Better than the shaft…
Used to love watching News Radio
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So what were you doing up there?
Communicating.
Communicating?
Yes. Giving him the bird. You know, the finger.
Yes, Goose, I know the finger.
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Almost time to go home and prepare for the interview.
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Interview went quite well. I’m their dream candidate
They were quite surprised to hear that my speech is almost normal for a hard of hearing person.
Salary and job responsibilities was also discussed, it is a junior managerial role. The team consists of 5 guys, three hardware and two software, latter of which I’ll join as they are looking at expanding into the rest of South Africa.
Will be good to get away from hardware for a change and do software. They will also provide training.
#optimistic
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Rediscovering the simple pleasure of a root beer float and seeing some of the fruit on my Italian plum tree fall onto the grass, which means they’re just about finished ripening.
I’m going to be well-stocked for the next two months for the ones I can’t give away. Last year, I let most of them just fall onto the grass and didn’t clean them up for a long time. When i finally did, I lost count after picking up more than 1600 plums. Let’s just say the back yard was pretty fragrant.
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One of our clients had a few performance issues with their overnight processing. One procedure was taking 37 hours.
Yep, that’s 37 hours for an overnight job.
I rewrote it.
It now takes 4:30 (that’s 4 minutes 30 seconds, not 4 hours 30 minutes)
The client thinks the sun shines out of whatever orifice I want it to 
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reminds me of when I was playing around with Pascal, and was coding a small program to create a dungeon.
First iteration of the code took a minute to draw a map of the dungeon on the monitor. Too slow.
Looked at the code, rewrote it.
Second iteration - 1 second.
Which makes one wonder whether today’s programmers ever optimize their code or not.
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Not until there’s a tangible need for it. The priorities are (in order): Make it work, make it pretty, make it fast.
We have so much excess compute capacity today that it’s not worth spending an extra 2 weeks obsessing over an optimization that makes a 5% or even 10% improvement unless someone is complaining.
Exceptions obviously apply.
You are right to an extent. The only reason I was looking at the code was because of the performance issues.
But the code was appalling and never should have made it into production. A number of things were apparent when I looked at the code:
- It was written by someone who had no idea how databases work
- It was written by a very junior programmer
- It had never had a code review
That last one is the one that annoyed me.
I don’t have a problem with junior programmers writing code - it’s the only way they are going to learn.
But they are never going to learn unless they get a bit of guidance from more experienced programmers - and the people who wrote that clearly didn’t get any guidance.
In a couple hours, the cats will be home. It will be a noisy 30 min ride from the boarders but worth it to have everyone home.
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Gizmo does OK in the car if both me and my girlfriend are there so that one of us can hold her carrier on our lap. If it’s just one of us with the carrier sitting on the front passenger side floor, though, she likes to sing the song of her people.
Yesterday I drove 816 miles in 18 hours.
It took 6 hours to drive the 408 miles from Blyth to Yeovil, on the A1, A69, M6, M5, A358 and A303. Then I picked my brother up from where he’s been digging up a Roman fort. Then it took six hours to drive the A303, A358 and M5 alone on the return trip as I discovered a new universal constant: people in the Midlands have literally no concept of how to drive. You know the whole “only a fool breaks the two second rule”? Yeah these guys misread it as “only a fool leaves an inch of empty road between them and the car in front” which of course means that all it takes to cause a five lane halt is for one person to tap the brakes lightly.
And I was getting abuse for leaving empty road ahead of me, even though it meant that in stop-start traffic I was the only person moving. Albeit slowly. My phone says that on the M5, a road with a 70mph limit, my average speed was 17mph. For the whole 120mile stretch.
Anyway, why is this in the What Made You Happy Today thread?
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Because I’ve beaten my record of driving 14 hours with no breaks* by an entire 4 hours.
Maybe one day I’ll become an endurance driver, that’ll be fun! 
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Because all the motorway driving has pushed my average MPG up from 55 to 62!
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Because my brother now owes me all the favours!
*[no breaks except the halfway point, for refuelling and toilet and passenger collection and stuff you can’t do while propelling 1,800lbs of iron and steel at 70mph haha]
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If this annoys you never, ever visit Los Angeles. 
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To be honest, I probably would cope. It’s just annoying when it’s expressly forbidden to drive that close in the Highway Code, and I know you guys don’t have a pan-States code book yet 
What would annoy me more in the USA is spending hours tracking down a manual rental car, because I seriously hate automatic transmissions. I can use them, I passed my HGV test in one, but I hate them!
Also, I started my new job today. Immediately made friends. This is good
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Good luck, unlikely to happen with a mainstream car/agency. Unless you find someplace that rents exotics (Ferrari, Lambo, etc.), or a Hertz/Ford rent-a-racer, you’re not going to find a stick shift at most Avis/Budget/Dollar/Enterprise/Hertz/National/Thrifty locations.
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All rentals in the US are automatics in my experience so good luck with that.
The thing in LA is that no one ever wants anyone to get in front of them. they all think they are the most important person on the road and everyone else needs to just get out of the way. So they’ll follow closely like that so there’s no room between them and the car in front to squeeze in. Unfortunately when you’re on the 405 during rush hour with 50,000 of your closest friends the scenario you described is very easy to happen.
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Won’t have one ever.
You almost have a pan-State guide to road markings and sign standards… almost…
It wouldn’t be too hard to create a unified driver’s handbook.
Also, the Florida Handbook uses funny words that literally made me laugh when I read it.
It wouldn’t, except it would be illegal. Constitution doesn’t give the federal government to regulate it, therefor, it can’t. Hell, if random states can legalize pot, what chance do they have of forcing them to change driving laws more.
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