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I'm sorry to take another pass on finishing the story of the Silver Balls tournament, but I've just had less time than I would like for messing around on the Internet what with work and all. At least during the time in the office I'm diligent about not poking over to see what's going on in the secret coati Telegram chat room or something. But between that, and pinball league Tuesday nights, I don't get nearly the time early in the week to write long-form stuff like I could when I was doing nothing. It's a shame but on the other hand it's triple the money I was making before so I can put up with that a while.
Work meanwhile finally reached the point where I'm set up and connected to things and can, like, check out code, unless it's supposed to be checking in, and fix things, and push, unless I mean pull, or I think I have to push and then pull? ... things to get them looked at and maybe approved. I did enough work on the simpler project (knocked out the bug I was assigned, plus ones reported in two other listings) to convince my boss I was ready for the other project. This other project is ... a disaster, something that was worked on for six years by my predecessor who seems to have been writing more cleverly than wisely.
It's doing a lot to reassure me about the workplace, though, since --- first --- they're clearly willing to keep a guy around for six years even though his code is much more rickety than mine. And also that everyone --- my coworkers, my boss, my boss's coworkers, and my grand-boss --- agree this new project is a disaster and it is impossible to get into shape by the deadline, finally hard after six years of being pushed back again and again. But what this means is it is impossible for me to be the screwup here. There is nothing within my power to make the situation a bigger mess; all I can do is make it a smaller mess. It's a good way to learn the system of programming groups that have a system; nothing I do before the deadline can possibly be failure. Nothing for a good while after that either, as everyone tries to drag the system back to ``something where you can almost see what it should have been in the first place''. I am, in this regard, lucky.
So let's finish off one of the little buildings at the Potter Park Zoo and get back to the lights, shall we?
Hi there! Friendly li'l guy in the reptiles-and-avians house.
And another of them, in even better light to show off their color.
While trying to find the snake in here I thought that the rock a little below dead center was their head. The big snake-like thing behind it didn't register for a while.
Tragic, another snake all tangled up in their own charging cable.
Boy, you just can't get hand-knitted woolen Gila monsters like this anymore. So cozy!
And the rainbow wall of lights, which we never miss. I always love the puddles of color at the bottom because they don't hang it too high up.
Trivia: Fannie Farmer was a director (the most famous one) of the Boston Cooking School, founded in 1879 to teach working-class women to cook scientifically. Source: Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World, Mark Kurlansky. (The Boston Cooking School merged into Simmons Univeristy in 1902.)
Currently Reading: Standpipe: Delivering Water in Flint, David Hardin.
