If I had a set of wings man I know she could fly

[austin_dern]

I got a field day from the Extruded Office Product. My current hiring is inspired by another customer deciding it wants a project that I'm sure I could do easily. It seemed to be getting data from one database which already exists and passing it to software from a web site that sells this information to anyone. With documentation on how to access the databases required I probably could do this in maybe twenty minutes. But since one of the databases is my company's there may be no documentation of anything anywhere. They'd also kind of like me to learn Cobol.

The important thing is I rode down to the customers with the company owner, in his Corvette, and did I mention he's been taking racecar-driving lessons from a guy who won ``some race'' back 1988 or 89? I haven't felt accelerations like that since my last plane flight, and it's a good thing for my nerves that it was a clear sunny day with little traffic.

On meeting the customers I established that they're all moving from one spot to another and what they want done is pretty much what I imagined. And I got to use the software they want tinkered with, letting me discover it's got a quirky attitude to user interfaces. By quirky I mean awful. I'm not responsible for that, so I can make my part simple and sensible instead.

And on the way back we stopped at the company's other office, a tiny spot in a run-down town with no parking and only a few employees, all of whom smoke. This is very different from the main office, which is larger and has only a few employees who smoke, all of them on floors I'm not on.

Trivia: Contributing to Sir Cloudesley Shovell's squadron's wreck on the Isles of Scilly in October 1707 --- sinking HMS Association, Eagle, Firebrand, and Romney, and damaging HMS George, altogether killing 1400 sailors --- were that the compasses aboard the ships were almost all defective; the magnetic variation of compass bearings was not accounted for; the Rennell Current in the waters around the islands was not known; and the navigation charts showed the Scillies north of their true position. Source: Compass: A Story of Exploration and Innovation, Alan Gurney. I find an irritating disagreement among my references to whether the wreck happened the 22nd or the 23rd, but for what it's worth, it was after sunset too. The accident was attributed to bad longitude calculations, although some modern researchers think the fleet had an acceptable estimate of their longitude. In any case the islands' position on the charts was wrong in latitude and longitude.

Currently Reading: The Great War In Africa, 1914 - 1918, Byron Farwell.

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

Sir Cloudesley Shovell

Trivial, but one of the Moles in 'The Chronicles of Narnia' is named Cloudesley Shovell :)

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I didn't know that. (I've never read the Narnia books.) I have to suppose the name can't be coincidence. I know the English have a fondness for impractical names, but 'Cloudesley' is beyond normal even for them.

[chefmongoose.livejournal.com]

You sound rather glad to be in the main office.

Unless you're a smoker, and I mean. We'd KNOW that by now. You could have children and we'd find this out in LJ on their third birthday, but we'd know if you smoked because of the Camel Coupons in Singapore having still had Joe Camel, or such.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't think I'm quite that evasive in sharing personal details around these parts. But, yeah, I'm not a smoker; never been tempted.

I could swear I talked some about surprising smoking-related encounters in Singapore.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

cobol? LOL! what year do they think it is..?

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

What they think is that a good deal of their software predates 1972, and they have data-retention obligations which make it problematic to make any big discontinuous changes in software or databases.

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

heh.. yeah.. I was only half-joking :>
One of the hardest things to explain to tech associates in my field, yes, IN my field, is something that is a fact, that very fact you mention, whether they believe it or not... there are LOTS of reasons many companies stick with the stuff they've got. Whether it's not easily upgradeable, too expensive to change, or maybe it's just all they really need, really, for what they do.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I get the feeling that Silicon Valley types don't quite internalize just how much, like, bureaucrats and accountants and actuaries and the like completely own them in issues like data management or numerical computation. Maybe we need some science fiction where the little fellow who wants to have a procedure in place is the one who actually saves the day.

(Asimov did have that, in fact, in ``Blind Alley'' I believe was the title. The bureaucrat saves the day through his remarkable powers of memorandum-writing. But Asimov loved playing games like that. Unfortunately a key character in the story was named ``Zammo'', so it's impossible to talk seriously about the story.)

[c-eagle.livejournal.com]

yup! great retort!.... and then I see Zammo and LOL!

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I really think the story would be better-regarded if it weren't for Zammo. Well, that and that the text includes samples of memorandums, which may not have been the best way to hold the audience's interest.