Category: Rant

Not “Bill Law is dead” sad, but sad none-the-less

In software development, there is nothing sadder than seeing a nice simple and elegant design turn into a mishmash of special cases and exceptions – except maybe having your project relocated to India. And in this case, I’m not close enough to that part of the project to see if it’s just that real life turned out to be a lot more complicated than the design, or if (as I suspect) the guy doing the work is overlooking simple and elegant ways of solving the problems and grafting on complicated band-aids on top of other complicated special case band-aids.

Pulling out the thermo-nuclear trump card

Our QA group works in the basement of this building. I work on the third floor. The only elevator is a freight elevator at the other end of the building, and I think you need your doctor to swear on a stack of bibles that you are legitimately handicapped before you can use it. Consequently, when the QA people need me to come down and look at a problem, I have to haul myself down this steep stairway in one of the danker and more industrial smelling parts of the building. I would like to I avoid it as much as possible. However, one of the QA people, Lisa, always calls me first whenever she has any problem, and she’s not very good at describing what the problem is, so I have to go down the stairs to see her. Unfortunately she’s very nice and pretty good at her job for the most part, so I can’t just tell her to fuck off.
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How to convince people you’re NOT a jerk

Back when Maddy was dying of cancer, she wrote in her blog an account of an encounter with a surgeon at Thomas Jefferson University, in which she said that in her opinion, the surgeon was a jerk. Before she died, somebody claiming to NOT be the doctor in question, but connecting from an IP in Philadelphia, wrote a comment saying that her account was slanderous and that the doctor has “every legal right to take legal action to expunge his record”. Several people, including lawyers, wrote pointing out that Maddy’s impressions and opinions of the actions of this guy are NOT legally actionable, and suing a dying cancer patient is not a great way to prove to people that you’re NOT a jerk.

Well, I guess the doctor wasn’t going to be discouraged by little things like freedom of expression or how much of a jerk you have to be to legally harrass people into not calling you a jerk, so now, two days after I get back from helping to bury Maddy, I get an email from Stacey Meadows, the General Counsel of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. Evidently because Maddy’s blog is on my site, she is under the mistaken impression that I’m some sort of “moderator”. She’s demanding that I remove the post and the responses to it. I responded that I’m not a “moderator” of the site, Maddy wrote what she wanted on that site without my endorsement or approval, and that she should try serving papers on Maddy’s grave.

I’m sure she won’t let this go, so I guess it’s time to see if those lawyers who told Maddy that it wasn’t actionable are available.