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circular painting of Nigel
Thursday, December 23 2010
Last year I was lame during the season of giving and only produced one gift: a blaze-orange baseball cap bearing a single word: "VEGAN," which I gave to Gretchen so that she could stay safe in the woods in hunting season while also advertising her views on the killing of animals. This year I'd resolved to do better. Per Gretchen's request, I'd bought a cat-and-dog-themed umbrella from the online seller of New Yorker schwag, but I also wanted to give something a little less impersonal, so I cut a piece of plywood into a ten inch diameter circle and then proceeded to paint a picture of Nigel (our new tuxedo-pattern black and white cat) on it. It wasn't long before I'd rendered a reasonably-convincing likeness. I didn't finish the painting today, but when I eventually did, it looked like this:
In my generic database visualization and editing system, today I added a system allowing for a systematic way to ensure that in a specific application (or in some base class of application), both the schema and data can be preset a certain way. That might seem unnecessary for most web applications. But once you're dealing with either multiple environments or multiple nuanced version of an application, the overhead of propagating all the changes out to the applications becomes a major error-prone burden. Now I've got a system in place to basically eliminate most of the unpleasantness of adding feature to a suite of similar sites that are part of a web constellation that will either pay off big or (more likely) prove an enormous waste of my early 40s.
This evening I took my first bath in nine days. I'm finding myself competing with myself for putting off such energy-intensive indulgences, though it's worrying that it's making me increasingly like my father (who didn't seem to believe in any personal cleansing other than "whores' baths" by the the late 1970s). I didn't want to age into a diry old man and carry hot peppers in my shirt pocket, but the call of my genes is overpowering.
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