant.
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I tried to pace myself better today, but it didn’t work. I ended up actually being 0.29 minutes (17.4 seconds) slower. I was attempting to go slower on the way out into the bay, but the wind was coming behind from behind, and there were swells coming from three different directions, and it threw me off. Especially since it meant that I had a wind in my face on the way back in, and also on the upstream paddle on the river. I was still tired at the split (and Ken still managed to not record it) in spite my attempt to go slower at first. I’ve got to figure out how to pace better!

There were a lot of people there tonight, both racers and not racers, and there was a lot of traffic on the river. There were a bunch of Huggers Club members, and suddenly I’m not the fastest one, which is mildly disappointing, but good to see the club embracing this activity. There were also some real racers - one guy who is nearly national team level, and he did the race twice in around 14.60. I’m going to see if I can convince him to tow me next time, strictly so he can get a better work out, you know.

There is a guy at the races who I think is a co owner of Bay Creek - the first time I met him was when he came to the Huggers club meeting where we discussed the Paddle Power group. He’s very outgoing - almost to the point of obnoxiousness, but it works for him. Anyway, he invited me for their Monday night training group - he says he’ll be able to teach me some better paddling techniques and some tips on training. Maybe I’ll learn how to paddle so my elbows don’t hurt so much.

Posted by Paul Tomblin on June 26, 2008 at 01:06 GMT under Kayaking, Rant.
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Still only using the crappy phone camera, so not much point doing my standard “embed the thumbnail and link to the big picture” when the full sized picture is so small.
Continue reading ‘Kayak Construction: Glassing the outside’ »

Posted by Paul Tomblin on June 22, 2008 at 21:43 GMT under Rant.
2 Comments.

As predicted in Rants and Revelations » I have seen the future, and it sucks, they’ve hired a new Flash guy to write the new user interface. It really sucks to find out that your contributions are going to be even more marginalized just as you’re also finding out that they want you to become a full time employee at a significant pay cut.

I guess it’s time to stop antagonizing recruiters and start finding out seriously what’s out there. Either that or find out if the bank account would survive me taking off however long it would take me to get a masters in user inferace design.

Update: Oh, it gets better. New Guy has never even heard of source code control. In other words, he’s used to toy projects on toy operating systems.

Posted by Paul Tomblin on June 17, 2008 at 14:29 GMT under Geekery, Job Experiences, Rant.
2 Comments.

…really, really suck.

Can you believe I got called by a recruiter who hadn’t even bothered to look at a map to figure out where Rochester is in relation to NYC? She seemed shocked when I said it would be a 6-8 hour drive for me to “commute”. She kept referring to NYC as “the city”, as if none of the other centers of population in New York (or indeed, probably the world) count as cities in her world view.

Feh.

Posted by Paul Tomblin on June 16, 2008 at 20:27 GMT under Job Experiences, Rant.
9 Comments.

I’ve ranted about the impromptu meetings that break out outside my cube in the past, right? Well, today it reached a new pinnacle of annoying: there were three separate groups talking, and because they were so noisy, each group was getting progressively louder and louder as they struggled to be heard over the other two groups.

After a minute or two of this, I went out and said very loudly “Excuse me, I’m not working too loud for you, am I?” One person laughed, but nobody stopped talking. About two minutes later, two of the groups went away but the one group stayed for another 5 minutes or so.

Next time I’m plugging my iPod into my speakers and blasting “Mao Tse Tung Said” at them.

Posted by Paul Tomblin on June 4, 2008 at 19:48 GMT under Job Experiences, Rant.
5 Comments.

This office has never been particularly well airconditioned. Mostly it’s too hot in both winter and summer, although a few years ago it was the opposite, so that I kept a sweater in my desk for the days when it was too over airconditioned in the summer. But in the last couple of years, we keep getting “emergency power reduction program in effect”, which means that they’ve turned off at least one of the building’s chillers, usually because one of the (formerly belonging to the company, now sold off to some other organization) power generators is off-line.

Today it’s bloody hot in the office, and of course this is a day when I chose to wear a long sleeve shirt.

Posted by Paul Tomblin on June 2, 2008 at 19:44 GMT under Job Experiences, Rant.
3 Comments.

One of the trials and tribulations and also one of the fun challenges of my job is that I get vague bug reports on something the QA person sees sometimes and not others. Our QA people don’t do a very good job of tracking exactly what they did and what they did differently between the ones that work and the ones that don’t. Ok, sometimes that’s our fault as developers for not logging enough, but it would be nice if they could tell you, for example, that the one that didn’t work used to be on the schedule before it was removed from the schedule while the one that does work has never appeared on the schedule.
Continue reading ‘D’oh!’ »

Posted by Paul Tomblin on May 31, 2008 at 01:45 GMT under Geekery, Rant.
4 Comments.

I swear, the next person I discovered declaring a method as “throws Exception” is going to get a kick in the balls. Serously, what sort of fucked up code are you writing that you can’t even tell what type of exceptions it’s going to throw? It’s head up your ass lazyness, pure and simple. And it poisons the code all up the line because your callers have to do the same, and then their callers, all the way up to whoever is handling the exceptions.

Posted by Paul Tomblin on May 29, 2008 at 17:51 GMT under Geekery, Rant.
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Our computers are put together for one thing, and one thing only - to run a theatre complex. And we give the users restricted logins that log them into a IceWM environment where they can’t do anything that they’re not supposed to. Everything on the machine is spec’ed for that purpose.

Today I get an urgent call - a site that is sort of a customer, and sort of a subsidiary had their system locked up, and when they tried to reboot, it complained that PostgresSQL wouldn’t start up. I’ve seen that happen before, so I asked their contact person to check if the root partition is full. Sure enough, it was. But of course they had no fucking clue how it could have filled up. “We didn’t do anything”, the constant cry of the clueless. I told them do to a “du -x | sort -n” on the root partition to see where the bulk of the files are. Turns out that there was 1.6Gb of stuff in /root/Desktop/Trash, and when they emptied the trash and rebooted, everything was fine.

I explained that our root partition is sized based on the premise that nobody would be logging into the console as root (I left out “unless they know what they’re doing”, because they obviously don’t.) They explained they “have” to do that because they have to preview the content that they’re preparing, and they can only do that as root.

I somehow resisted the urge to say “Either get a fucking clue or stop logging in as root”, and just responded “With great power comes great responsibility”. Next time they fill up the root partition and call me, I’m going to uninstall every desktop environment except IceWM.

Posted by Paul Tomblin on May 28, 2008 at 20:24 GMT under Geekery, Rant.
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The temperature is finally over 65 degrees, so it’s time to start gluing. And it did not go well.

As per the instructions, I mixed up an ounce of epoxy. I painted some on the boards around the seams. Then I cut some of the fibreglas tape and put them down on the wet epoxy and painted some more to wet the tape. Problems:

  • As I painted the epoxy on the tape, the tape kept moving around. I ended up having to hold down the tape with my fingers (in the rubber gloves, of course).
  • As I was painting, one of the boards popped up a bit as a nail came lose. This made gaps and bubbles to painstakingly paint out.
  • Bits of fibreglas frayed off the edges and ends of the tape, and had to be carefully picked out of the epoxy.
  • other random dirt got into the epoxy and had to be picked out.
  • I ran out of epoxy in the middle of it and had to run inside and mix up another ounce.

With that all done, the second part was to cut some strips of mylar and put them on top of the tape, then squeegee it flat, and put weights on them. Problems:

  • I’d put the nails in the boards too close to the seams, so I had to remove them and move them back so the mylar would fit. Several times that lifted one of the boards, ruining all my previous work.
  • The instructions had said to weight them down with bricks. I didn’t think I had any bricks, but I figured all the scrap 2×4s I had could be piled on top. Unfortunately, it turned out that the 2×4s weren’t heavy enough, and things were popping up. With the glue hardening quickly, I had to improvise. I found a pile of half-bricks in a dingy corner of the garage and pressed them into service. Unfortunately they were filthy, and got dirt all over everything. I’m hoping none of it got below the mylar sheets.

    • I’m not looking forward to tomorrow’s reveal to see just how ugly these joints look. Hopefully it will be like my canoe, where I know where every blemish is but everybody else just sees the overall beauty of it.

Posted by Paul Tomblin on May 23, 2008 at 23:43 GMT under Kayak Construction, Rant, Revelation.
2 Comments.

UPS tracking InformationI’ve said some nice things about UPS recently, but it appears that my streak of luck with them is running out. My delivery from Pygmy Boats is in three boxes, two of which are around 30 pounds, and one that is around 7 pounds. I’ve been tracking them eagerly on the UPS web site. All three of them showed as arrived in Hodgkins very late Thursday night. Hodgkins is a city that seems to be in quantum flux because some entries on the UPS web site say “Hodgkins, IL” and others say “Hodgkins, IN”. One of the two heavy packages hasn’t updated since it got there, and is still showing that although it’s there, it’s scheduled for delivery on Monday. The other heavy one and the light one, however, showed travel to Buffalo, NY on Friday via Middleburg Heights, OH, which is good because Buffalo is almost right next door. But for some reason, those two also say “Rescheduled for delivery” and Tuesday’s date.

I’m kind of at a loss to understand why it’s going to take them from Friday to Tuesday to get these packages here from Buffalo. Hell, I’d offer to go pick them up myself if it would help. Especially since the other package is evidently going to be dropped off via wormhole as Hodgkins makes its transition between its Illinois incarnation and its Indiana incarnation. Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s probably a matter of scheduling low priority room on the truck or something, and the package whose status hasn’t updated since Thursday is probably going to be late as well. Still, it sucks.

Posted by Paul Tomblin on May 18, 2008 at 21:35 GMT under Kayak Construction, Rant.
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