A look through MyFlorida, the employment site, was not too encouraging. The phone company is hiring cable pullers. Beyond that, the fed stimulus money seems to be wasted on nothing jobs like taking soil samples. There is a position to repair cell phones, but camouflaged at the end of the ad is a requirement to be “available” for weekend midnight shift. Bryne reports he may be heading back north. A company has recently been acquired by a British firm he used to work for. His landlord gets a monthly pension and is “Living Like Harry”. These people have been shielded from the harsh realities of working survival. To a man getting free money, it seems easy for other people to live on $8 per hour. Even in my heyday at the corporation, I was never able to completely forget that I was six months away from poverty. Others seemed to be one paycheck away.
It is blast furnace hot, even riding the bike into the wind brings no welcome breeze. I read some more details on ASP programming, what a rat’s nest that is. It’s as if MicroSoft went out of their way to make it as structureless as possible, each department adding in patches. My worst criticism, likely shared by any careful programmer, is that object based (their words, not mine) programming is full of “fall through” coding. I’ll describe that with an analogy.
Imagine you found a barrel in the desert. Logic says you would do at least a two-step process. If the barrel contained liquid, you would test it. If it was water, you would drink it, if it was gasoline, you’d pour it in your truck. That is classical programming. But the object based programmer would say “if it isn’t water, put it in your truck” and proudly cheer that he’d saved a step, that his code was “elegant”.
This is fraught with danger for in that logic, there is no check to see if it was gasoline. The only test was if it was not water, whence the code will “fall through” to the next stage. Object based programming is full of such backwards logic, a sure sign of bad workmanship. It seems they were stupid enough to design the objects before they designed the commands. Even if the barrel contained vinegar or air, it would still get poured into the tank. Then they spend hours coding error-handling routines. Elegant, my eye.
MicroSoft has become the NASA of the computer field. Each department is more concerned with making sure they have a job than in producing a final working successful end product.
I spoke to Mr. Will again. If he had stuck with his guitar lessons, we’d be local heroes by now. I’m afraid I cannot give any further second chances, for last Sunday I was here all day waiting for a promised call from another guitarist who, a week ago, told me he would be free. Will is a complete beginner, but he’s the best chance I’ve got, even if he can’t sing. Guitarists in Florida are a pack of born liars who think they are above judgment and reproach. Then they whine like babies when you bypass them, or they walk up to the stage and want to talk about what an improvement they could make.
In other news, Jackie and I put an ad on C-list to try to locate California Johnny. We got to talking about him, and he has just disappeared. Pudding-Tat has quit coming around, that’s nearly a month now. Theresa seems okay with her new job and is in much better spirits. I’ve completed my taxes for 2009 and bingo is a driving force, as predicted, rising to third place. I have not started the Taurus for so long the battery has gone dead. How was your day?
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