The Funny Bug

First, a warning: If you are allergic to math, computers, or generally not a fan of geeky things... Stop reading this now.

Still with me? Okay, so today at work I saw one of the funniest software bugs in my short career. We make a set of map publishing tools, and one of the capabilities of these maps is to store data about each shape or area of the map. So in the course of testing, one of our QA guys discovered a bug in an election map. Basically each state had associated with it some attribute values for what percentage voted for Gore and what percentage voted for Bush. The bug was discovered when someone tried to use our expression engine to create a new attribute column that simply stored the result of adding the two percentages together. This expression looked like "PCTGORE + PCTBUSH". Simple enough, right? Well the engine evaluates expressions you put into it and reports back on any errors. In this case it spat back an error "bad token at position 0", which basically just means that it didn't recognize the "PCTGORE", even though it was a perfectly valid "column".

Half the development team was huddled around the QA guy's computer as we tried to figure out why it doesn't like Gore. It's pretty confounding because if you do "A + B" it works fine. Anyway, long story short, I had a eureka moment when I realized that "GORE" contains "OR" which is one of the permitted operands. We all laughed pretty hard at the initial notion that the computer didn't like Gore. I was given mad props for figuring it out. I felt quite smug and satisfied, and proceeded to tell the guys the story about a GM engineer who was sent to investigate a man's claim that his car wouldn't start if he went to the store to buy vanilla ice cream, but it would start fine if he bought chocolate. You can read that story here.

Girl Of My Dream

Last night in my dream I met someone. It was strange. There are certain things I remember very clearly so I feel like writing them up. The girl was introduced through a faceless friend, and she was a cute dirty blonde. This is where things go off the rails. She had the Starbucks logo on her forehead, and a green/black button somewhere else on her person. After talking for a while and getting the "I want to brew you" vibe from her, I literally pushed her button as a show of affection. I'm not sure if this spinning metal apparatus came out of the top of her head, or the top of her head might have opened up to reveal it, but I was totally dumbfounded 'cause I had no idea what its purpose or meaning was. This morning as I was driving to work I realized the spinning metal thing was the blade of a coffee grinder! So it all fit perfectly in its own self-contained nonsense. I think the dream originates from a Starbucks barista I thought was somewhat cute when I went there a few days ago. It's odd that the stuff you think about super-briefly and then forget ends up being the contents of your dreams. I wish I could will myself to not think about Jessica Alba so she'd make an appearance too. Ah well! Here is a slightly freaky image I made to visualize what I saw in the dream... I hope she doesn't mind me adding a blender to the top of her head, but it'd be really useful in the evolutionary sense.

Brokescent of a Womountain

In preparation for this year's Oscars, I decided I had to see as many of the best picture nomenees as I could. Since Brokeback Mountain is a favourite to win, I decided to download it. Honestly, it was one of the most boring movies I've ever seen in my life. The entire movie's runtime reminded me of the dawn of civilization montage in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The only thing breaking up the monotony is a couple of dudes going at it once in a while and some nice booby shots of Michelle Williams. I didn't think much of it as a love story. The courtship and relationship consists of the two dudes just mostly grunting at each other incoherently. Later on in the movie, there is a sense of anguish at being apart that resonated with me and I think everyone can relate to that aspect of it. But overall when it was over, I wanted my 2 hours back. I also realized that I enjoyed Brokeback To The Future a lot more than the movie it parodied.

I noticed Scent of a Woman was on tonight so I watched it too. Now here is a movie I can see a hundred times and not get bored with. In many ways besides the obvious, it's the opposite of brokeback. If the cowboys living in the middle of buttfuck nowhere had seen Scent, maybe their lives would have turned out differently. Maybe they would have found the strength to hang on to each other longer than the 5.4 seconds Jake Gyllenhaal lasted on a computer generated rodeo bull. Damn, why'd they have to add fakey computer effects to this kind of movie? But I digress.

Favourite quote from Scent of a Woman: "You've been the sugar business for so long, you've forgetten the taste of real honey!"