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great clouds of ladybeetles and stink bug
Tuesday, October 18 2016
Today was unseasonably warm and humid, which seemed especially odd given the bright fall colors (which are unusually intense this year) and the carpet of fallen pine needles on the grass. Gretchen was out there in the yard on a lawn chair reading for large swaths of yesterday and today. The great thing about this time of year is that there are few or no biting insects. There are, however, great clouds of ladybeetles and stink bugs entering the house any way they can to begin their winter hibernation.
One of my most important tasks in the remote workplace today was to figure out the 130 thousand email anomaly Ca had hit me with late in the day yesterday. Today he sent me a CSV with contacts from the first mailing and one from the second one. I looked at contacts in the second one that hadn't been present in the first one, comparing their records in the current database and one that had been saved about a week ago. The only difference was the dateModified column, which my sync scanner could well have affected. Sure enough, a query showed hundreds of thousands of records had dateModified columns set to times yesterday afternoon. Finally, looking at the mass mailing algorithm, I saw that dateModified was a factor. That explained everything. It was a huge relief to finally know what had happened; if such a big thing were to remain a mystery, it would greatly diminish my confidence in the reliability of the whole system. The solution was to alter the algorithm so that it no longer took dateModified into account. There were other ways to arrive at the same idea.
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