16 December 1997: Exorable Logic

Tuesday, 16 December 1997:

Exorable Logic

Today's Life Lesson: The same logical reasoning techniques which prove so incapable of persuading people around to my point of view on the Internet, also prove largely incapable of persuading people to my point of view at work. Moral: Inexorable logic is fine, but Dr. McCoy got all the best lines.

Or something like that.

At work we're upgrading our application from Microsoft Visual Basic v3 to v5. This being a Microsoft product, two truths seem to hold:

The newer version is not backwards-compatible with the older version, and
The newer version is a step backwards in a few respects (especially in user interface) from the older version.

This in itself leads to a not-insignificant amount of "fun" in the conversion, which we expect to take several weeks, minimum. Maybe more. (Oh yeah, it should also be noted that a couple of the most amateurish glitches in the VB compiler have not been fixed in the two intervening major releases, or so other folks at Epic have told me.)

On top of this, a central group at Epic has been defining programming standards for us to follow. Now I don't object to standards in-and-of themselves; indeed, we could probably use a little more procedural formalism than we have. However, I think that some of these standards are a step backwards from ones we already have, and the issues they're intended to address are better-addressed by those current standards. Needless to say, I find this frustrating.

Of course, this is just in my opinion. In trying to explain this to one of the parties in the central group, it turns out that we've had starkly different experiences in our programming, and have diametrically opposing outlooks. But he's in the central position and I'm not, and that's life.

But enough about that. I get riled up about these things from time-to-time. Doesn't everyone?

I did indeed go out and buy a Christmas tree tonight. It's a nice Scotch Pine, the same sort I got last year. I had to saw off a couple of the lower branches to get the trunk to reach the bottom of my stand, but it's now standing fairly straight, and had lights and ball-ornaments. The cats are intermittently curious about it, but I doubt they'll topple it. They never once tried to climb my tree last year, although Jefferson did climb inside it once, and stood on some of the lower branches for a while.

For the first time since, oh, last Thursday I guess, I didn't go down to the coffee shop to read. Instead, I sat on my couch and read, and looked at my tree, and petted the occasional cat crossing my lap. I'm nearly done with Inherit The Stars, and might finish it tonight. It loses a little something each time I read it (unlike Kim Stanley Robinson's Icehenge, another of my favorite books, which gains something each time I read it), but it's still a fun book.

(After I finish this one, I think I'll have read both the just-mentioned books three times, which is unusual for me, as I tend to have a very good memory for fiction of any sort that's any good at all. I used to be able to recognize episodes of the original Star Trek series from just a two-second clip of film, from pretty much anywhere in the episode. Except for "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", which inexplicably I don't think I've ever seen in its entirety. Fun Fact #27832-G.)

Jan Yarnot sent me a Christmas card with some cool dinosaur stamps included for my use, as a prize for being the (if I recall correctly) 3000th person to read her journal. The card was very funny, too. Thanks, Jan!

I should probably do a piece on my thoughts/feelings/reactions/whatever to the on-line journalling "community" sometime soon, now that I've been at it for over four months. (Preview: The DIARY-L mailing list is mind-numbingly dull most of the time. The journals themselves are far more interesting.) Maybe this weekend.

Hmm, I seem to be in much better spirits tonight than during the last few entries. A good sign, I think. Maybe I should stay home more often!

Michael Rawdon (Contact)