You know what I've spent a couple weeks at, at work, dealing with? An annoying error in geographic information services that I finally tracked down to the problem of one GIS provider giving the Feature ID, an index of the things that are on a GIS layer, a number that starts counting from zero, and another source that figures the number and starts counting from one. As far as I can tell there is absolutely no way to make either source see things the other source's way.
On the one hand, I love the sense of triumph in tracking down a mysterious and newly-appearing bug, and I'm very glad that it wasn't my first suspicion, which was that in the two or maybe three projections of the Earth's surface involved in the project one of them was just different enough to be causing the trouble. On the other hand, the answer proved to be such a boring one. Where's the justice in that?
Meanwhile: my humor blog. You've been reading it directly, or by RSS feed, or by Livejournal Syndicate construct, right? If not, then, here's the stuff it's had the last week:
- My Appropriately-Sized Rhode Island Terror, my major piece for this week, about the ridiculous extent I went to in preparing ...
- Statistics Saturday: The Size of Rhode Island in terms of Football Fields, last week's statistics post and just what it describes.
- The Mid-Winter Fashion was last week's major piece, about how I dress, and why
bunny_hugger sighs and shakes her head when she sees I dressed myself.
- Popeye: Close Encounters of the Third Spinach, from the late-70s run of cartoons and featuring Popeye parodying exactly the science fiction film you'd imagine given that title.
- Math Comics, and the Tree’s End, pointing to the mathematics blog and featuring a picture of our pet rabbit eating a Christmas tree.
- Why This Has Been Such A Happy Day, describing how my day really and truly was made great by people correcting me.
- National Cheese, Penguins: did you know it was National Cheese day? Or Penguin Awareness Day? Now I do too.
- An Impostor’s Dream, which can't possibly be my subconscious dealing with anxieties about work because everybody in my generation thinks they have a job they're not nearly qualified to have.
Trivia: The Wright Brothers's Flyer models of 1907 allowed for the pilot to ride in a seat, rather than lie prone as those of 1903 and 1905 did. Source: First Flight: The Wright Brothers and the Invention of the Airplane, T A Jeppenheimer.
Currently Reading: A Brief Guide To Oz: 75 Years Going Over The Rainbow, Paul Simpson.