Silence, Looking Glass, Peemoflage, Coding, and Murlocs (Oh My)

Day 37. No word yet. But today was a holiday, so no mail.

Haven't gotten my special package yet, either. Today would've been a good day for me to get it, because a new way of looking at it hit me: am I likely to get this kind of opportunity where I currently am? Made the decision obvious to me today. By tomorrow I'll be second guessing myself again. It's kinda what I do.

Random thing you didn't want to know about me: I almost always flush twice when I urinate. My school didn't have enough class rooms, so my sixth grade class was held in what was basically a gutted doublewide trailer. A pretty blonde girl sat right in front of the bathroom door, and I was horrified by the thought of her hearing me pee, so I developed the clever plan to flush first to drown out the sound. This necessitated more frequent trips to the bathroom to ensure that the flush-gurgle outlasted my urinary drumroll. Nearly 25 years later, the habit is deeply ingrained. If I'm not concentrating on pissing like a normal human being, I flush first, then pee. If I am, I usually forget halfway through my micturatory observances and flush early. And damned if my OCD will let me leave an unflushed toilet, so... doubleflush.

Today was a long day. Not a bad one, just long. I implemented the last feature on my list for this month's sprint. Doing that work revealed a flaw in the design of part of our model. Tsk, tsk. Someone violated the rules our Most Senior Coder lay forth lo, these many years ago, and the result illustrates exactly why these guidelines exist. I should write it up on my coding blog.

I spent much of the afternoon refactoring that portion of the model. That's actually pretty fun, or at least it is to me. It's my favorite part of the development process -- and I guess it shows a bit, since the team has occasionally had to tell me to knock the refactoring the fuck off and write some new code.

This refactoring job wasn't as straightforward as it should have been; another team in California references some of this code, and our source management system is rather prohibitive where collaboration is concerned. It's a shame, really, because the code repository winds up discouraging good practices in coding across our greater organization. Nobody in management gives a shit, though. Oh well. Anyway, coordinating changes to any of the code they reference would be a goddamn nightmare, so I had to refactor with a light touch. Which is to say that it wound up being somewhat less than ideal, but still pretty damn good, I think.

Funny how the longer I do this shit, the less technical and the more business-bullshitty the challenges are. Maybe I should leverage some synergies or something.

Dead tired when I got home. Wifezilla tried to give me a break and let me chill out and unwind. She rocks that way. She got a bug to do some cleaning and started going through the fridge chucking this month's aging leftovers. A big tupperware container of spaghetti noodles went into the garbage disposal, and promptly clogged it.

Again, she didn't want to drag me into it. I finally went to investigate the strange noises I heard coming from the kitchen and found her working it over with a plunger. Well-intended, but it actually just crammed the noodles farther down the pipes. (I sound like I'm making fun of her, but I went straight for the plunger myself.)

I wound up having to take the pipes apart to clear the impaction. Ever smelled the inside of your plumbing? It smells the way I imagine murlocs do. Which may explain the gurgles.