Younger son’s gf brought her hamsters over for the week while she and the family visit the grandparents stateside.
Did you ever get that sinking, very hungry feeling when you opened the door to the staff fridge and your lunch was gone? Happened to me today. It was easy enough to find the culprit: a colleague who also shops at the local grocery store sometimes and re-uses the same bags. He claimed he was being absent-minded.
This past Sunday we drove to London, rehearsed hymns, Mag and Nunc, responses and an anthem during the afternoon to sing at an Evensong service. A good friend and music director at the church sent out an email invitation and 53 singers showed up. It was hot inside the sanctuary. My wife had only come because I promised we would go somewhere air-conditioned for supper rather than staying for the pot luck.
I sent an email about a ½ hour before quittin' time to a manager about my new site going “live” on my PC at work. He phoned to say that the link didn’t work. I went over to his office and, sure enough, it didn’t. He suggested I try another PC in his area and this time the http access worked fine. I suggested that perhaps there was a configuration problem on his laptop. Instead, he seemed to imply that it is was my problem. I wonder: he his covering up some form of technophobia? I should have sent the email in the morning—I missed my usual evening train.
I have several PostgreSQL tables of readings in a database which all inherit from the same base table so that they all have the same columns. I wanted to define a function to return the maximum value of a particular column from an arbitrary table. The EXECUTE command doesn’t work because it doesn’t “trap” it’s output. After some Googling and reading, I finally came up with the answer using FOR-IN-EXECUTE:
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION get_timestamp(text)
RETURNS "timestamp" AS
$BODY$DECLARE
max_ts timestamp ;
rec record ;
BEGIN
FOR rec IN EXECUTE 'SELECT max(reading_stamp) as mx FROM ' || quote_ident($1) LOOP
max_ts := rec.mx ;
END LOOP ;
RETURN max_ts;
END ;$BODY$
LANGUAGE 'plpgsql' VOLATILE;
My older son dropped in with his darling girlfriend. Our dogs had a great time playing in the backyard. Later I actually had supper and conversation with my younger son. That, to me, is good father’s day. I remember my first father’s day. Back in 1981 I had to leave early Sunday morning for a field trip. I got a “Number 1 Dad” T-shirt and, since I was working at a thermal generating station, I could wear it that day.
Since my father left when I was 13, I don’t have memories of a Father’s Day with my dad. I haven’t heard from him in several months though I did send him a card recently for his 74th birthday.
I spent part of the day planting the second of two serviceberry bushes my older son brought yesterday evening. I took advantage of the long evening twilight and planted the first last night.
I run some Perl scripts from the Windows Scheduled Tasks control panel applet. I have always had the cmd window pop up while the script is running which can be quite annoying. Today I found how to suppress or at least minimize the window by adding the start command:
cmd /c start "My Task" /min c:\Perl\bin\Perl.exe c:\scripts\myperlscript.pl arg1 arg2
Now the cmd window appears very briefly and the perl process gets minimized to the task bar.
A group of us have finished up the first annual(?) Health and Safety Audit at work. Generally the people we interviewed know the company has a policy and that the documents are on the Intranet. It seems the only ones who actually what’s in the policy and related documents are those like me who had to look up the “real” answers to the interview questions and others who had recently been involved in “incident” investigations. The rest know just bits and pieces from emails, hearsay, colleague chatter, etc. The Safety Manager has his work cut out for him to bring the company into “compliance.”
I snapped a couple of shots of Mount Laundry in younger son’s room. How can you tell the cleaning person visited today?
In the “I don’t why I didn’t do this years ago” department, I installed a ceiling fan in the kitchen. Cool! Unlike the second floor fans I didn’t have to remove the existing junction box or worry about a vapour barrier. And this time I had an electronic stud finder to locate the joist. I still haven’t had to use any of those weights to “balance” any of the fans (more than a half dozen now) I’ve installed. Since I installed the fans I have been able to turn up the thermostat 1 C°.
I can see my workbench and table saw tops again. All that clutter was driving me nuts.
I made a copy of a Perl module I’m developing so I could make it faster and test it thoroughly before I merged it with the production code. Today I merged the production and new and improved modules and discovered one tiny change I made for testing and sorting convenience: $hash{key_a}{ke_yb} to $hash{key_b}{key_a} would seriously “break” the main calling program. Fortunately I had checked in my old versions as I went so I could restore the previously working versions of the calling program and production module. It’s kind of depressing to do this on a Friday afternoon, though — especially since I’ll be tied up doing Health and Safety auditing next week.
I see that Chiang Mai, Thailand where my brother teaches, has about the same temperatures, low 20’s to high 30+, as we do.
I needed to convert a timestamp (seconds, minutes, hours, day, month, last 2 digits of the year) into a BCD string of bytes. Here’s the Perl sub I came up with to do that:
sub bcd_timestamp_string (@) {
# Convert given time or local time to BCD bytes
my @time = @_ ;
join('', map {
pack('H*',sprintf('%02d',$_))
} @time) ;
}
My very first board meeting as choir manager and recording secretary was cancelled this morning: several members couldn’t make it at the last minute. For me, it meant I could walk the dog, do some weeding and have a couple of beers this evening to help survive this spring hot spell. Another board member wasn’t amused: he was already on his way to Toronto, he had hired a babysitter for tonight though he did have several other meetings arranged for during the day.
I asked our company if they have a policy on community evening bored meetings at my work place. The parking would be free and the place is not too far from the QEW.
Though I slept OK and didn’t go to bed too late last night I was falling asleep at my desk this afternoon and also on the GO train home. I figure it was the smog alert today. It’s like being in a small room with too many people and a boring meeting/speaker. The body just has to fall asleep to compensate: that’s what I’ll tell my boss, anyway. It could be worse.
I have finally finished pruning the maple in the hope that it will recover from bark splits that occured a few years ago. If not, then I guess I have started the “taking down the tree” process. We’ll see next spring.
Finnegan had his first trim this week. I include a before picture a couple of weeks ago and the “day of” image. Witness the transformation from bear cub to dog.
The back garden looks particularly nice now with lots of self-seeded columbine in several colours together with iris and early daylily I transplanted from when my in-laws sold their vacation place in Bobcaygeon.
I also trimmed more branches from the maple tree. My goal is to remove a couple more of the large lower limbs and then see if this improves the tree’s vigour over the season and next year. Today I learned that if I can it is better to use the pole saw to trim off the very high branches. They rotate 90° and fall leafy parts straight down and “bouncing.” A chain saw cuts “too” fast so that the limb doesn’t rotate much and it falls heavily “log first” over a larger area.
Our company (well at least the four of us anyway) fielded one team to enter the YMCA Corporate Challenge. The stats are out. Our team came in 127 of 478 teams and 24 of 95 in our class (open - 1F, 3M). We made the first page of stats with a time of 1:38:25.4 and averaged 24:37 per 5km leg. I thought I had run slower than a couple of years ago but I heard that course layout was less than 5km. The beer and pizza at the end tasted great.