20-V-2008.
Serious thunderstorm in the afternoon, with lots of rain and even marble sized hail. Luckily, this one ends before Nina returns from work, unlike those tornados a month ago, when she just squeezed between, and even reported easier ride than usual.
Norman messed with something financial in Feds. I feel lucky to have no connection with that, the accounting rules here make no sense to me, not fit into my head. The dual that we have is mother Mara, symmetrical clear and has just two columns, and a very clear set of rules. This... there are things they routinely do, which would get any accountant at home straight behind bars.
In the afternoon, tech call, with George, Hana, David, Jan, Suez, Ben, me, Norman. From 14:00:04 until 19:08, about CAAR. First dozen minutes George and I chatted something on the side, voice only and there's no way to record it. Any random Joe with a peebyex can call you and record, but to make recording of your own calls, not can do.
Or was that meeting yesterday... the times are wired with hay, that's not 15:04, it says 3:04 in the table, which could have been 9:04, and this with George at 3:09... or who knows when. Six to eight hours this or that way. Nevertheless, the meeting was 14 to 19, which is quite long, and I wonder why did we type so much, didn't we all have mikes and headphones already? Or was it that the conversation went through GoToMeeting and we typed in parallel while that lasted.
14:03:37 Hana: Okay, if you can host if you like :) I just have two current investigations right now; Gradivoj says he's covered the rest of the bugs in version "o."
14:14:40 George: If you are sharing a desktop then we could transition that to serve the tech call at 9:30 or later if your meeting runs long... otherwise, no problem, I'll host the tech call desktop.
14:16:17 Jan: why do you need to share my desktop ?
14:17:01 George: To avoid creating two separate go-to-meeting sessions and also to allow the CAAR meeting to run long if need be. Nevermind.
14:17:32 Jan: ah... I'm not using gotomeeting at the moment
15:38:28 Ben: Suez, you've been designated as the person to populate the "City/Town" list in the "Adelaide IVF" (which is really the base database so ignore the "Adelaide" part). How would you plan on doing that for the base database? Leave it all blank and when we get to the regional Databases they will be populated with the specific cities or put in make believe cities?
15:41:34 George: As an aside, I wonder if the demo and sample databases shouldn't be worldly, with clients from universally well-known places like Hollywood, Paris, Milan, and Acapulco. Arguably this is much cheaper to maintain with little if any loss in familiarity for the prospective users, users in training, or tire-kickers.
15:44:18 Ben: Good idea, however, they get a bit cranky when they see things like that. Norwood has indicated a few times in my tenure here that they are not happy that the product is taking on an "American" feel to it. ie. they puff out their chests (everybody does I mean) and feel they do IVF the best. So for a UK client to see US cities, although not sounding like a huge deal to us, may put a crinkle in their noses. I agree with you, only because it would make our jobs easier, but I've not been doing this long enough to know the ramifications of what you're suggesting. I would "Assume" none to very very little, but I can't say for sure.
15:46:18 David: Just quick aside...As we have the list of all American Cities (not sure whether we ever enabled that..) I'd be happy to get the list of all Australian Cities...they are pretty cheap lists (could do so for UK too)...if we can maintain them seamlessly...I don't know
And this is where the whole discussion went to the issue whether we need a table with all possible cities. Because Amers give no fuck for the rest of the world, Canadians are bitching about having all of them american cities, the Brits and Belgians want to see their own and will not see the american, and what will the Ozzies think is to be seen. George claims that the whole zipcode game is just programmers' gold plating, which in his parlance means a feature that nobody needs, nobody even asked for, but a programmer thought it'd be a killer feature. In this case it would even become expensive, because there's a dozen countries to be covered, and maintained, as the data are prone to change - in the US it's a common occurrence that the post office decides that some city has grown enough and needs to be split into more codes. On the other side, in countries where this is neatly ordered (e.g. Belgium, Germany, SFRY) it was actually necessary and the maintenance is null, there was never a change, and this helps avoid various typing errors (I didn't recount the 22-V-1987. but it was vivid in my mind). In this case, however, we'd look good if we had regional tables - canadian, american, british, australian, but not irish, as they never introduced postal codes completely, only partially, in some places, to some extent.
And this is not the first discussion on this subject, and even now I said „the zipcode stuff was practically ready long ago, it just stayed stranded in the old 2b30 directory.“.
Near the end, Nick was mentioned, something about the need to show the full name of the patient plus something more, now whether it was in a form or some report, about questionnaires somewhere. And Jiang is back and taking reins again, Jan is screwed when she starts demanding things to be done.
The CAAR chat was just as long, with just Ben, Hana, Norman and me present on it. How did they get it so tangled... not to mention the descriptions of conditions with double negations („content of this field need not be ’not done‘ when the field ... does not contain a ’yes‘“...). And then I did a provisory build for some canadian clinic.
On UA the old Craig McCabe asked about Pythagora's numbers, i.e. rectangular triangles with natural number sized sides, so I gave him a solution, in eskewelle, message 1317804, where I wrung a lot of sweat from zmajček's processor, running it to a hypothenuse of 32767, which it never reached. I cut it down to 800, got 680 solutions and a 2,1G of temp file. Should have cut it shorter, to first 800 primes, because 3-4-5 and 33-44-55 are the same solution, it's a triangle of same such angles.
In the patio, paving goes on. Despite the basest of tools - a beam from the old storm door's frame as a ruler, brick itself as a tamper, and a simple flowerpot shovel - it went smoothly and I liked the result, specially considering that we managed to find the just right shade of it, matching the color of the same paving in the middle, which was already there. While I prefer to have some soil and greenery, rather than concrete, in this case the attempts to grow anything were proven futile, the neighbor's tree would spread its roots everywhere. So at least we'd have enough space to sit.
Mentions: 22-V-1987., CAAR, David Berton, Feds, George Whiteley, Gradivoj Sredljević, Hana Burberry, Jan Brenkelen, Jiang Wong, Nevena Sredljević (Nina), Nick Scage, Norman Shen, Suez Lima, UbiquAgora (UA), zmajček, in serbian
6-VII-2008 - 30-VI-2024