(Written about March 11, not live until March 30.)
The boo is almost gone, tra-la. I can do some scrapings. It makes me sleepy now, y’know. Haven’t been doing the writing I should. Tonight yes. The Dutton book.
Reading The Lost Weekend. Both awful and stupendous. Too experimental, naive self-revelatory for me. Now the protag is finishing up his last whisky, post-Bim, dropping bits of Burns, reading Shakespeare and Fitzgerald. Thinking about how there’s a lot of life left in Scott. Many more novels. He’s still under 40! This is supposed to be 1936.
Susie Bright talks about being an Irish Catholic, quotes a line from The Departed where Matt Damon is impotent. Something like
“I’m fuckin’ Irish, so I’ll deal with something being wrong the rest of my life.”
Well that’s actually it. I couldn’t remember, so copypastaed. Michael and I saw that a dozen times, I didn’t get the humor or the point. Some obscure bog-muckery I think. Suggestion of grudge-bearing?
Susie also mentioned Hunter Thompson was Irish Catholic. Believable if true. How did I miss that? Look him up. No, I don’t think so.
I got a letter from Medicaid. I’ve been approved. What do I do now? Only reason I wanted Medicaid is that otherwise I’d have to pay a ridiculous amount for Medicare Part B, which I never use anyway. I need to call some of those phone numbers, or maybe Dottie’s friend.
A chiquita from MSK phoned on my landline today (March 11). Just discovering now that my birthdates don’t match. I told her that was the birthdate on my ID at that time, and that was fine. What I don’t understand is why we received, or the Bern firm received, my medical records last October, and now you’re going through this again now.
Somehow in the last few mostly sleepless days I realized I’d had a recurring nightmare for years. It’s about an elaborate project I was assigned to do by igkins, nog hired as web director after the Indian left. I think Peter Pollack hired him because he looks like Obama. A little. For whatever reason, igkins turned against me, maybe because I tended to get blamed when things went wrong because I was the only one there half the time. (I call igkins igkins because that is his Twitter handle.)
And a front-end web person is the most accessible interface for the editors. So they knew me, and if something went wrong, it was my fault.
Anyway, in this dream: I was given this project to do that would require me to build a grid-table capable of digesting huge amounts of data and images. And it had to be constructed in some off-brand platform or library, one of those Django or Struts or Springs things that were hot 15-20 years ago and now have a user base of maybe 43. I tried getting guidance, useful examples I could copy, out of those big paperback Manning books. But those manuals had no solutions to what I needed. So day after day I’d take my notes and design specs out of a big wrinkled manila envelope on my desk. There was other work to do so I could put this aside for a while. The manila envelope sat on my desk, half-folded, frowning at me, making me feel guilty. After several months I still hadn’t built the project and I wasn’t sure if it was still needed. Somehow I never got in trouble for it. The curtain closes. I think igkins leaves the job, moves on.
The nightmare part was the daily anxiety, knowing I’d been asked to the do the impossible. A whiff of truth from real life there, for three different projects. There was the Flash rebuild of the Thanksgiving widget when I first arrived there. This was nearly impossible and should instead have been rebuilt in HTML and jQuery from the start. Something I didn’t realize until I was heavily into the next project, which I did mostly in HTML and jQuery.
The Flash widget that I built succeeded, but it was far more trouble than it was worth. Adding to the confusion and anxiety was the fact that legacy files we got from last year’s vendor (Hudson-Union) did not work, could not work. I think I had to do tedious, repeated, proofreading and debugging in the Flash IDE. And it turned out they gave us incomplete files. One of the AS3 class files was truncated. I looked around, found a long class, the standard version used (this is a utility, not specific to a project). And it worked. But I had to agonize over that for a week.
And then the next project. I had to build interactive pages of schedules and speakers for the Classic in Aspen. These would be built in HTML, following the previous year’s Flash AS3 version, which read a big XML file to populate grids of test and images. There were so many things nobody understood there. Least of all the egregious DDP, a former temp who got himself hired as a web developer around the time I arrived, then begged igkins to bump him up to project manager. He didn’t know, and no one else there would understand this, tbat the reason the previous year’s Classic project used XML, not JSON, is that Flash could not consume JSON. JSON, a set of strings that are formatted in javascript syntax, was fairly new then and just beginning to be implemented in databases, eg MongoDB. It’s cleaner-looking and easier to proofread edit than XML.
If I were doing the Classic in Aspen thing again, I might try do it using JSON just because it looked simpler. At least try. But instead David assigned the project to this fat colored girl he had interviewed and hired, at least as contractor. Her family were aliens from Central America (David was gay and Jewish and he liked to patronize female moojis). He told her how to revise or rebuild my old Classic project. They didn’t consider JSON, went with XML because David wanted to do the project as an AJAX file, AJAX being a javascript code technique he thought he understood.
Now, when I had built the earlier version, I had created the schedule lists of cooking classes, wine tastings, etc., in actual HMTL, hard-coded it, you might say. Because that worked, it was foolproof, whereas using XML probably wouldn’t work, because each separate seminar had to have its own #ID. You might be able to lay the data out in a flat file, but you weren’t going to be able to manipulate it if you asked for a record by #ID, and they all had the same #ID.
Anyway, David and the noggess built the schedules as forms, like mailmerge templates, without any unique ID for each seminar because unique information would have to be in the XML data, not in the HTML tags. I didn’t know they had chosen to do that until after they built it, at least built part of it. And it was intrinsically buggy because every seminar had the same #ID. I told David this was a problem. I told him you couldn’t duplicate an ID. He acted huffy and asked why. He was clueless about that. I said, because it’s an ID, not a class, not an attribute. Must be unique. He didn’t know you couldn’t repeat an #ID over and over in the same file, the same way you can with the multiple-use .class tag, for example.
They hadn’t noticed problems yet because they’d simplified the project, only built half of it, the simple half, where the XML gets spat out into a list. They totally ignored or eliminated two sections that handled the output and printing utilities. It may be that the noggess tried to do those parts and found she coudn’t get them to work. So, end of the day, all these two really built was a sort of AJAX demo, where dumb data is laid out into something like a spreadsheet. There was no need whatsoever to use XML, no reason to use AJAX, in fact it was a bad idea. It’s harder to type, edit and proofread than normal HTML is, and a static HTML page is not going to break when it loads. But it’s AJAX, thought David, wanting very much to say he’d used AJAX in the project, and of course if it has these extra layers of complications, it must be better.
But it’s not. Let me beat this dead horse again. A simple HMTL page is easier to manage throughout because it’s a one-step edit process .You have formatted text coded the way you want; you have nice PLUS MINUS buttons you can click on, click off (they used most of my little graphics, that’d I carefully drawn in Illustrator the last time; the had no idea that these illustration bits were part of the project, thought I’d downloaded clipart or something). Then the seminars you clicked on would be output to a printable personal schedule for you. And if you chose two or more at the same time, same day, my Conflict Catcher javascript caught it and told you, in my cute drawings of a mid-century television clock and computer printer.
The whole point of the project is to have an app that lets you select and save a schedule. But how useful is that if you can book multiple classes at the same time and you can’t save or print the same thing out?
