Tuesday, July 28, 2020
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
Thursday, April 30, 2020
Programming unlocked
I remember that I have promised several times to continue my discussion slash literary review of HP Lovecraft and CS Lewis, and of course I have not done that yet because I haven’t performed the crucial and required re-reading of the Space Trilogy by Lewis and some selected stories by Lovecraft.
In the meantime and before I launch my own comic book version of Lewis’s Perelandra, I’ll take a minute to discuss computer programming or “coding” as the kids and cooler old people call it. I’ve been learning this computer programming thing for a few years now, and I’ve made some stunning progress, specifically I have already created my own future calculator. Not a Future Value Calculator, a Future Calculator.
In the How To Program books they usually show you, in one of the early chapters, how to write a Future Value Calculator that will calculate interest on a loan. They probably figure that anyone who is going to learn computer programming will most likely be getting a sweet job and buying a huge house very soon and will most def need to figure out what kind of huge mortgage payment they’ll have to fork over each month to live in that huge house.
That didn’t really pertain to me so I kind of lost interest in the Future Value Calculator and instead I thought, “I’d much rather determine the actual future than just the future amount of some sleazy loan. “ Then I tossed the programming book into the trash and began to devise an electronic tarot card reading program and fished the programming book out of the trash and slowly over the course of months and indescribable frustration I created Hagentarot, a tarot card reading that will predict your future (within a reasonable percentage of accuracy) using nothing but JavaScript, which is a programming language for web pages, specifically for images and buttons. Please take a moment to experience Hagentarot now. The reading does not take long and it will change your life.
In which case the reading wouldn’t be very accurate, would it? I may do a version 2.0 where it doesn’t change your life so much that it affects the accuracy of the reading, that’s a tricky one.
I had a sort of a vision when I began the project, of what the tarot reading would look like and how it would work. Needless to say that beautiful vision did not quite make it into reality. Computers are cruel and uncooperative, but as you age you become inured to failure and disappointment, resigned to defeat. You don’t cry when the candy gets snatched away. You just move on patiently to the next bright wrapper, living for the brief spark of residual hope you feel when you gaze upon the bright colored crinkliness.
Obviously, since we’re talking about web pages, I also learned some HTML and CSS along the way. Even as a 50 year old who fondly remembers the Atari 2600 Superman game, I didn’t have much trouble with HTML.
But then I had to learn about CSS, which is the code for the appearance of the web page. I say “learn about” because after months of effort, patiently typing in values in “em” and “%” for “padding” and “margin-left”, and seeing the results, or more often than not with CSS, seeing no result at all, I came to the conclusion that CSS just doesn’t really work, that I knew CSS fairly well and that while it can perform some amusing tricks, it’s in beta testing still, not something a professional would ever rely on without the mediation of special patch code kept in secret files in Iceland by the Swedish guy who invented the Internet. But then I saw this website, CSS Lace, where someone created a painting out of CSS. It only works if you view it in Chrome.
If you’ve never heard of CSS or tried to learn it, you wouldn’t even look twice at this image. It would be another flash of colors that you swipe by on the interwebs without a thought.
But if you’ve tried to learn CSS, and you find out it they used CSS to make it, you will know it as satanic wizardry. Something inside me went pop when I saw it, and I knew that I might learn about CSS, but I would never know it.
Friday, April 10, 2020
Monday, March 23, 2020
Wednesday, March 11, 2020
Wednesday, March 4, 2020
Hi I’m John, I work in Quality Assurance
I recently posted something about unpleasant careers, which reminds me that for the past decade or so, even reaching back into the time before IPhones, I’ve worked in Pharmaceutical Manufacturing, in Quality Assurance. Why Quality Assurance? Why Pharmaceuticals? Entirely by accident, of course. I was working temporary jobs, which I rather enjoyed actually, and had an assignment to go work at a pharmaceutical plant, and eventually got a permanent job there. It could easily have gone the other way, if I hadn’t gotten that particular job I would probably have moved to other assignments and maybe stumbled into some other career, and I’m betting that if I hadn’t gotten a push from a Manager there who happened to view me with second hand approval (I was a friend of their star employee), the position would have gone to someone else more deserving. But here I am, working in a heavily-regulated, science based industry where management prefers humanities degrees with a minimum of two years Creative Writing experience. Haha! Gotcha! They’re actually pretty easy-going about the creative writing experience.
And yes, I do some writing for this job, mostly emails of one sentence or less - and they are spell-binding, I assure you! I mock myself, but I would love to teach a college course in emails, procedures, and investigations; the only reading and writing I’ve done in pharmaceuticals, and they probably comprise over 90% of the professional reading and writing performed by English majors in the pharmaceutical industry and possibly anywhere. Humanities Professors would probably prefer to completely ignore the existence of this kind of English, but I can’t think of a better way to gain appreciation for “literature” as we call it, the English designed to tell a story, than to study it alongside the everyday English, the English that organization people use to avoid telling any story at all. I would call it “camouflage writing”. It’s actually a lesser form of fiction, meant to bore and repel rather than enchant and distract. You may write it to hide your lack of knowledge on a subject, or to avoid telling people all you know about the subject to safeguard your job, or like the greater part of working people you may have never really learned to write except in the organization where everyone writes in camouflage and you don’t actually know how to write in any other way.
And of course, in a regulated industry, the regulating authority will read your procedures and your investigations. Maybe they will read them in front of your managers. Maybe their eyes will glaze, and they will stifle a yawn, and the managers will sign you a thumbs up, and offer them a blanket and a pillow.
People ask me; “What is Quality Assurance? What do you do exactly?” And I answer...
Gotcha again! Nobody has ever asked, literally ever, in all the years I’ve told people that I work in Quality Assurance. Not only have they not asked what it is, they usually stop asking me anything, as if my answer was so awful, so surprising in a very bad way, that they don’t dare ask anything more, as I might construe the slightest hint of interest on their part as a signal to vomit forth every nasty dribble of information on quality assurance that I’ve been holding in all these years and they so do not want to hear about it that they are conversationally frozen with fear.
I completely understand, of course. The name “quality assurance” was devised by the same people who devised standard operating procedures and please believe me when I say that they are not interested in being interesting. See notes on camouflage writing above.
And yes, I do some writing for this job, mostly emails of one sentence or less - and they are spell-binding, I assure you! I mock myself, but I would love to teach a college course in emails, procedures, and investigations; the only reading and writing I’ve done in pharmaceuticals, and they probably comprise over 90% of the professional reading and writing performed by English majors in the pharmaceutical industry and possibly anywhere. Humanities Professors would probably prefer to completely ignore the existence of this kind of English, but I can’t think of a better way to gain appreciation for “literature” as we call it, the English designed to tell a story, than to study it alongside the everyday English, the English that organization people use to avoid telling any story at all. I would call it “camouflage writing”. It’s actually a lesser form of fiction, meant to bore and repel rather than enchant and distract. You may write it to hide your lack of knowledge on a subject, or to avoid telling people all you know about the subject to safeguard your job, or like the greater part of working people you may have never really learned to write except in the organization where everyone writes in camouflage and you don’t actually know how to write in any other way.
And of course, in a regulated industry, the regulating authority will read your procedures and your investigations. Maybe they will read them in front of your managers. Maybe their eyes will glaze, and they will stifle a yawn, and the managers will sign you a thumbs up, and offer them a blanket and a pillow.
People ask me; “What is Quality Assurance? What do you do exactly?” And I answer...
Gotcha again! Nobody has ever asked, literally ever, in all the years I’ve told people that I work in Quality Assurance. Not only have they not asked what it is, they usually stop asking me anything, as if my answer was so awful, so surprising in a very bad way, that they don’t dare ask anything more, as I might construe the slightest hint of interest on their part as a signal to vomit forth every nasty dribble of information on quality assurance that I’ve been holding in all these years and they so do not want to hear about it that they are conversationally frozen with fear.
I completely understand, of course. The name “quality assurance” was devised by the same people who devised standard operating procedures and please believe me when I say that they are not interested in being interesting. See notes on camouflage writing above.
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