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sproing!
Thursday, October 28 1999
The website was doing all kinds of screwy things all day today. All the web servers were running out of memory simultaneously while the SQL 7.0 databases acted unpredictably and kept choking on some important data tables. The consequences were widespread. This sort of thing has happened before, but never so pervasively and never without a solution that could ultimately be found with a little troubleshooting. In this case, the site was acting a little like Humpty Dumpty and I was one of the half dozen King's men standing around scratching my head, trying one useless stab at a solution after another. I eventually gave up and went back to developing new products to further tax the site on some future day. By the time I'd left, the problem had been isolated somewhere within a huge cornerstone application, but still no one knew what was going on. It was scary and unreal, sort of like a nightmare. When the Grand Pooh Bah came in to check on the situation, he didn't even chew out the engineers like he usually does in these situations. He could tell it was a lost cause. A scheduled demo for investors was called off.
As I was riding my bike home I was thinking about the immaturity of my fellow web developers. They're all younger than me, in their 20s, but there's something that seems to set them decidedly apart from someone like me. Immaturity isn't a bad thing (I myself am immature!), but in their case it seems to border on inane and even stupid. I won't bother to go into their Star Wars fandom and other issues of taste. The thing that affects me most in their behaviour is the frequency with which they engage in horseplay. Their giggling, wrestling and throwing things around often is the thing that causes me to leave for the day; it always starts at about 5:30pm, and once it starts I have difficulty focusing on my work, no matter how loud my headphones. And once my focus is gone, it's gone for the rest of the day. I miss the days back when I worked out in the main office area next to the sales guys; their uninteresting phone conversations and complete lack of juvenile idiocy accounted for much of the considerable productivity I achieved in August.
Tonight I went to the Revco in Ocean Beach and bought some items for a possible "Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz" outfit. The pickings were kind of slim, however. The most interesting metal items I found were a reflective electric stove tray and a very small aluminum funnel. I bought these, along with some duct tape; what else could I do? Good thing there's plenty of tin foil in this apartment.
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