Author: Walt Stoneburner

Riverdance and Sippy Cups

This Friday I got word from my sister that her husband was going to be working a really long shift, and as such she wanted to come up and visit with her two kids. Since Tamara has been working her butt off since as long as I can remember, I knew it was going to be up to me to entertain the lot.

Luckily for me, Madison and Marni hit it off really well, and that lessened my load considerably. Picking up and tossing one three year old is a lot of work, according to my lower back — but surprisingly put two of them together, and you just have to herd them rather than entertain.

Unfortunately, we forgot to clear *all* the monsters out of the house, so when Madison woke up crying from being chased by one, we had to move her to another room as not to wake the other kids.

In the morning, Mike caught a baby rabbit with his bare hands and we had a BBQ later that night. Perhaps I should add we let the rabbit go and ate cow instead.

In the morning (now Sunday in the story) my parents came over, and Marni had to go to church. Madison wanted to go very badly, and just didn’t understand why mom felt it so important to go home and see dad near the same time.

I taught Madison a new trick; after learning to drink from a straw, she now knows she can blow bubbles. She also knows if she blows really hard, she can make the liquid shoot out of the cup. With this knowledge, we went outside, and I showed her how to suck up water in a straw and then shoot it (or at least dribble it in a nasty mess). We practiced a lot.

Madison got so good she wanted to show grandpa. So, we egged my dad outside, but instead of shooting at the rose plants as we had done before, Madison unloaded a mouthful all over him. She’s now officially ready to send home to my brother-in-law. I bet she’ll be moved back to sippy cups within the week.

The evening concluded with my wife joining Mark and Michele in seeing Riverdance at Wolftrap. We started off the night with a picnic. One squirrel was acting a little weird, and was draping it’s self all over picnic tables, trash cans, and tree trunks the way a dog wipes it’s rear on a lawn when it has worms. Michele tried to ward off the squirrel by throwing food at it. It had about the affect you’d expect, the squirrel started stalking Michele until Tamara chased it off.

The show was fairly well, but the band looked further away and smaller (which usually happens when you put something further away). I don’t know what it is about Riverdance, but each show I see gets worse and worse. The timing between people is off, sometimes I swear I hear clicks and stomps when there is no activity (or the reverse), and symmetry and equi-distances just degrade. It’s unlike the very first show I ever saw.

It could be me, but it seems like the troop size is decreasing as well. I heard that in 2005 they’re returning with a cast of just five. And in 2009 it’ll just be one guy doing quick changes and running back and forth to simulate the appearance of multiple people on stage.

The best part came when we exited the theater and walked back to the parking lot close to the woods where we ate. I took my water bottle, snuck up behind Michele, ran it up the outside of her leg starting at the heel very quickly, and screamed out “Oh God it’s an attack squirrel!” Michele flipped and flailed screaming “Get it off me!” Yes, the squirrelhad targeted just her out the the crowd.

She paid me back by filling my shirt pocket with ice when we got back to her place. Which reminds me, I need to set up Tamara’s glass cutter.

Which way did the lemmings run?

Well, my wife came home announcing she had a LiveJournal. That was pretty much all I needed to see that if I was ever going to converse with the rest of the group, I’d need to jump on board the bandwagon as well. Just remember folks, this is how Microsoft sucked us all in; the next step in the evil plot, after giving away a free token, is to entice people other people to join, then when critical mass is hit, revoke the free token. Poof. Captive community.

I still intend on maintaining livejournal.wwco.com, but more as a migration project.

You guys can just look at this as me caving into social peer pressure, with the added benefit that I no longer have to be anonymous to you.

UPDATE (6-Feb-2006):  I did the LiveJournal thing on our servers, willing to pass out free full-featured accounts to anyone that wanted them.  Turns out that was an interesting social experiment… no one, save Danny, wanted one.  It turns out that LiveJournal has an established audience, and the authors there count on the perception that there will be voyers.  So, in fact, it was not about having an online diary after all.  The biggest hurdle was migrating content from the official LiveJournal site to the local one, a feature that was added a number of years later.  Since people were willing to pay (and for less features) to use an existing service, I’ve abandoned the project.  I’ve just finished importing my own LiveJournal entries into my blog, which seems to provide a much richer environment.

Sick and Tired

Actually, I was literally sick and tired. I didn’t get any sleep the night before and work up with one really bad dry throat. I ended up taking the day off and consuming cold medicine, which had the affect of knocking me out and leaving me dazed and groggy whenever I came to.

I’m not sure what the plans are this weekend, though I’ve gotten a number of calls and emails from people scheduling to do one thing or another all this month. I’ve stuck them into my online calendar and the WWCo events page, hopefully they’ll sort themselves out.

Dozens of Deaths at Bonnie’s Cabin

Bonnie had her Chalet Christening, which was extremely near the old Freedonia stomping grounds we used to tred.

For the first time in a while we were able to get quite a number of people in one place, sitting, and talking. So, I introduced a new game to the group.

I won’t go into all the details and variations, but the general gist is that we played the role of villagers who were being tormented by werewovles, and in an effort to stop the killings, we’d go on a lynching.

We played several games, each consiting of several rounds, and the result was tons of innocent deaths combined with just the right amount of mayhem.

I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but we ended up doing group improv by the time all was said and done. Highlights included Alan making some rather obscure hand gestures which were taken out of context, while shortly later Bonnie and James were trapped in a women’s prison and despite her best efforts, professing to the rest of the inmates James’s talent.

Why do “they” make so much?

All this week I’ve been in Oracle training to learn more about SQL, PL/SQL, and DBAing. I completed the classroom excercises well ahead of schedule, and since there was no Internet access, I had but one activity left: thinking.

I was quite suprised that while our instructor knew many of the ins and outs of Oracle, basic questions I had about the language, it’s syntax, or why things were the way they are, that the instructor didn’t know, and worse filled in the gap of knowledge with double talk.

On a side note, that really bothers me. If someone says they don’t know to me, that’s a perfectly acceptable answer. I don’t expect experts to know everything. I’ll research elsewhere, and if I find the solution, I’ll make sure they get the answer too. However, when it’s a matter making up cruft to save face, then I have a problem and I lose confidence in the expert on a number of grounds.

But back to the original train of thought. It was spawned when the instructor said “many of the DBAs out there don’t know PL/SQL” — this is an acceptable fact, as PL/SQL is an Oracle-thing. But when the phrase “or how to program” was added, I started to take notice.

How come an Oracle DBA can make a six-figure salary with such a limited set of generic skills, while numerous people I know dripping with portable skill sets are struggling to find jobs paying half that amount. Then it hits me:

1. Their lingo covers it up to make the technical sound unapproachable. For instance, IBM mainframe consultants will talk amongst themselves about a ‘DATA SET’ — however if you the low-level peon happened to learn “that’s just a file like any other you use” then you’d start to get a little pissed about the value you were getting. And so, much of the Oracle training went: there were all kinds of techno-babble names for things which I remember learning in BASIC classes in the 6th grade. None of these application-terms seemed to match the terms already in use by the mathamatics community.

2. Supply and Demand. Let’s pick on Oracle again just for fun(personally, I think it’s the best of the commercial databases out there). Oracle is expensive. Oracle training is expensive. You don’t need many Oracle experts to do things “right” — but you do need at least one. Consequentially a company will put all of it’s eggs into one basket and train one person to be the DBA. Then they keep them there with golden handcuffs. Now, look at C/C++ people. You can get programmers a dime a dozen. Unfortnately there’s no real way to rank how good one is over another without doing some tedious work. Oracle solves that problem by handing you a certificate. Like many training classes, you get a certificate for paying tuition. Naturally, you’d think that an employer would be smart enough to look for a certification over a certificate (which usually means you passed a test). However, testing is no match for experience. I’ve known a number of MS certified people who were clueless. Before I ever wrote a line of Java code, I was able to pass their certification test. Finally, in your daily commute to work, how many drivers do you see doing illegal (or just plain dangerous) things on the road who “passed” driving certification from the DMV? The whole point is that expense and convolution can keep supply low and demand high.

3. But the real reason is: these people are solving real business problems. Everyone loves a hero. Fire fighters get more praise than fire prevention marshals… yet, who saves more lives in the long run? Your typical programers and highly-skilled techies are able to build amazing things, but it will always be the instant gratification of DBAs and Unix Admins that will draw managements attention. The interesting part is that those techies have the knowledge to do these jobs already, but aren’t challeneged by them and the domain terminology is used as a barrier to create frustration. The secret is that these positions don’t deal with technology nor products! They deal with *service*.

All one has to do, it seems, is pick a domain (like Unix systems or databases or something) which there are a large number of consumers within an organization, learn -just that domain-, and understand how to make reasonably decent trade-offs [e.g., space vs. speed].

Bowls of Speghetti

Last night I managed to swing by the new candy store in Ashburn; right as I walked in a promotional balloon popped. I would have considered it conincidence, until someone else walked in and another balloon popped. My guess is that they have a remote control connected to a sensor, and they pop the balloons with infrared lasers in order to get your attention. Pretty clever.

Went to Movie Night(tm) last night, and it felt like months since I’ve been. That might be due to the fact it was months since I’ve been. We watched Thumbtanic and BatThumb (and a whole lot of kids shows before the main event). The young-one has gone from baby to toddler in the blink of an eye, has hair, is running around, and whapping mommy. It was hard to say which was more entertaining.

That evening I spilled the news about the surprise party happening tonight. Actually, it’s not so much a surprise as in he won’t know it’s coming, but more of a surprise that we recently thought to do it.

The rest of the night was spent doing Unix Regular Expressions.