|
|
|
too much weird too fast
Wednesday, September 12 2018
A few days ago I had a really fucked-up dream I neglected to mention. In the dream, someone had a little brownish dog on a leash. It looked like a dog, right down to the four legs, the paws, the sniffing around, and the wagging tail. There was something a little off about its eyes: they were a bit far apart and seemed more like dead black ovals than things out of which a creature might be able to look at the world. It was then I was told that though this looked like a dog, it was actually a species of crab, one that had been bred by the Chinese specifically to resemble a dog.
At the workplace today, I finally made some progress on my Sybase migration project. I managed to get Sybase's command-line command dbunload to produce a mess of CSV-like files and a .sql file to read them. My task then was to create a Microsoft SQL (T-SQL) file to read those CSV-like files and, using the BULK INSERT command, write them to a MS-SQL database. There were, of course, complications. One of these was that the CSV-like files were not CSV-like enough for BULK INSERT, so the Python script I was writing had to process all those files to make them more like CSV files. As I said in the comments in mu code: "story of my life."
Socially, the new workplace has been a bit cold for my tastes. I prefer a little more engagement with my co-workers, particularly of a non-work-related nature. It's important to understand where your co-workers are coming from in order to interact with them effectively. This was a point I stressed at Mercy For Animals, though in that environment (at least with the people I worked with) this really wasn't a problem. It's definitely a problem in the new workplace. Today, though, in the late morning Jake, one of the young guys who knows a thing or two about Python, was trying to hang a small handheld vacuum cleaner on the wall, but he needed a drill. So I went out to the Subaru and fetched him a human-powered one (a battery-powered one would quickly lose its charge and then even its ability to hold a charge in the greenhouse-heat of a car). He tried the drill but eventually gave up when he realized that installing a screw was going to be difficult without a powered screwdriver. But it was enough of a connection for him to later invite me to lunch with him and John, one of the other younger guys. Jake even put it that "the younger guys" have a tradition of going out together to get lunch. I suppose I should've self-deprecating said that I was an old fart, but instead I agreed to tag along.
We drove to a nearby deli, one so close we should've probably walked. Initially I was fearful that there would be nothing for me to eat there, but it turned out that they had a veggie burger. So I ordered that (without the cheese, but with hot peppers). The guys at the deli were nicer than just about anybody I'd ever encountered in a retail environment, which was a little disturbing in the context of all the visible dead animal flesh. While waiting for our food to be prepared, John and Jake were talking about how wild and crazy and interesting Elon Musk is. They mentioned his recent on-video pot smoking and then went on to talk about his crazy idea for a subterranean transportation system called the Hyperloop. At that point I chimed in to say that I too am really into digging tunnels. And then I proceeded to tell them about the 10 foot hole I jackhammered into the basement of my greenhouse and my pipe-dream of eventually tunneling sideways to emerge at the escarpment. It was perhaps too much weird too fast, something I was aware of even as I told them such things. These people at this new job, they're a lot more conventional than even the straight-laced people at Mercy For Animals, so this is going to take some getting used to. After an awkward pause, someone at the cashier announced that my veggie burger was ready (they'd packed it into an absurd amount of styrofoam of course). So Jake asked, "Are you a vegetarian?" I said that I was. He apologized for bringing me to a deli, but I waved it off and said "there's always something for me." I am determined not to be judgmental or otherwise a dickish vegan around these people.
My workplace laptop is a good one (its AMD Ryzen 5 2500U processor is actually about 10% faster than the Core i5 in Woodchuck, my home desktop). But I'd found it excruciatingly slow for certain big database chores. Initially I'd assumed it had a solid state drive (we are in 2018 after all) but last weekend I'd discovered that it actually contained a one terabyte mechanical hard drive. I'd made some mention of this at the workplace, and so the head honcho bought me a 500 gigabyte SSD on Amazon Prime, and it arrived today. So tonight when I went home, I brought the big laptop and that SSD. The main problem with swapping in the new drive was the fact that it was smaller than the old one. This meant I first had to shrink the partition on the mechanical drive. A Google search suggested that the trial version of Easus (rhymes with Jesus?) would do the trick. But when I tried to use the partition resizer, it demanded that I upgrade. Fuck that noise! So I then installed a package called Paragon, but then something creepy happened. It wanted me to register with my Facebook identity, so it presented me with a popup browser window that looked like something hosted by Facebook. But since it was a popup, there was no address bar, so I couldn't tell who actually hosted it. If it had been an actual Facebook page, it should've picked up my login without asking me. But instead it presented me a form to type in my Facebook credentials. There was no way in hell I was going to type credentials into a form when I didn't know who was hosting it. In the end, I managed to do the resize with a freeware application called MiniTool Partition Wizard. Its interface was almost identical to that of Easus, but it allowed me to do all the things I needed to do. The transfer of the disk to the SSD went amazingly fast, taking something like a half hour. At that point I wasn't really in a good state to monitor the passage of time; I'd eaten some mystery powder I'd found in the bottom of a baggy that had, during our Mexico trip, contained some salvaged pills (ones that had partially dissolved due to contact with water). Eating that powder had made me fall completely asleep in front of the teevee, though I'd awoken within the hour and continued on groggily with the hard drive copying project.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180912 feedback
previous | next |
