You take my hand, I'll take your hand, together we may get away

I've actually been a little bit overwhelmed with an outbreak of work at work, which is doing wonders at keeping me from nodding off mid-day, although it's slowing down my reading. Most of this is related to the new project, which is still a bit stuck in that the software we're trying to use doesn't work. I'd had a tolerable replacement for this worked out using Google Maps, but after excessively long discussion we're trying to move it to Bing Maps, which has taken up much of this week to do. However --- and this is no small shock to me --- it turns out the Bing Maps programming interface is shockingly easier to work with than Google Maps is.

But there are still occasional outbreaks of follow-up work from my first project, more or less finished two years ago. The scheme set up for that client depends on one of the clients's office people scanning documents and putting them into a folder where my software turns them into locally-web-available tools. Fine, so far. But for some reason the client's office person keeps going through weeks or longer without actually putting the files where they belong.

So, recently, I learned about such a problem when one of the other programmers told me that something on the site ``doesn't work''. What doesn't work, I asked. ``Hey, I don't know, it's your program, I don't know anything about what your code does.'' If this doesn't sound like any kind of a response, imagine it going on for five minutes with my trying to find an example of a document which was not properly displayed, and his assuring me that it was entirely up to me how I handle this sort of problem. What I draw from all this is, first, the client really ought to have automated the file-placing part on their end but you try telling them this; and second, apparently, the other programmer felt I intruded on his domain with the site I coded back when. I'm glad my current project hasn't even got vague connections to anything he works on.

Trivia: In a letter to the earl of Oxford, Jonathan Swift expressed his outrage at the appearance in print of words including ``bamboozle'', ``uppish'', and ``couldn't'', and wished they could be banned as offensive to good sense. Source: The Professor And The Madman: A Tale Of Murder, insanity, And The Making Of The Oxford English Dictionary, Simon Winchester.

Currently Reading: Why Call Them Back From Heaven?, Clifford Simak.