So that Facebook and news thing?

A while ago I realized scrolling through the news and Facebook was making me unhappy. So I stopped doing that, mostly. It's been interesting. I haven't visit CNN at all since then, and that feels much better. PostMedia, which is most Canadian newspapers, are a wasteland, and I don't miss them a bit. I'm a fan of The Sprawl, but don't subscribe and I probably should.

Maybe it means I'm behind on stuff, but I don't care. I figure if the news is big enough, or it needs to tell me badly enough, it will find me. Like the closure of the downtown Y. I only found out about it a few days ago, and it was announced about a month ago. These days, before I go anywhere, I check the website to double check opening hours.

I only know about the proposed changes to Calgary development via the "Guidebook" because it's inundating my email. Linda is involved with community development stuff on behalf of our local community association. Let's just say that City Council and the planning department have been a little secretive about the plans to do away with SFH zoning in favour of increased density housing. When asked why, one planner said that they don't consult as much because they weren't getting the results they wanted. Now we have a minor flap where Mayor Nenshi said the Guidebook wasn't statutory, and therefore not a law, was revealed to be not a true statement. It is statutory, and says so on page 4. That he either didn't know that, or misspoke on such an important clause, seems strange for a guy that's been a city planning policy wonk all his life. Lets just say there are lots of upset people.

Facebook kind of comes and goes. I'll usually drop in every day at some point, typically first to a photo group. I recently scored a Milky Way campout event in August that I'm really looking forward to. After that, well, it depends. If something interesting is at the top I might scroll a bit, but almost any combination of too many ads or posts that don't interest me, and I'm done. I've already dropped out of several groups. A message to me there gets forward to my email, so I will see it.

It's been 5 weeks since I last posted on Instagram. I drop in on it daily, mainly because it's in my bookmark of click once open several tabs thingie. It's usually a quick scroll down to where I recognize the photos again, unless there are too many Tik Tok videos, in which case I bail. I don't get Tik Tok, and don't want to. Maybe that makes me a grumpy geezer.

The astute of you will have noticed this has not translated into more blogging. The last several weeks of this work contract have been brutal. I was already doing some testing this morning, hoping that out of 16738 rows of data there would be only a couple issues and the brutality would end. Not. Oops. I made a stupid mapping mistake building the load file. Sigh. I ended up building a load file to delete the ones that shouldn't be loaded, and a file to add some data that hadn't been loaded. Oh, and I'm still cranky about Excel at the best of times. 

There was a suggestion that Linda should put a swear jar in the office. We don't have a container big enough. It reminds me of the time at a work when we had a jar put on the conference table during an all employee meeting, as either a swear jar, or harsh statements, or something. I forget the details, but I do remember one senior manager tossing in a $20 and asking if he got a volume discount.

In other news, daylight saving time rolled around again. At least the clocks are easy to change, adding an hour. Some of them are harder to take away that hour in the fall, having to push a button 11 or 23 times to cycle through the hours.

Some of them are so difficult, like the oven, I need to dig out the manual to read the instructions. Which turned out to be wrong. It doesn't say you have to press a specific button TWICE to get into the mode where you can tweak the time. Life would be ever so much simpler if we picked a time, standard or daylight, and stuck with it. I don't particularly care which. 

Which reminds me of the one time issue we dealt with during this migration. The source database just gave us a date. The target database demands a date and time. The business didn't care what time as long as it was the right day, so we said midnight. Except the target database importing software thinks it's running on GMT. We added 2003-05-15 at midnight, and it came out 2003-05-14 17:00:00. So we had to add 7 hours back in, so the load sheet looked like 2003-05-15 07:00:00, and it would get loaded at 2003-05-15 00:00:00. Except, EXCEPT that darned DST. Next we noticed some of them came out on the wrong day. So then we went back into the extract SQL and added 8 hours. The whole thing makes writing the test scripts a bit tricky. Plus there is all the usual Excel being pissy about dates and times and how they're displayed and how it evaluates if two cells are the same or not. And people wonder why what little hair I have is gray. Grey. Whatever.

It's now Friday evening, and I don't want to think about work till Monday. The big thing is to get all the photo gear ready to go for a photo shoot I'm doing. I'll need to play with a new light to get a grip on what it can do before then. It's a great group that I've done before, and it should be fun. Here's a hint.

I'm pretty sure we're in fake spring here. We have had almost no snow in March, which is somewhat unusual. It's been warm, so I was a bit surprised to see this bit of ice between the back yard patio stones, with the water evaporated out from underneath it. I was on the way out to fire up the barbecue, so while it was warming up I grabbed the camera.

Of the Day

Driftwood

Celina

Serendipity from 2017, with Flower