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the one who looks at my glasses the most
Friday, March 2 2012
Today Gretchen and I had a double date at our optician's office in Uptown. Our insurance pays for a visit every two years, and it had been two years since our first-ever appointment with an optician. Gretchen met with our optician first, so I walked down the street to get some diappointing coffees from Dream Weavers. Maur!ce Hinchey, our outgoing congresman, was evidently in town, because a big black Lincoln Towncar with New York plate #022 was parked on the street, and a guy I was pretty sure to be Maur!ce himself was in Dream Weavers drinking bad coffee and reading the newspaper. Being a congressman has its perks, but being politically stuck with expensively-inferior American automotive technology is not one of them. By the way, nearly all of my ties (the kind that go around one's neck on formal occasions) and a good number of my socks used to belong to Maur!ce. Gretchen and I used to work for his ex-wife back when Gretchen was something of a clutter-buster and Maur!ce's stuff amounted to clutter.
My prescription hadn't changed much in two years, but it had changed a little. So I'll be keeping my old glasses and getting the new prescription with auto-darkening glass. Now that we know I'm good at not losing my glasses, we decided to get nicer frames (designed by Vera Wang). I would have been happy with cheaper ones, but Gretchen is the one who has to look at them the most.
This afternoon I found myself wading through some half-assed code from an old project I'd worked on perhaps in 2008. My initial goal was to insert some new hooks giving me the ability to easily test changes without having to wade through a convoluted multi-step web experience as various logged-in users. These hooks allowed me to completely bypass the security model just by putting things into the query string. It's the kind of quick-and-dirty testing scheme any experienced developer is likely to concoct. But what separates conscientious from I-could-give-a-fuck developers is that conscientious ones remember to disable all those testing backdoors before releasing the code into the environment. Somehow, though, I suspect that an aweful lot of code is live on the web with such backdoors still intact, waiting for someone to try a fun extra querystring variable such as &testing=true or &testuserid=1. Just saying.
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