It is pitch black.

* I spent two hours this morning giving a training session on our Time and Attendance system, and then the last few hours carrying on a silly email conversation with a coworker I've never met and never communicated with before. It must be Friday.

* I have an interview on Tuesday - well, a sort-of interview. But at least things are progressing.

* I seem to be a verb.

* Going to see Due Date this weekend. It was either that or the Valorie Plume movie, and frankly I don't feel like doing serious stuff this weekend.

* I'm not mentioning the elections.

* ... damn.

* I'm actually going to be awake at 2 am on Sunday morning so I can set my clock back to 1 am. I think I'm going to try and make multiple bank transfers between 12:45 am and 2:15 am, just to fuck with their system. I may regret this, but hell, it's only money.

* I just realized it's impossible to quickly enunciate "mixed nuts".

* It's supposed to be cool and rainy this weekend. This in itself isn't surprising, as it's November. However, it is currently 84 degrees outside, and was in the mid-90's yesterday. Someone needs to tell Mother Nature to lay off the sauce for a while.

* The Lorentz factor is not a reality TV show. I know that wasn't funny, but I've heard that all humor is relative, so...

* This is the 11th item on the list.

* Apparently, people's taste preference for soda is almost entirely psychological. Oh, and Mexican Coke is chemically identical to American Coke, whether it's made with "real sugar" or not: any difference you think you can taste is just in your head.

* Happy Guy Fawkes Night to all you British-types. Maybe I'll burn something down in your honor.

* You will likely be eaten by a grue.

10 comments:

GayHermit said...

[Unlurking To Comment]
First, like your blog(s). Good stuff. Makes me have to think sometimes.

Second, you made me look up grue so I could get your reference. Congrats! (Not sure if that was your goal or not, but you accomplished it.)

Third, loved you 11th item. {he,he}

Later,
GayHermit
[Resuming Lurking Status]

Austin said...

GayHermit:

Hey, welcome :) Thanks.

And, I'm not sure if anyone knows this, but if you click on the title of the post, it goes to a link that always has something to do with some abstract concept in the post. Today's links to the Grue definition on wikipedia :)

Anyway, hope you stick around.

A Wandering Pom said...

Hi there, Austin

Taking at least some of your points:

2. I hope the sort-of interview goes well.

3. ??!! In what way do you seem to be a verb?

7. How did your bank transfers go? Did you manage to lose or gain any money in the repeated hour?

9. You're welcome to some of the weather here, if you like. There was a frost last night, and today it's been cold, wet and windy. Winter has definitely arrived!

10. The first sentence is self-evident, but not funny. With the second sentence, though, it is funny.

13. The only thing you should burn is a bonfire, preferably with an effigy of some disliked public figure on it. Fireworks are appropriate too. If you really want to get into the Guy Fawkes spirit, you could try blowing up a national parliament when the head of state is visiting, but I can't recommend the outcome of the consequent judicial process...

14. I should probably return my geek membership card, as I'd never heard of grues until I saw this.
Looking at it from another angle, there's an interesting difference between British and American usage here: I would say "You will probably be eaten..." or "You are likely to be eaten...", but definitely not "You will likely be eaten...". If I were more familiar with the technicalities of grammar I could explain just what the difference is.

Oh, and I had spotted the links from at least some of the post titles, but I'll take more care to follow them from now on.

Take care

Mark

Austin said...

Mark:

2. So do I :) We'll find out tomorrow.

3. "We" are not things; "we" are processes. "We" exist as a constant change of states. In essence, "we" aren't the thing changing from one to the other but instead the change itself. It's more a romantic concept than a practical one. Mostly, though, it's yet another quote from a book.

7. Bank was offline. Phooey on them.

13. Is there a residency requirement? E.g., could I blow up someone else's parliament?

14. I assume you're basing that on the fact that "likely" is an adjective and not an adverb. In an alternate ego, I take on the role of Grammar Nazi. In fact, I did the quote from memory, and you are correct as to the syntax: the game has it as "likely to be eaten" according to multiple sources. So, I'll yield, and since it was almost 25 years ago that I played, it won't hurt my ego much to be incorrect.

A Wandering Pom said...

Hi there, Austin

2. And how did it go?

3. I think I see the point that's being made, though it seem to be pushing the meanings of words beyond what's really reasonable. I have to say that I feel more like a noun myself :-)

7. This may be a deliberate tactic to avoid the sort of activity that you were intending. If so, it doesn't encourage confidence in the robustness of their systems...

13. I think for strict adherence to the rules, you have to attempt to blow up your own parliament, though people with dual nationality obviously have some freedom of choice here, and we probably ought to allow an exception for official stateless persons. You might also have to ensure that your head of state is also the head of state of a neighbouring country - this seems to be unpopular these days, for some reason, and I seem to recall that the US Constitution takes a particularly dim view of it. Still, I'm sure we can overlook some of the technicalities.

Another thought has just occurred, following on from the "head of state of a neighbouring country" line above: I don't think the history taught in England ever mentions that the Gunpowder Plot nearly succeeded in killing the king of Scotland as well as the king of England. I'd rather like to know what the Scots think of the whole episode.

14. I think you're right about adjective vs. adverb - I had just never analysed it in those terms. For me, "you will likely be eaten" is just wrong, in a way that I can't readily describe, but is very similar to what I feel when I see badly structured code or a poorly thought-out business process. I think this may imply something interesting about the relationship between language processing and the analysis of structure, at least in my brain.
Meanwhile, I have to acknowledge that the adverbial use of "likely" is very common in American English; while it still seems to be rare in British English, I suspect it will creep in, in much the same way that "may" is replacing "might".
As you might guess from all of this, I'm something of a grammar Nazi too.

Take care

Mark

Austin said...

Mark,

2. Not bad. I think I said all the right things to impress - though, to be frank, that wouldn't be difficult in this case: one really couldn't come up with a job to which I'd be more suited unless, perhaps, it somehow related to computer gaming, techno, and poetry. Oh, and monkeys - gotta have the monkeys.

Regardless, having more than a passing interest in psychology, linguistics, and general information theory, I'm more than qualified to convince people I know what I'm talking about for pretty much any aspect of "business". Whether I do or not usually isn't a major issue.

However, the official interview process starts shortly, and that's liable to be a far more intensive ordeal since the position is fairly senior; everyone has to sign off.

7. A big part of being responisble is knowing your limitations. If they anticipated a problem and thus avoided it with minor inconvenience, more power to them. When major companies such as SAP can't build their systems to correctly account for DST changes, it's hard to reasonably hold anyone accountable.

13. Actually, there's no law stating that the President of the US can't *also* be a citizen (or even a head of state) somewhere else; s/he just has to be a natural born citizen here. It would depend far more on the restrictions of the other nation.

14. I find my tolerance for variant grammar is based almost entirely on context. In blogs, for example, I'm much more inclined to use "conversational" grammar - which is in no way officially sanctioned but "feels" less formal and rigid to most readers. In a business proposal, I'm rigid to the point of absurdum with regards to grammar and syntax. When editing manuscripts for friends, I apply different levels of scrutiny depending on the targetted audience and the nature of the passage in the book; sometimes, a sentence fragment is entirely appropriate, even if it's incorrect.

Unrelated - aren't you supposed to be travelling with limited network access?

A Wandering Pom said...

Hi there, Austin

7. Point taken: if the bank is unsure (or worse) about how its systems will handle transactions during a DST transition, I too would much rather the system was unavailable than that people's bank accounts got tied in knots. But if they can't cope with something relatively simple and predictable like DST, what else is lurking in there?

13. Point taken again. In the original case, though, James I of England was not a "natural-born" Englishman - he was a Scot (at a time when England and Scotland were still separate sovereign nations), and was already James VI of Scotland when he was invited to occupy the English throne as well.
I'm sure that as far as we Brits are concerned, you Americans are entirely welcome to invite the head of state of your northern neighbour to be your own head of state. But this would present constitutional problems, as already mentioned, and I suspect you might feel that there's some historical precedent against such a choice too :-)
Pedantic aside: if I'm not mistaken, the first few Presidents of the US were not born in that country, because it didn't exist at the time. I assume that everyone who was in the territory that became the US at the time of independence was considered de facto to have become a citizen of the new country.

14. I'll tolerate most grammatical idiosyncracies (at least as long as I can work out what the writer actually means), generally because I'm not in a position to do anything about them. I do still very often find myself irritated by them, though.

Unrelated: I was only away for the weekend (last Friday - Sunday). I'm now back at home, with normal internet access, and expect to remain so until the first weekend of next month.

Take care

Mark

Austin said...

Mark,

7. Interestingly enough, DST isn't relatively simple. Datetimes are often, from a data standpoint, considered sacrosanct: databases are generally designed in such a way that the datetime factor is purely linear.

DST in the fall violates that principle. The issue is more due to errors in how we account for time rather than time itself, obviously; the way around this is to force-convert times to UTC any time you're interacting with something outside the database itself, but that takes a lot of planning.

And while major systems likely have this accounted for, every process is a conglomeration of multiple systems; it's thus very difficult to assure with 100% certainty that all the intermediary systems are compliant, even if the major portion is.

I'm actually working on just this problem with a coworker - I'm walking him through designing a system that is time-consistent regardless of where the source data systems or even the primary ODS are stored. It's one example of the kinds of things that keep me from going completely stir-crazy here.

13. Article II Clause 5 of the US Constitution:
No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty-five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.

So, they accounted for that in the document.

A Wandering Pom said...

Hi there, Austin

7. Hmmmm... To me, it looks like the solution is simple (you got it in a couple of lines), but, alas, planning for it is not.

The software that I work with does exactly what you suggest (convert all datetimes to UTC for storage in the database, and back again when retrieving them for users), but unfortunately it doesn't store the accompanying offset, so all datetimes written before a DST transition and read back after it change by an hour from what the user expects. Similarly with datetimes written in one timezone and read in another.

13. Thanks for the quote - I really should have looked it up myself. Having read it, I thought for a while that this didn't resolve the issue, as it still didn't define a citizen. Then I realised that the framers of the constitution were using an older sense of "citizen", that of "person living in a place or an area", rather than the more modern one of "person issued with citizenship papers by a sovereign state". On reflection, this is no surprise: the concept of citizenship papers (passport or ID card) hadn't arisen in the late eighteenth century.

It's reassuring that the constitution framers thought about the awkward edge cases...

I was about to say that, having no constitution, the UK is free to pick anyone it likes to be head of state, but then I remembered the Act of Settlement, which imposes some very specific restrictions on who can be monarch - not of nationality, but of line of descent, and of religion. At different times through the centuries, though, England has had kings from quite a few different countries: I've so far found Denmark, France, Scotland, the Netherlands and Germany.

Take care

Mark

Austin said...

Mark,

The system we're designing here stores a slowly-changing dimension for the source system timezone for every record we bring in; that way, even if we move a system from one location to another, the relevant source time is calculable. We also store two copies of every "date" - one in the source time, and one in UTC - for some data (usually transactional data) where the source time might be required.

Part of the problem is that TSQL doesn't really have an easy way to account for changing between time zones; it can be done, obviously, but most programming languages handle timezone conversion intrinsically, whereas you have to jump through some hoops to do it in TSQL.

The main problem is, of course, the mindset of the programmer: most won't even think about something like timezone or DST conversion until it happens and their system breaks. Obviously with some systems it isn't critical or even a concern, but they should still be accounted for almost anywhere you use a datetime value.

I was teasing a coworker who uses a "start datetime" and adds 24 hours to calculate the "end datetime", and I pointed out that not all days are 24 hours. He looked at me like I was insane, until I pointed out that 11/7 technically had 25 hours here in the US. That convinced him that he needed to manage his values better.

As the old saying goes, "the exception proves the rule" - that's "prove" in the old sense of "tests", as in "proving grounds" - and in this case proves it lacking.

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