Smidgens of random bits of potpourri of this week's happenings:

- I managed to get Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur tickets, so that's one less thing for me to worry about. I'd like to join the shul in question, but I'm not too sure how easily I could afford the dues. If I pay 1000+ for the year and something wrecks my work situation in a month or two, and I have to move and need money to move, that'll be a problem. But for right now, I won't have to worry that up here I'll be missing out on something I enjoyed doing every year back home.


- Still a little embarrassed about whatever went on at the party last weekend. I honestly don't remember anything past the point at which the guy with the nosering and hat came up to the porch and entered the scene. It's like I remember walking around the house around 2AM, and then somehow, I materialized on pmt's couch in the morning (actually more comfy than some futons I've crashed on). There's an entire blank chunk of time missing. I hope I didn't say or do anything too stupid other than stare at inanimate stuff for hours on end. If I did do something stupid or offensive, I hope that I'm forgiven for it.

- In work news, yesterday I got confirmation from a previous programmer who worked for my company that my latest guess at what was wrong with the system is correct: the former programmers made an assumption about the limits of how their stuff would be used, and since my fellow non-programmer employees had unknowingly started breaking that assumption since I started the job, they had starting breaking the software as a result of it. One one hand, I'm really pleased with myself that I was able to figure out that the problem was the damn software was never designed then to do the things it people want it to do now. On the other hand, I feel really frustrated for having spent months chasing down phantom bugs in the software that were not bugs, but in fact limits of how the software was supposed to work, and that I couldn't find this out because no one in the organization knew how the software was supposed to work.

- My latest project at work is something I really haven't mentioned much to the higher-ups, largely because they'd probably write it off as "getting sidetracked"; kinda like I got "sidetracked" with another project that I started that has automated the business workflow and saved me hundrds of hours of work at the cost of a few tens of hours spent programming it. This new project is a little bit different than the others, because I'm making it run in a web browser using PHP instead of as a regular mac application using Obje ctive-C* like I would otherwise do. My web programming skills have gotten a little rusty and I need to sharpen them up for the sake of my career--this project is also a good excuse to do this. It will also save me man-weeks and make my job a lot easier in the long run, and the higher-ups will be able to view it from the comfort of their own web browser.

- I'm very happy that I got my latest hobby project, a Co coa Postg reSQL framework, to run. As I spend nine hours a day working on someone else's stuff that I think is put together badly, it's nice for me to be able to make something that I feel is put together well.

I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.
I will never drink alcohol again.

Dammit, where's the advil?

For the last several days, I was going to write another screed about how stupid my work/boss/whatever is.

But I've decided not to. And that's because I'd be bringing work into my after-5PM life, and I don't want to do that because my dad has been visiting since Friday. I miss my family back in North Carolina, so much so that I don't want to give one damn about work once I clock out. Making the most of every second of the limited amount of time I get to see them is of chief proriority, and I won't let anyone else (including myself) tell me otherwise.

There's actually no point to the post. But then again, this is like a diary and all, and since when has personal reflection needed to have a point?

If there were any doubts as to my lack of sanity, I now lay them to rest with this wonderful example of how my warped mind works.

Two days ago, I was up at an hour I really shouldn't have been up at watching a public access TV channel documentary on the history of Buffalo. I found it quite fascinating, as I tend to find a lot of Buffalo history.

They got to the Pan American Expo of 1901, and that really picqued my interest. I knew that there was some massive world's fair type thing 100 years ago in Buffalo, but I never knew quite where it was. I also knew that President McKinley was assinated at the Temple of Music, a building that was considered one of the crown jewels of the expo. Having finished watching the documentary, I now not only wanted to find where the expo took place, but I especially wanted to find the location where the Temple of Music stood. I knew that if I could find the marker that marked the area where McKinley was assasinated, I'd find the former location of the Temple of Music.

After some searching, I managed to score a really decent map of the expo.
I also found out that the expo happened in the area north of Delaware Park. So I now knew the location of the Temple Of Music in relation to the rest of the expo (from looking at the map), and I also knew the location of the expo in relation to the city as it is today, but I still didn't know where the TOM (I'll abbreviate it now) stood in relation to the streets of today, and that piece of knowledge I was searching for would lead me to the place I needed to travel to visit the former site of the TOM.

While I had a map of the modern city (courtesy of Google Earth) and a map of the expo from a hundred years ago, it was an enormously large pain in the ass trying to mentally navigate between the two maps, each in its own separate window on my computer. "What I really need", I said to myself, "is a way of making one of the windows transparent, or some way of overlaying the two images on top of one another." I was getting really frustrated, because I didn't own any software that could do this and I wasn't in the mood to write a one-off program on my mac that would let me do this that I'd probably never use again. Then, out of the blue, it hit me: Google maps lets you overlay transparent images! I could use that.

At this point, I had already found out through other sources that the McKinley monument was on east Fordham Dr. But since I had already done all this work, I might as well confirm the results for myself. So I pursued this perverse idea of laying the image of expo map over the current satellite imagery in Google Earth. Using the Buffalo historical society building (the only building remaining from the expo), the bodies of water near Delaware part, and the train tracks cutting across Elmwood Delaware all as reference points to help me accurately place the overlay over the current city, I was able to confirm that east Fordham Dr. was indeed the site of the TOM where McKinley was shot.

Here is a screenshot of the overlay of the 1901 Expo map over satellite imagery of the city as it currently is, for the people who may not have Google Earth installed on their machines.



The Google Earth file can also be found on Gather, tracking number is 0537094001156306145

The coolest thing to do with Google Earth and my map file is to adjust the transparency of the overlay, which takes you from past to present and vice-versa. You see the most striking similarities/differences around the ponds of Delaware park; adjust the transparency of the layer from opaque to transparent and you start seeing interesting things like part of the pond being filled in, while some stuff like trails and treelines have remained virtually the same for a century. It's also kind of interesting how some features of the exposition grounds (e.g. paths and roads) sometimes perfectly fit over the outline of today's buildings, especially the long and narrow ones. Very curious, indeed.

Anyhow, the next day after I watched the documentary and after an arduous day at work that I needed to unwind from, I was able to go to the former site of the TOM and snap a few photos. I'd have to say that of all the monuments to presidents I've ever seen, the McKinley boulder is the most low-key; it's basically a rock with a plaque and two flags in your run of the mill residential neighborhood. Which in a way is kind of cool, as marble is sort of cliche and it's probably neighborhood people (as opposed to government employees) maintaining the monument.





In the coming months, I'll try to think up other unusual expo things I can do with this map.

For some reason, I've lately had some inhibition against posting. I'm not exactly sure what I'd call it, but it runs along the line of the duality of fear and laziness I tend to feel sometimes--like I'm afraid of the consequences of doing anything at all. But then I get tortured by the reality of doing nothing at all, so the thought of either choice bothers the hell out of me.

Okay, I'm starting to feel better about this now, having gone one paragraph into my post and shaving spent the effort to start typing stuff.

First, the curses of this week.

1st Curse. Work has been extremely stressful, because the database whose work I'm trying to repair (done by the other programmers before me) is just so f*cked up. For the past month of so, we've had this "phantom problem" as it were, where parts manufactured on certain work orders wouldn't go through the system. I tried and tried and tried to figure out what the problem was in the software client that talked to the database, but no dice. Two weeks ago, I finally found out what the problem was: the problem wasn't the client software at all, the problem was the server software the client software talked to. I had assumed that the problem wasn't the server at all, as I would have thought that the programmers would have made sure that above all else, the server code would have worked flawlessly.

In a way, the system did work flawlessly, and that was the problem. The entire system was never *designed* to deal with manufactured parts where the same manufacturing operation was done twice. If you record in the database that you stamp the metal and weld the metal, it's all good. But if you stamp the metal again after that, the entire process gets stuck in its tracks. I'm oversimplying a little bit, but that's the just of it. What getting me so darned stressed now is how deep the roots of this problem run, that almost everything in the existing program will have to be changed or thrown out; it's not going to be the quick, simple fix that the CEO thinks it'll be.

2nd curse: my issues with someone I'm close to back home. I've made the visit down to see them early this summer, but they're not reciprocating and visiting me up here. I've even offered to pay for their plane ticket, but still this person finds every excuse not to come up. This in itself is merely annoying, but it starts getting infuriating when they lay on the guilt trips real thick about me not visiting and asking when I'm going to come down and visit again. I'm feeling that in my interpersonal relations with this person, I'm not getting any due consideration at all. I end up feeling really bad.

3rd curse: My own inertia I suck at overcoming. There's just so much more I could be doing with my weekends if I didn't sleep till 2PM.

4th curse: Missing folks back home, and missing them a lot. Tends to happen when I have family come up and visit.


Now the blessings

1st Blessing. My father came up to visit me. It was wonderful having another human being besides myself in my apartment. I was really nice to see at least one member of my family again. Over the five days we spent together, we had several good meals, he helped me tremendously with work around the house, and the high point of his visit was seeing Shakespeare In Delaware Park. He really liked the "12th Night", and is still raving about it a week later.

2nd Blessing. I know I forgot something that was good. This is a placeholder until I remember it.

3rd Blessing. The blinds my father helped me put up. I now officially have the choice to walk my apartment end-to-end in whatever clothes or lack-thereof and no one will be the wiser. My dream of privacy has finally been realized.

4th Blessing. I finally got around to adding basic exporting of data on the bar-mapping data-entry program. Since I can now export the existing buffalo establishments I've added (+140) into a XML PList file as backup, I'm now less concerned about screwing up the rest of the program. My next goal will be adding parsing of the Yahoo geocoding format, as Yahoo seems to provide more descriptive and useful geocoding XML than Google.