frisky is an Idiot

June 30th, 2005 rants | | | ##

Im a moron. After spending all day Friday, a few hours on Saturday and about 13 hours on Monday and about 8 hours yesterday trying to fix a stupid banner ad bug on AOL Radio, I had a mini-epiphany this morning in the shower. I should just start living in the shower - thats where I have most of my epiphanies. Anyways - it all made sense in the end. The problem wasnt that hard after all - and I was able to fix this bug in 3 hours… and release it to production and save AOL millions of dollars. Again.

You might ask why I bust my ass so much for The Man. Why I care so much. Youre not the only one - on my way into work this morning (which by the way happens to be from my bed to my den that I call my home office this particular morning) I asked myself the same question. Of course I knew the answer - but I feel that I have to keep validating it in my mind. The answer is that Im quite the perfectionist in everything - and when things go wrong, especially with something that I created I cant deal with it until I fix it.

This is not limited to just work either. The problem wasnt the bug - it was me. I over analyise everything. I always take the most pesimistic road. The fact that I was simply over-engineering the solution and thus creating more problems with this particular problem sums up my life in recent months… When Im in a relationship and things take a tumble - I feel that I have to do something extra and fix it. I hate when things are not hunkie dorie. This tends to be quite a pain in the ass, as I found out the last couple of days.

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1 Papigiulio Jun 30th, 2005 at 11:30 pm

So wheres your million for fixing the prob??? I always have epiphanies when I drink beer
2 frisky? Jun 30th, 2005 at 11:58 pm

Ya I asked them the same thing. I asked them about the supposedly $750,000 a day I saved them last year during another one of these ad revenue production outages - I fixed a bug and released it to production 3 days ahead of schedule - thus saving AOL tons of money… I asked them for a day’s worth of cash. They politely showed me the door. Asswipes.
3 Stephen Donner Jul 5th, 2005 at 9:16 pm

Why is Netscape Radio such a piece of junk right now?

It fails to connect to one of the servers (not an ultravox server, must be some other server?) almost constantly, freezing up the Radio@Netscape application.

I know AOL wants to switch over to AOL Radio, but that won’t happen until at least mid-July, right?
4 frisky? Jul 5th, 2005 at 10:00 pm

Radio@Netscape has always been a piece of shit… They will soon be retiring it… I havent touched that code in over a year - and Im sure even QA has no idea of the bugs you are talking about… Story of AOL - no QA resources = shitty quality…

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A list of medieval occupations. Like this gem:

stewsman - probably a brothel keeper - “since the words stew and stewholder both mean a bawd, I’m guessing that a stewsman would be a brothel-keeper as well. Whether bawdry counts as a criminal activity varies at different times and places.”
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Shit Programmers Say.

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One of the keys to this education is the simple act of learning how to wait. It is why the French babies I meet mostly sleep through the night from two or three months old. Their parents don’t pick them up the second they start crying, allowing the babies to learn how to fall back asleep. It is also why French toddlers will sit happily at a restaurant. Rather than snacking all day like American children, they mostly have to wait until mealtime to eat. (French kids consistently have three meals a day and one snack around 4 p.m.)

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The original “Mona Lisa” hangs in the Louvre but the sitter looks older than her years as the varnish is cracked. The painting is so fragile that restoration or cleaning is deemed too risky. The Prado version, however, will show the sitter as she was: a young woman in her early 20s.

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Jonathan Coulton:

Along with all the illegal stuff happening on MegaUpload was some amount of completely legal stuff. People used MegaUpload to send large files around. Some number of those files were personal files owned by the people sending them. I have no idea what the ratio was, and probably it would be impossible to figure that out with any certainty, but let’s stipulate that it was a very large percentage of illegal activity, and only a very tiny percentage of the users were there for anything other than downloading content that they didn’t buy. Still, today that tiny percentage had something taken away from them, without warning, maybe just a service they liked using, but maybe a piece of digital media that belonged to them - if they uploaded something and didn’t keep a copy, that thing is now gone.

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In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle. But, today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more above average cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra — their unique value contribution that makes them stand out in whatever is their field of employment. Average is over.

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