Month: October 2020

The Old Switcheroo

On October 12, 2020

In Life During The Plague Years, Robot System For Robots

After finishing up the WordPress after spending too much time and effort trying to force Serendipity to function in ways that it really wasn’t intended to. I basically like s9y but decided that I no longer had the time I would otherwise dedicate to writing what potentially were interesting things here to mucking around with the backend of Serendipity. I enjoyed using it after so many years of WP but ultimately took the easier option to keep what I do here more enjoyable and less cumbersome.

One of the scariest parts about Serendipity is that it does not do a particularly good job at exporting entries especially for WordPress which doesn’t have any easy time importing s9y RSS. I ended up recreating all of the older posts manually which was equal parts fun and horrible like most things related to the web. All of time stamps are of course horrendously fucked up but I got most of the entries over nearly in spite of the new/horrible editor that is default in WordPress these days. I’ll need to chase down and repair all of the block quote and strikethrough stuff from earlier posts that I’m 100% sure broke after the rapid-fire copy/paste marathon that brought the old stuff over. I’m sure the Google bots are going to have a field day finding all of the broken shit but I feel like I accomplished something for myself today that wasn’t either doom scrolling the news or pointlessly mowing the lawn.

Life Is Still Terrible

By goneaway

On October 12, 2020

In This Sucks

It probably wasn’t obvious (and again I’m telling this to an assumed audience when I am actually talking to myself a few robots) from my earlier and more sunny post about my wife. She had surgery on Thursday of last week. Right now she is still breathing through a tube and hasn’t been responsive to attempts to wake her up. She also suffered a couple of small strokes either during the surgery or afterwards. We (meaning me and the handful of doctors that I speak to on a daily basis) have no way to access what debilitating effects those strokes may have had on her without her regaining consciousness. It has been a very long four days that feel like they are never going to end.

I’ll likely do a fair amount of posting here about the usual technology related things because it’s a kind of mental break from thinking about what is going on in real life and the panicky attempts that I make at planning whenever I have moments when I’m not otherwise occupied. Until she wakes up, I’m going to keep myself occupied.

One Not Really Weird Trick To Avoid IT Wrath – Microsoft Hates This

By goneaway

On October 8, 2020

In I Wish I Didn't Know About This, Microsoft, This Sucks

About once every ~~10 minutes~~ every couple of weeks I warn someone about what a terrible fucking idea storing important data in Excel really is. Seriously, don’t do dumb things like that. There are are as many good alternatives to Excel as there are pieces of software that are not named Excel. I’d sooner try to recover lost data from scraps of paper kept in a hat than I would some monstrous spreadsheet filled with fuckery that sorta works most of the time. Try a fucking database that is actually designed to efficiently store, manage, and retrieve data. Seriously.

That makes disasters like the loss of 16K Covid-19 tests in England so painful. If you’d used not even the right tool but any tool actually designed for the task at hand. I know people are lazy and stupid but you can be lazier and stupider with better tools and not, you know, have to change the naming convention for genes:

Errors from the spreadsheet software have even changed the very foundations of human genetics. The names of 27 genes have been changed over the past year by the Human Gene Nomenclature Committee, after Microsoft’s program continually misformatted them. The genes SEPT1 and MARCH1, for instance, have been changed to SEPTIN1 and MARCHF1 after they were repeatedly turned into dates, while symbols that were common words have been altered so that grammar tools didn’t autocorrect them: WARS is now WARS1, for instance.

There are very good reasons why your IT folks get so pissed at you after you build some business critical business process that runs entirely in Excel and is brittle and prone to losing or altering the data it mismanages. Don’t do it.

This House Feels Strange

By goneaway

On October 7, 2020

In Life During The Plague Years, This Sucks

It’s been a while and I’ve decided that I will no longer make excuses for my absences from writing here because I’m an
old grown-ass man and I don’t have any more pretensions about writing to an imagined audience; this is for myself and the robots. Unfortunately, I’ve been away for different reasons and this mostly has been due to my wife’s health. We found out this weekend that she is going to need another round of open heart surgery which is jarring enough by itself. She survived an aortic dissection a couple of years ago which required emergency open heart surgery but this went from an urgent care visit to scheduling surgery in a matter of 36 hours.

Needless to say, it’s been jarring for me and all I have to do is keep the household running in her absence. Despite my natural inclination for solitude when it’s available to me, which is very rare in Covid times, I feel less inclined to do anything and spend more time working the increasingly ragged seam of free form anxiety. Although when I was younger I was often teased about being a living embodiment of entropy I have become increasingly drawn to the quiet comfort of routine. She is the core of that routine and it sucks not to be able to mumble something to her across the room.