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relative vs absolute dates
Saturday, January 14 2017
Early this evening (at around 5:30pm), Gretchen and I met up with our friends Chris & Kirsti (long referred to as the "Photogenic Vegan Buddhists) at Rock Da Casbah in Saugerties. Chris was just getting back from the UK and Gretchen had already made for us to see Hidden Figures at the Orpheum, and it's so hard to coordinate dinner dates with the C & K that I thought we should make it work if we wanted to see them again before Trump rounded us up for the camps. This would be C & K's first experience at Rock Da Casbah. We're all vegans of course, and Rock Da Casbah definitely does what it can to cater to our needs, though it also has things like pork bellies on the menu. All of us but Kirsti ordered some version of the delicious Hey Jude pasta plate. Kirsti has it in her head that she should avoid gluten, so she ordered a salad and a huge plate of vegan chili fries which she managed to eat in its entirety. Chris partook in the tiny bottle of Dave's Insanity Sauce I'd brought, delighting in how just a few drops managed to make his pasta roar with heat.
Dinner conversations dwelled for a long time on the messy conclusion of Gretchen's recent job giving animal ethics lectures in local high schools. I say messy, because it turned out that the woman running the program from Atlanta was a bit of an authoritarian bitch, revoking Gretchen's email account before she could wind it down and then removing her from the organization's Facebook group when she'd posted a goodbye to her colleagues. This led into a conversation about non-profits generally, and how they tend to exploit their employees. Chris is transitioning out of working for the spinoff of The Organization I work for, and he had a little useful intel about behind-the-scenes changes.
At some point we got to talking about Trump and the big march planned in Washington, DC for next week. The topic is still depressing, but it's got more comedic potential now that it's all had a chance to soak in.
Meanwhile our waitress was providing dismayingly poor service. The food and drinks had taken forever to arrive and at least one thing we'd ordered never materialized at all. Gretchen and I managed to make it to our movie on time; one great thing about a post-dinner activity is that it creates a definite sunset for the restaurant phase of the evening and there is less endless lingering over refills of water. I'm the kind of person who is weary of being in a restaurant the instant I finish my last bite or sip, though nobody else in the world seems to be in agreement with me on this.
Gretchen and I watched Hidden Figures in a well-attended theatre in the Orpheum. The movie was the feel-good story of how some mathematically-talented black women overcame institutional and cultural racism (at the Langley NASA facility in Virginia in the early 1960s) to make important contributions to America's manned space flight program. Watching our heroines deal with the spiteful and demeaning details of segregation reminded me of how cultures sometimes suffer in competition with other cultures because of their stupidity. Take, for example, the Nazis: in war with the Allies, they could've benefitted from all the Jewish talent they'd consigned to the ovens or sent fleeing from their dystopian Fatherland. Similarly, by forcing mathematical genius Katherine Johnson to walk a half mile to find the nearest "colored" restroom, NASA in its blinkered ignorance lost a lot of valuable computing time (and focus), and for what? So racist white women wouldn't have to worry about a black woman's bum having been in contact with the toilet seat they planned to sit upon?
Hidden Figures was a fun movie, but it was also a deeply-traditional Hollywood production of the sort I don't often see now that we're in the Golden Age of Television (with all its complicated characters and messy moralities). Hidden Figures had all the tropes and clichés from similar movies about plucky heroes overcoming institutional obstacles. All the protagonists were brilliant and flawelessly conventional, without any rough edges or strange interests. And on the off chance we ever had any doubt about how we should be feeling in any part of any scene, our emotions were always precisely cued by swelling orchestral strings at all the right moments. In these fraught times, though, perhaps it was all for the good. The story lent itself perfectly to the full Hollywood treatment, and it showcased yet another example of marginalized minorities in this country making big contributions only to be forgotten by history. Until now.
Back at the house, I was back at my reporting system code, this time adding multiple methods for specifying relative date defaults for a form requiring date inputs. The way dates are typically picked on a web form is via a calendar. But calendars only a provide a view to absolute dates (for example, "November 2nd, 2011"). In a reporting system, by contrast, dates are usually specified relative to today (for example, "six months ago" or "the beginning of this year"). Those dates are specific and can be found in a calendar. But first they have to be calculated, and all of that takes mental work that really would best be handled by some sort of machine that is capable of performing math, whatever that might be. I'd already developed tokens for representing concepts such as "a year ago," "a week ago," or "the beginning of the year," but today I expanded it to allow any arbitary single-unit specification of a date in the past (reports never deal with the future). So now I could say "-5 month" and that would mean five months ago. Or I could say "-2 yearfirst" and that would mean the first of the year two years ago.
Once I had all those tokens working for easily specifying defaults in an HTML date picker, it then occurred to me that, next to every date picker, I should put a dropdown of shortcuts to various dates relative to today. That way a user could just pick "six months ago" from the dropdown and it would populate the date form, completely bypassing the fussy and unpleasant business of trying to find whatever that date is in the calendar. You can see this behavior right here on this page (which should also provide a calendar if you're not using a dumbass browser like Safari):
I have just about everything anyone could need to do anything in my laboratory, but tonight when I went to open a bottle of wine that happened to be in the laboratory, I realized there was no corkscrew handy. Oh the humanity! I could've just gone down to the kitchen and gotten one, but I like being self-sufficient in the laboratory, so I made myself devise a solution using things available there. With my Hitachi hammer drill, I put a large 4 inch decking screw down through the center of the cork, put that screw's head in a vise, and then used a pair of needle-nosed pliers to pry the bottle from the vise, thereby extracting the cork. The procedure was a bit clunky, but the results were the same as if I had used a corkscrew.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?170114 feedback
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