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full of themselves
Sunday, December 12 1999
One of the more interesting of the channel producer guys had invited me to attend a meeting today, purportedly on the subject of "application design under the upcoming 'new architecture" (not to be confused with earlier ill-fated "new architectures"). I didn't really want to spend my Sunday in the office, but it seemed like a reasonably good cause.
So I biked into work at around 10:30am. The weather was absolutely perfect, though few people were out on the bike trail or in the harbour-side park.
Since nothing interesting was on the radio, I was playing the local hard rock station on my headphones. I usually change the station every time they play an AC/DC song, not because I don't like AC/DC, but because I've heard enough AC/DC in my lifetime to never want to hear it again.
Shortly into the meeting it was clear that it was not what it had been billed. Marty, the erstwhile VP of System Architecture, announced that it was instead a class focused on our existing site, and it would begin with rebuilding our site's homepage, which just happens to be one of my creations.
Actually, it wasn't such a bad "class" as such things go; in the process some useful ideas emerged, for example, Eric the Web Developer suggested that we needed a librarian to keep track of includes and functions that have and are being developed.
But much of the meeting was tainted by the personality issues of the most arrogant web developers, particularly the aforementioned Eric. One irritating thing I've noticed about computer programmers is their tendency to view their arbitrary personal coding practices as the only way to do things. For example, while looking at the source of the homepage, Dave and Eric were chirping about how "inline code" (code lying outside of functions and subroutines) was a terrible thing and knocking my frequent (though successful!) use of the file system object, which makes them nervous because they never learned anything about it in college.
Ironically, some of the coding pet-peaves of one programmer were diametrically opposite the pet-peaves of another. For example, while Marty likes vertical white space to "open up the code," Peter and I prefer as little vertical white space as possible (with the exception of space separating functions and subroutines) because we want to view as much of a routine as possible without having to scroll. Indeed, I have difficulty reading the functions of some of my colleagues, what with all the vertical white space and ugly ASCII-graphical headers they lard into them.
Lunch was lame; a few cheap 29 cent burgers and fries from McDonalds. By the time I snuck off (circa 4:20pm) some of my "classmates" were already falling asleep.
Meanwhile Kim was at an Asian Indian fashion show at Galoka in La Jolla. She came back sort of drunk, delighted with the variety of people she'd met. She'd been hob nobbing with the beautiful models, having a fully multi-cultural experience. Evidently after the fashion show a bunch of homies arrived and a hip-hop show ensued, complete with Olympic-level break dancing.
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