Bill Roper's Journal

Julie has officially finished high school. I am impressed.

Today was my last day of work before Christmas break. This made it a bad day to break anything, so I wrote a little utility method that should be useful for several projects that we're working on. Since nothing is using it yet, it could be checked in harmlessly. :) I'm not traveling, so I have promised to show up if anything that I changed recently *does* decide to die horribly in the lead up to Christmas.

Now, I just need to finish my Christmas shopping...

I am going through some code, cleaning up old constructs before a major release that's coming up. This takes me into some interesting places.

Today, I realized that there is a whole species of things that can be simplified by cutting out a lot of intervening code that is building unnecessary objects and doing unneeded lookups. I've patched a couple of places and will continue looking at the problem tomorrow.

Some of the fun, of course, is that we've moved up to Java 8 since this code was originally written which opens up all *sorts* of possibilities for playing with Java Streams. The amount of things that you can now do with one (longish) line of code is really impressive. :)

There are just limits to what you can get done in a weekend, especially when you have two dogs who are anxious to compete for your time. I appear to be Calvin's "safe person" and when he is threatened by Ruby, he will hop up on top of me in my chair looking for protection. This annoys Ruby, because Calvin is now hogging her person. (This is not to say that the dogs do not love the other people in the house -- I just appear to be the household alpha.)

The Christmas tree did not get straightened up in its stand today, because that's a three person job really and I was not going to get that level of cooperation. But one of the tubs of Christmas decorations has gone back to the basement and most of the decorations are actually up which is a good thing.

The driveway was also shoveled by Julie and me in various shifts. Julie does not quite realize that the apron is part of the driveway, but I have explained this to her and hope to have better luck next time. Gretchen suggested that I should fire up the snowblower, which probably would have been the best idea if I already had gas and was sure that I had the appropriate snowblower oil *and* had an empty gasoline container. Maybe before the *next* major snow. Today's was about five inches, which is definitely a depth where the snowblower becomes worthwhile.

I bought more plugins and software upgrades while they are on sale. Now I just need to *do* something with them...

And I cleaned off the top of the bookcase in my bedroom, putting the stuff that had accumulated there away for its safety. I'll need to remember where I put it when I need it. That's the tricky part. :)

Tomorrow, it's back to work and I have a *lot* of things to do. Happily, I updated the password that was going to expire today when I logged in *yesterday*...

Apparently, I am going to write the design for a feature.

Now.

Let's see how this goes...

And here I am, back to work, trying to solve problems. With luck, I'll get some of them to fall by tomorrow.

I checked tonight, but no obvious aurorae visible here. On the other hand, the sky is very bright in the Chicago area, so the chances are always low that we'll see anything.

Today was the second day of meetings in the Loop. Everything went well and when we were done, I lit out for the train home, because today is Gretchen's birthday.

After some brief negotiations, it turned out that what Gretchen really wanted for dinner included the deep fried mushrooms from Mr. Beef and Pizza, so I went out and grabbed dinner for us there. (I had already picked up Julie's dinner from Subway.) Then I went to Omega and bought cheesecake slices for the assembly.

Everyone is quite full. And happy.

That's a good result for a birthday. :)

Sam and Bonnie came by for lunch today and to meet the new puppy. Then we went out to grab lunch and get them a spare house key that they can use while helping Julie out over the weekend during OVFF. I got new keys cut and gave one to Sam. When I got home, I looked to my left and found the missing spare key. Oh, well. More keys are still a good idea.

Gretchen urgently needs to renew her driver's license, but when she went online to try to grab an appointment at 6:30 AM, the system crashed out from under her. This may or may not have had something to do with the AWS outage today. I am getting up early tomorrow and will try to make the appointment for her, because I would like her to have her driver's license for OVFF.

And I have to get up early anyway, because I am off for two days of client meetings in the Loop. This will be my first time doing this since before COVID, so I am reacquainting myself with the current versions of the train schedule and paying for parking.

And then I will walk from Ogilvie Station to a building that I've never been to before.

This is perhaps a bit more chaos than I needed leading up to OVFF. :)

I wasn't able to log into the VPN at work today until early in the afternoon, which greatly limited the amount of work that I could get done before that. Nevertheless, I managed to fix one bug this morning in a Zoom meeting (because Zoom works without the VPN and I was able to see the code on someone else's machine), and email worked too, so that was all good.

In the interim, I have managed to finish all of the tweaks to the digipak artwork save for actually having a front cover. I hope to remedy that tomorrow. :)

I have frequently explained that large computer programs (like, say, the one I work on) are complex systems and have behaviors. You program the rules into the system code, the system executes your program following those rules, and then it exhibits certain behaviors.

Occasionally, you look at the program and go, "No, no. Bad program." However, this is almost always due to a failure to write the correct rules. Some times, you think you have written the correct rules, but you have written the wrong thing or left a loophole.

And then the program will misbehave and take a dump on the floor.

Calvin the Dog is also a complex system.

The Cubs won tonight, 4-3, in an exciting game where I got to spend time chatting and catching up with an old friend. These were good things.

Traffic management by the City of Chicago *following* the game was a complete disaster. There were announcements on the news about how the Keeler Ave. entrance to the Kennedy was being reopened early. More than two weeks ago, they were making these announcements.

Guess what was closed tonight? With no signage to warn you that it was closed. This meant that there was a tremendous backup trying to make the right off of Irving Park to get to Keeler, exacerbated by the idiots trying to butt in near the front of the line. And then, when you got onto Keeler, you found the entrance was closed. I have no idea of why.

Keeler, of course, is a tiny two-way street that cannot carry this much traffic, but there it was. And the people coming southbound were even worse off, because there was a large panel truck that had gotten several cars past one of the intersections only to discover that it could not proceed any further south because of the traffic disaster trying to move north. I barely managed to squeeze past it going northbound.

I don't know when I last saw such a big mess without a major accident being the proximate cause. But that's life in Chicago.

Tomorrow is going to be a train wreck. We have a meeting at school at 10, then meetings for work at 11:30, 1, and 4.

This is too many meetings.