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a microcosm of what I've been saying
Wednesday, June 14 2017
room 515, Hyatt Hotel, Downtown Columbia, South Carolina
Ca, Da, and I also slept last night in a hotel room on three separate beds. There was so much bed in there that there was hardly any floor between them. The bathroom was beind a sliding glass door that that did little to absord the sound of defecation, something we all knew. That kept us from doing much besides pissing, showering, and brushing our teeth in there. Unless we were alone in the room, defecation was something best done in the bathroom downstairs across the hall from the pool.
This morning Ca set off to get himself some hotel coffee, which would hopefully get his machinery moving. As for me, I think I managed to get 'er done in our room's bathroom. Later I joined Da for a long walk to the Good Life Café, a raw vegan restaurant where he likes to get his breakfast. I don't like raw food and probably shouldn't've gone, but I thought socializing with my boss at this stage of our gathering was prudent. [REDACTED] There was a sleepy (or hungover) waitress working the counter at the Good Life Café, and there would be no folksy southern-fried friendliness from her. It was before 10:00am and we were the only people in the place, though it still took awhile for our food to be prepared. I'd ordered the "raw tacos," which came with two sides, though the only options for sides were kale salad or fruit salad. I didn't want either, but, when forced to choose, selected two kale salads. I'd ordered three raw tacos, and ate one there on the spot. The flax-seed taco was kind of weird: soft and a bit slimy. But it was overwhelmed by the other things on the taco, all of which were raw. People who eat raw food insist it has something to offer, but to me it's like only wearing clothes made of burlap. It's unpleasant and there's no valid point (either morally or in terms of selfish health concerns).
Out IT team had flown in from all over the country to participate in the ConvergeSE Conference, a national gathering of mostly web-design professionals. There's a little material for web developers, but it mostly tends to focus on the front-end and user experience. The conference would be beginning today with a series of workshops and then maybe a party somewhere, though none of us in our IT team had signed up for those. Instead, we'd (or mostly our boss Da had) decided to do a "hackathon." All of us would get together and work together to build a web app. It sounded like a fun project in the abstract, but then as it began somehow Da sucked all the fun out of it. The plan was to fix up the existing task manager, a primitive web app that provides structure to our completion of tasks. If we'd just cleaned up the user interface and added some features, we could've done something useful. But instead Da insisted that we build an app from the ground up, including a new database schema. This is his approach to everything when given full use of his authoritarian tendencies (thankfully, reality usually intercedes). The rest of us weren't too happy to find ourselves building something from scratch. I got irritated with how Da was hovering over me at one point and said, "Why can't you be an owl on a lamp-post somewhere?" Such absurdities were the main form of entertainment through the whole grueling process.
I'd been given direction to develop the app's backend, which I decided to do using a simple PHP framework called Slim. Things started seeming more professional once I began negotiating an API with Ni (who was in charge of frontend), though I quickly got bogged down in the painful details of PDO database connections, since Slim didn't provide that (maybe it did via external modules, but I didn't have time to figure out how to install plugins). Normally all the database stuff is set up for me and all I have to do is write queries and deal with results. Not today; I had to devise a way to store connection information and figure out how to do things like pass named parameters to a PDO MySQL call. All that learning cut into my developing. It made me mutter to myself in a way that seemed to delight Ni and distract poor Ca. I managed to make the rudiments of a backend, but we were a long way from having a working app when the 7:00pm quitting time came (evidently having a hard quitting time is essential to a good hackathon).
[REDACTED]
Compounding matters, Allison quickly decided to boycott the whole thing. She disappeared into the un-airconditioned streets of Columbia for a time and then I caught a glimpse of her hurrying upstairs to the room she is sharing with Ni. In all fairness to Allison, there probably wasn't enough backend work for two people, especially given all the learning I had to do just to get basic things to happen. Still, the whole thing came off as insubordination, something Da had to live with because he's not technically her boss.
[REDACTED]
After the hackathon, the four of us who had participated walked to a restaurant called Publico, passing diagonally through the grounds of the state capitol building along the way. There were a number of grand old trees (some sort of small-leaved oak) and some skinny squirrels, as well as a bronze statue of a palmetto that had weathered an unplantlike green. Further on, we passed a modest (but noisy) diesel electric plant plunked right in the middle of a neighborhood of quaint old houses, causing me to comment to Ni, "Only in the South." I thought the neighborhood must've been African American, but it was actually part of the University of South Carolina.
Allison took an Uber and caught up with us as we waited for an outdoor table in front of Publico. We were eventually given a seat out back, near an area where children can play with various toys, including an oversized Jenga kit. It smelled a little like garbage back there, but the tacos I ordered were the best thing I'd eaten on this trip so far. [REDACTED]
Eventually we returned to the Art Bar, which was having karaoke night. We'd come at an earlier hour than last night, and the place was crowded. There were an unusually large number of fat gothy-looking women. There were several bartenders tonight, and, oddly, they didn't interact with the customers except to get them drinks (which they did in a no-nonsense, highly professional manner). The bar isn't really laid out to encourage interaction with the bartenders, who are mostly hidden in their centrally-located universe surrounded by an ovoid bar topped with various appliances, faux robots, lights, and art. The place is great, though I had no idea it was fat-goth-chick great!
[REDACTED]
The hackathon today. From left: Ni, Ca, Da, and me (in my NASA shirt).
At the Art Bar tonight with upside-down glasses: me, Allison, and, in the striped shirt, Ca.
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