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portobello & poblano
Tuesday, September 9 2025
Today in the brick-and-mortar workplace, I spent most of my time coming up with queries to fix data issues I'd learned about yesterday. Being that I was working in an Oracle database, though, this process was an unnecessarily painful one. In the day-to-day writing of SQL queries, the big problem with Oracle is how much boilerplate code it demands to do simple things. I've mentioned the ordeal of just getting a recordset from a stored procedure. But a huge problem infuriating me today was how fussy Oracle is when it comes to entering datetimes. In MySQL or Microsoft SQL Server, you just enter a string like "2025-09-09" if you want to specify a date, or maybe "2025-09-09 12:12:12" if you want to also specify a time somewhere within that date. But in Oracle, you have to specify dates this way:
"TO_TIMESTAMP('2025-08-27 00:00:00.000', 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS.FF3')" or perhaps even "TO_TIMESTAMP('2025-08-27 00:00:00.000 -05:00', 'YYYY-MM-DD HH24:MI:SS.FF3 TZH:TZM')". Adding to my rage, I couldn't simply copy a datetime out of the returned recordset and paste it into a new query. Doing so produced an error that even ChatGPT had trouble explaining. It turned out that the timezone info in the recordsets is specified as something like "-0500" but when you're writing queries it must be specified as "-05:00." (And the template for that part must be "TZH:TZM," not "TZHHTZM.") Yet again, it had me thinking about all the additional hours wasted by people forced to use Oracle instead of a less punishing relational database system.
After I'd written my queries, I ran them on a copy of the production database and had the IT guy check to see if the data looked good. He identified some problems, which gave me an even better sense of how the pieces fit together, and then I updated my queries further. We went back and forth like this all day, and by the end of the day my queries seemed to be fixing the glitches with both of the problematic users in the system.
At lunch today, we had that outdoor barbecue that had caused me to go out and buy portobello mushrooms yesterday. About fifteen minutes before noon, I'd gone down to the outdoor grill where Ron, the project manager guy, was flipping burgers, and gave him two portobello caps and some poblano peppers to grill for me. (I also added some oil and soy sauce to the caps to give them more flavor.)
The barbecue was in celebration of the company's owner's imminent vacation in Croatia, though of course it was just a rare opportunity to socialize. The weather was beautiful, with clear sunny skies and temperatures in the 70s. I sat with a somewhat different group than I normally fraternize with at such an event, mostly the young developers and that young guy from IT. We talked about such subjects as jury duty and the possible use of AI to make videogames and perhaps brand-new episodes of Beavis & Butthead (though the younger guys had only a dim sense of what Beavis & Butthead actually was). As for my portobello & poblano sandwiches (I ate two), they were very good, though the cheap buns they were on kept threatening to dissolve away completely in the barbecue juices.
At the end of this unusually-satisfying workday, I was feeling good from the pseudoephedrine I'd taken this morning as I started my drive home. On the way, I stopped at the hardware store in Accord to get supplies so I can install a light in the basement bulkhead entrance to the Adirondack cabin's basement. I also got a 7.25 inch circle saw blade for a new cordless Ryobi power saw I recently bought. As I was leaving, I saw that the lead developer at my company had also stopped there to buy something.
When I walked Charlotte early this evening, I took her far west of the Farm Road, over to the newest house near Reichel Road. (It was built some time in the last year or two.) It's a pretty typical house installation in the forest, with a big round clearing containing zero trees and a prefab house plunked down atop a poured foundation. I saw a vehicle parked near it, so I didn't get too close (as I was probably walking through property belonging to the owner). There's not really too much interesting in this part of the forest aside from the scattered bluestone boulders, which each tend to be about the volume of an automobile.
Back at the house, I did a little preliminary work adding a clip editor to my new web clipboard system and then transitioned to preparing dinner. Tonight I'd decided to make my usual vegetable soup, which is built around five or six potatoes, a bunch of kale and collard greens fresh from the garden, a can of kidney beans, a can of diced tomatoes, and a pan of onions fried up with mushrooms. To this mix, I also added a moderate number of dry campanelle pasta noodles, which were nice and noodlelike by the time Gretchen returned from pilates and meeting with a contractor at the Downs Street property.
Tonight after Jeopardy!, we watched the rest of Capturing the Friedmans, and by the end I was pretty sure that most (or perhaps even all) of the sodomy charges against them were bogus. I got the sense that most of the kids who had been interviewed were pushed to make outrageous claims, something one of them admitted to doing just to be able to go home.
[REDACTED]
Deer in scrub forest of the highlands west of the Farm Road. Click to enlarge.
A bluestone boulder in the forest of the highlands west of the Farm Road. Click to enlarge.
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