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poorly-kept Jeopardy! secret
Wednesday, October 13 2021
Over the course of the morning, I gradually figured out how to accomplish the parcel inventory migration I'd been working on for the last four or five days. The key to this was being able to run rapid tests on code, something that yesterday's work provided. Eventually I figured out how, in the C# code layer, to make the date ranges of the import (into a SQL Server database) perfectly match the data in the old dBase data, which had been organized in a completely different way. I've done a fair amount of work in C# up to this point, but this was the first time I'd ever gotten anything so complex working in that programming language. Up until now, I'd been fixing the complex issues with this migration in the SQL layer, often by iterating over rows that had been imported imperfectly at an earlier stage of the process. I probably could've figured out how to do something with inventory records, but it would've been a time-consuming step. It's better to have fixed the underlying C#. I should mention that this was the first real success I'd had on my job in years that didn't involve the Angular-based tax importer I'd built two and a half years ago, and it greatly improved my feelings about my job. (I'd actually started the process of looking for a new job due to general job dissatisfaction and, also, to hedge against the possibility that the new head honcho proves unpleasant to work for.)
Late this afternoon, not long after 4:00pm, I started making a spaghetti dinner involving a frying pan full of chonkiness from mushrooms, tofu, and onions. I also boiled cauliflower with the noodles, as I now regularly do so there will be some sort of vegetable in the meal. Gretchen and were still having a bit of a cold war about the need for AFCI outlets at the cabin, but that all seemed to be over when she came home and smelled that I'd prepared dinner.
As I was spooning marinara sauce onto my spaghetti and fried chonkiness, I mentioned to Gretchen that I'd seen something I would've rather missed on the homepage of the Washington Post regarding Jeopardy!. Gretchen knew exactly what it was I'd seen, so I didn't really need to say what it was. It also, unfortunately, spoiled the surprise for her of what had happened. Without ever discussing what specifically had happened, we elected to watch the Jeopardy! episodes from October 8th (the episode just before the thing that had happened) and October 11th (the episode where the thing happened). What happened, of course, was that, on his 39th appearance on Jeopardy!, Matt Amodio went down to defeat. In the episode where this happened, he found himself playing against two unusually strong contestants, who, between them, often managed to beat Amodio at the buzzer and keep him away from the daily doubles, starving him of money. By final jeopardy, Amodio was the contestant with the least money, and then he got the final jeopardy answer wrong (saying "Poland" where he should've said "Austria." So he went down to defeat in third place. Gretchen and I were delighted, of course.
I went to bed unusually early and then awoke a little before 1:00am with tummy complaints. Antacids proved useless, but a pink Pepto-Bismol-like tablet made me comfortable enough to fall back asleep.
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