Well, at least I was exhausted this afternoon. I have since recovered.

It’s a file format prodject. We do these ALL THE TIME! I am a SPECIAL MASTER [snort] at file format prodjects and so are the others on my team. We had to deal with outside folks today. I hardly ever do that but they want a custom file and we spent like a month trying to dredge details out of them. Like is this field’s static value “A” or “B”? Because you have sent us conflicting specifications.

And then there’s the whole fixed format thing. If you want to send sample records for a fixed format file, PUT THEM IN A MONOSPACE FONT! Please. Otherwise there’s no way to tell which column each character is in. Especially if you send a PICTURE, and not a file. If it’s a file (word or .txt or whatever), I can CHANGE the font to something monospace… … …

Sorry. After that plus some afternoon heat, I was having trouble keeping my eyes open. It’s okay. I didn’t get much productive work done this afternoon but despite the sleepiness, my brain was in background gear and Tuesday morning I will knock it all out choppity chop.

I was a bit astounded when I heard a story on NPR this week about how some misguided companies were trying to track white collar and professional folks’ productivity by their keyboard activity. No no no no no… We are coders and writers but we are also THINKERS. Sometimes what looks like downtime to an outsider (feet up on the desk or doing word puzzles or whatever) is active brain work. When I used to do my Zen Commute I can’t COUNT how many times I would leave Cubelandia struggling with something and the answer would surface as soon as I turned left onto South State.

Last I heard, the covid numbers from the high school reunion I didn’t attend had reached 11. That’s approaching 10%. The problem is not so much the numbers from the reunion though. It’s how many other folks the people infected at the reunion will spread it to. Not that we truly know if all of the 11 were actually infected AT the reunion. covid is a trickster. Mask up please.

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