|
|
celebratory advantage Saturday, July 10 2010
There was a strong and consistent rain for much of the night, enough to chill the air down to a good sleeping temperature and rain out the moonrise celebrations of local coyotes. Later today I went down to the greenhouse for some reason and found six or eight inches of water in the well, indicating that the local water table had been somewhat recharged. That's good news for the plants, though it will take more than that to recover from the drought. Places that would normally be swampy at this time of year did not have standing puddles in them after this rain, which they would after such a rain during normal conditions.
The cooler weather made for more comfortable work in the laboratory (which is a non-air-conditioned attic room above the garage). This was good, because I had some daunting work to do. I took my usual study-drug dose of pseudoephedrine and tried to figure out what was going on with a very complicated Flash-AJAX-PHP-MySQL application I've been assigned to get working on a new platform (in this case a social networking site similar to Facebook but based in Europe). At some point I realized that the communication back and forth between the Flash and the PHP was far too complicated for me to every understand or debug, so I sent an unusually sternly-worded email to the guy who hired me to do this work pleading with him to give me more information and telling him (truthfully) that this was the most convoluted job I'd ever worked on in my life. At this point I've decided that if I ever successfully pull this job off, there is no puzzle I cannot solve. Because that's how it's been presented to me and that's how I've had to deal with it: as a maddeningly complicated puzzle. Normally I don't like puzzles, but I will solve them if my paycheck depends on it.
After sending that email, I felt a little bit of my burden lift, so I took celebratory advantage of the relative cool of the evening by taking a bath. I love baths and would take one every day if I could find ecological justification, but in summer on the East Coast they're not all that appealing.
For linking purposes this article's URL is: http://asecular.com/blog.php?100710 feedback previous | next |