This is stupid tripe. Your life will be richer if you DON'T read this dreck.
I
should post this in "meaningless drivel" but it is related to this site and i kinda like the idea that the content of MD is actually more substantial.
A few days ago Jocelyn set up a date on my calendar so we could record a new podcast. In fact, she set up every thursday for that. Unfortunately, she had an ugly headache, so we skipped the first week.
In the meantime ...
paypal is changing stuff. It used to be that every transaction came with an email that included all the info. I would reply, cc the relevant folks and say something like "order received!" Only paypal is "improving" things. So now, when I reply, it goes to
service@paypal.com - I thought, I guess paypal will forward it to this person and paypal will keep a record of the conversation. Fair nuff. But, no, service@paypal has an autoresponder that just says "don't send email here". So then I have to go fish the person's email address out of the email sent and so some copy and paste action. A hassle - especially if I am trying to process stuff over my phone. This started about a week ago. Not all the time - about one time out of four.
Yesterday came the first email where the person's email address was not in the email from paypal. In fact, there were three like that. So I called paypal to complain. It took a while to get to somebody that could understand what I was talking about. I explained that with the old way, I would just reply, cc somebody and type "order received" and get on with my day. Now, I have to click on "transaction details", type in my password (extra tough over a phone), wait for the advertisement to load, skip past the advertisement which would leave me at the "dashboard" (not at the transaction) and then search for the proper transaction, click on that, then search through the transaction data for the email address. Copy, switch back to email, paste, etc.
You might think that once you log in on a desktop computer, re-clicking on the transaction details link would take you directly to the transaction, but it doesn't. It takes you to the summary screen.
This morning, I got another one of these emails. Only this time when I log into paypal and wander through the maze to get the transaction details, there is no email address. Nor shipping address. I have no way of contacting the person that sent me money.
I'm not sure, but I think this is all part of how paypal wants to get 3% of the transaction even if a person has money in their paypal account and there are no credit
cards involved. If a person sends money and paypal doesn't take a cut, they call that "friends and family". So I think they are trying to say "you already know their email address and their shipping address." And if you want to do a transaction where the email address and shipping address are sent, then they want to harvest that sweet 3%. I'm not sure, but I think that is what they are doing.
The key is that all of this education takes time. And phone calls. And this is all stuff that I don't want to learn about - I have other things I want to spend my time on.
... another part of the day was spent on trying to solve email problems for richsoil, permies, javaranch and coderanch. Fortunately, several other people are hip deep in trying to solve that. At the same time, I still need to be involved - and again, this is all something that I don't want to be involved in. It seems like this stuff should just work, but noooooo, things are getting freaky complicated with email these days.
Apparently, several people think that my email address is the place to send their google requests. Or rather than posting content to permies, they want me to post it for them.
Then there are people that appear to be hostile fountains of disinformation.
I got an email yesterday asking me if I wouldn't mind driving four hours to come be on a tiny town radio show.
16 emails from yesterday I still have not opened and processed. Each one has a fair bit of work behind it, and today's emails are already pouring in.
Silly stuff. It just keeps pouring in ... the decent thing to do is take the time to do the good and right and decent thing for every email.
Around October 6th, I had caught up on all emails for october. A great feeling. Yesterday I got the point where all of the october unprocessed emails was about 40 - an achievable gob.
drivel .... drivel .... drivel ....
here was something that made me glow for a few days. The jforum software had a bug. Devaka spent lots of time trying to fix it. He said that the sql had gotten too complex, we should undo some features. I said, it has been a long time since I've done any coding, but I always felt that a lot of really good software engineers put way too much business logic into sql. sql should be for storing and retrieving data only. Business logic should be in java .... object oriented. And once you have good clean OO java, then these sorts of features are easy to introduce and easy to change. The whole
project becomes simpler and malleable.
A few days later Devaka wrote:
On permies, best topics are now showing up in all of their forums. The cache stuff seems to be running well too.
I replied:
A few days later ...
So ... you were facing a daunting task ... i suggested moving away
from logic in the SQL and toward OO. I get the impression that you
embraced my advice. I painted a picture where the logic would become
very simple - and it would be much easier than trying to do it with
SQL.
Was I right?
Yeah, right And even more - the new structure gives us the liberty to do a lot of 'personalization' stuff to the best topics algorithm without having to worry about the performance issues. I foresee this would help us a lot in some future tasks related to best topics.
So... while I have not done any coding for a long time... I think you are saying that my general advice on coding still has at least a little value?
If I were given the chance to 'should' on you just once, what I'd say is you should get back to software engineering! .
Granted, some of your suggestions on coding might not be what some people would consider as the 'best', but after all, your suggestions work out much better for getting stuff done much quicker and neater! There were many events where I hated the 'best', and then realized you have the same mindset as me
That warmed for a couple of weeks.
When I was actively doing software engineering, I thought that nearly everything labeled as "best practice" was awful.
A few days later, I shared this with Andrew (who runs coderanch) and he said something awesome like this.
Jocelyn spoils me rotten. Maybe I really have nothing to whine about at all as long as I am so thoroughly spoiled. As and added bonus, I think Julia Winter set her up with an audio book series that I got hooked on. So Jocelyn uses this audiobook to spoil me further.
Yeah ... now that I think about it ... all of these silly things that I'm whining about are pretty trivial when I take into account how much I am spoiled.
2
