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Tu, Fu, and Ck
Wednesday, March 22 2017
Howling winds in the night brought yet another blast of arctic air that would make late March feel more like late January. I'd taken some diphenhydramine (benadryl) before going to bed last night, and it gave me some interesting dreams. One of those had me showing up for my first day of work somewhere and finding my new boss to be something of a cougar engaging in what had all the hallmarks of a molly-fueled cuddle puddle. It was a little awkward, but first days at new jobs always are.
The other day (though not after taking diphenhydramine), I had a rather vivid dream about showing up to take a test in my analytical geometry class (I've never taken such a course in my life) only to find that I needed to know the atomic weight of iron (a number I do not have in my brain). The test was being given in a semi-outdoor area, but there were what looked to be periodic tables on the wall. On closer inspection, though, these charts turned out to be highly-stylized geographic maps with zero information about chemical elements. I think I ended up having to guess at the number I needed (which turns out to be about 56; I would've guessed 50). And then I ran out of paper and was forced to scratch my answer on a muddy rock with a stick. Yes, it was that kind of dream.
Today was a good day if only because the nagging discomfort that felt to be emanating from my left testicle (or the plumbing connecting it to the rest of me) seemed to have almost completely dissipated. I don't know what had caused it and why it had chosen to move on to someone else (hopefully Paul Ryan, Devin Nunes or other facilitators of nascent fascism).
In my remote workplace, I've been find more reasons to implement MySQL functions (which are similar to the stored procedures I used to write for Microsoft TSQL eighteen years ago). Today I did some work writing a function that turned an integer containing a binary bitmap into a list of comma-separated English expressions. This was to make the bitmap (a nice, concise way to store data) human-readable. Unfortunately, due to a typo, the function kept failing with a mysterious error about not being in sync, causing me to ask a question on ServerFault.com. That got marked as being off-topic, since it should've been on StackOverflow.com, where I then posted it. I can never keep straight which site is which; they look the same and come up in my Google searches whenever I'm trying to solve a problem.
Perhaps because of that dream the other day involving the periodic table, I've been adding custom periodic-table-of-elements-style emojis to the workplace Slack.com communication system. Yesterday I added "Tu" (in a little square, like an icon for Adobe Elements) to represent "Tuesday". This was a reference to a running in-joke spawned by an article at The Onion entitled "It's Only Tuesday." Today I added two more: an "Fu" emoji (for use when playfully acting like someone pissed you off) and "Ck" (for when you need to complete that thought).
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