The Family

I just watched Earth vs. the Spider (1958). It was a terrifying movie about a giant tarantula holed up in a cave just outside of town. What i found most interesting was the way the spider changed size. When it was dead and waiting in the high school for the people at the university to come pick it up to study, it was about twice as tall as a man (they had carried it thru a set of double doors to get it inside) but when it came to life (it had only been stunned!) it broke out and went walking down the street. Then it was taller than 2 story buildings.

The best acting or the best written role has to be the mother of the teenage heroine. Our heroine’s father was killed by the spider and his sucked-dry corpse was recovered. Our heroine is feeling guilty because he had been killed on his way home from buying her a present which she found and then carried into the spider’s lair where she lost it. She was weeping when her calm mother found her and sympathetically agreed that it was a shame that she had lost the bracelet, but told her that she should not feel guilty and should forget the bracelet. Then she reminded her that she did have homework due at school tomorrow. This is the same day their husband and father was killed by a giant spider. Later when her daughter is saved (just barely) from the spider, mom gives her a quick hug and then pullls her handkerchief out of her pocket and cleans the smudge from her daughter’s cheek.

Anyway, it was not “the” spider movie i remember from my childhood. I didn’t think it was, but it was worth a look.

One of the features of our software is the ability to generate documents with information pre-filled on a per-case basis.  Everything from name, address, fees, to… well, whatever we want can be stuffed into a document template and loaded into the system.

Basic documents are easy to do.  The system is build that all you need is a template (mix of text and template-tags for data) and a name for the document to work.  However, we sometimes need to do more fancy things like build document tables on the fly, leave fields open for editing, and make fields available as a drop-down list for the user to choose the option they want when printing.

That last feature is one I built.  Give the code a list of items you want to show up in the selection box and away it goes, happy as can be.

I haven’t really thought about the that bit of code till today, when I was thinking about how to explain things to any new developers.  How did I make that drop down code?   I created a document with a drop down, reverse engineered the generated document, then built code to create a dynamic dropdown.

I didn’t think much of it at the time, but looking back that does sound like a bit of code wizardry.  That’s the sort of thing that I don’t do often but sure do enjoy when I get the chance.

An earth friendly house you might find interesting.

Anyone think Hobbits?

It is funny… usually when we have company I am ready for them to go home after a short while. When they go it feels good to get back in my usual routine. But this morning shortly after I woke I became aware that i felt lonesome. I am sure it is partly because Trip was here for so long that she became part of my daily routine, but it is partly because she is pleasant to have around and she “fits”…. and maybe partly because we were working which gave us something to do and took away the “company” feeling.

I am sure that Bruce misses her. They took a particular liking to each other the first day. Bruce also liked that she went outside to smoke often. I think he found it interesting that she went outside every couple of hours and just sat, ready to pet him and be companionable.

Come to think of it, Carrie showed a marked preference for Bruce too. She enjoyed playing with him. Bruce responds well to her favorite kind of cat play.

The big push to pain the house inside is over. We did not get as much done as i wanted or would have expected for the length of time we worked on it, but i always underestimate how long something like this is going to take. There was more prep work than i expected, partly because Trip did things to the ceiling that i would not have known to do and partly because we kept finding new problems that needed to be dealt with before we could paint.

We finished the living room, finished the ceiling and walls but not the trim in the foyer and dining room and back bathroom, finished the ceiling in the laundry room and hall, and primed the ceiling in the kitchen. The new texture on the ceiling in all these rooms made the ceiling a bigger deal than it would normally be. Some of the rooms had to be textured twice because we did not like the way they did it the first time. Those rooms were particularly hard to do. They do, i suppose look a little heavier textured, though i don’t think it is obvious enough that one would notice unless one was looking for it, but when it comes to putting that first coat, the primer, on, it makes a huge difference.

My goal today, my bare minimum goal, is to move the paint and tools which are now in the dining room to another place so i can vacuum the room. I need to paint the baseboard so i need to pay particular attention to the edges. Then i would like to get the baseboards done. If i have to wait till tomorrow for the window and door trim that will be ok because i can do those later. If the baseboard is done i can more the furniture back and replace the plastic, paint, and tools. They will be living in there for a while longer.

It is going to be slow going but hopefully i will make a little progress each day.

A newish report that I’m sure most everyone has already heard about but I decided to post here just in case it missed someone.  There was some research done on how people reacted to working in spaces with different ceiling heights.   Their findings are, essentially, that working in a lower ceiling area results in higher detail-oriented thinking and working in a higher ceiling area results in higher creative thinking.  Maybe I should say ‘results’ instead of ‘thinking’, as they could only judge based on the solutions to problems instead of watching thoughts.

This makes me wonder about where I work.  The ceilings are /high/.  Our building used to be a mechanic shop; they didn’t put in a drop ceiling, wanting to use all the vertical space for overhead engine hoists and such.  The companies that followed left the roof alone too, so we have a 20+foot high roof.  Does this mean that we come up with creative solutions more often?  Does coming up with creative solutions mean we spend more time thinking about something than we do actually producing code?  I’m not sure, but it is interesting to think about.