Almost Endless Rambling, Volume 1

One of my good friends and coworkers, Sara, had a good weekend – his brother was voted in as mayor of his city of 20,000 people. Here’s a link to a website that has a copy of the newspaper article announcing his win. I know at least one person reading this blog knows French, which is going to help – his brother won the election in a city in Senegal.

http://mayacine.org/

I work with, and live near, a lot of people who grew up in other countries and speak multiple languages. In comparison I’m pretty lame, having grown up, gone to college, gotten married, and settled down with a family within a radius of about 45 miles from where I was born. That’s not a bad thing by any means – in fact, while people from other countries have interesting stories to tell me about their cultures, I can tell them what TV shows were like in the 70’s, and provide background information on popular rock bands and TV personalities. It can be hard to work ‘The Love Boat’, Grand Funk Railroad, and Mr. T into everyday conversations, but if I work hard at it, I can usually do it.

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For the past two days I have been walking around like I left my brain at home in its jar of liquid preservative. Yesterday at work I managed to call on my years of experience as a project lead and go-to developer to clobber a bunch of data in our working database, and this morning I did ANOTHER similar clobbering that was only fixed by restoring some backups. The problem with working on a live database (“live” meaning several people might be using it at any time, and it’s always accepting requests) is that one wrong move can be a huge problem. It’s not like making a mistake in Microsoft Word, where you can hit the Undo button until you’re back in good shape – once you’ve deleted something in SQL Server, it’s gone forever. There’s no Undo.

Fortunately, our users (the ones who pay us money) are not using the databases that I work in daily, so it didn’t affect what we would call “production” data. But leaving your brain home in the jar does not help your database maintenance skills.

(As an aside, it’s common to give your brain jar a nickname. Mine is nicknamed “Bjar”, pronounced “Bee-yarr”, which is a Norwegian word I made up. It’s not uncommon in our house for Jennifer to tell me I left Bjar in the laundry room again. Runner up nickname: “Abby Normal”. If you don’t get that joke, you should watch more Mel Brooks movies. )

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I know everyone reading this knows what serial commas are, but since I expect a flood of readers on this site any day now, I’ll explain for the comma challenged.

When you list a few words in sentence, you can put commas in the sentence one of two ways:
1) Don, Jennifer and Ringo Starr went to the Farmer’s Market.
2) Don, Jennifer, and Ringo Starr went to the Farmer’s Market.

Note the comma after Jennifer in the second sentence.

I always use serial commas because, as a pretend engineer/scientist/writer, I like to find one single rule I can follow all the time, so I choose to use serial commas.

The other day M brought home a worksheet he did in class that asked them to insert commas into sentences, and the teacher was requesting that they always use serial commas. I was glad to see that. Any time I read something that doesn’t have serial commas, I wonder if the writer left his or her brain in the Bjar that morning.

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Fun link of the day: a capacitor-powered flashlight. Some people think capacitors are good candidates to replace batteries in cars, etc. They’re dicey, though, and you can read about the drawbacks of this design at the link below.

http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2009/03/how-to_build_a_battery-free_flashli.html

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J and I are going to see "Movin' Out" this weekend, which is a musical full of Billy Joel songs. The choreography was done by Twyla Tharp. It's at the Fox, a place we haven't been in several years. The last time we were there, we saw Dora the Explorer's Live Show, which was OK for the kids but there wasn't much for the parents.

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The roofers will be here in the next few weeks. Oh boy!