Such lovely weather for early March

Today is a lovely January morning - if it was January, and I was waking up to this in Victoria. Yesterday's rain turned to snow late in the day and we awoke to fresh accumulations this morning. Snow is not unheard of this late in the season - heck, it snowed on us up at Riding Mountain park on Canada Day a few years ago. It's just ... fuck.

I am getting rotated onto Primary support this week, starting tonight. I chatted briefly with the guy who is coming off his stint on primary (though we are going to meet for longer this morning so that he can fill me in on more detail) but so far he says it is much better than it was. For the most part it just involves getting up at 4:45 to babysit a couple of systems, and then handle emails and phone calls from clueless idiots.

The last time I was on primary support we had all kinds of system meltdowns, and people screaming at me for things I was not qualified to handle. It was fun in a way that is absolutely not fun at all. It was the kind of experience that I will look back on later, laugh nervously and change the subject.

Speaking of work, somebody left a bunch of these in the cafeteria on Tuesday.


I am not normally a fan of flavoured coffees, but I am a sucker for free stuff. I grabbed one of them and made it later in the afternoon. It was ok - as flavoured coffees go. I appreciate them a lot more when the coffee is meant to be flavoured, and I am not just inheriting some left over flavour oils from whoever made a coffee before me.

Many years back, when I was still working in our yard office, I used to take my coffee maker and grinder in to work on the night shift so that we could have good coffee. This worked well for weeks, until I wandered into the break room just in time to catch some yutz running a batch of Almond Shitbark - or whatever his flavoured coffee was called - through the grinder. I was so pissed at him I came darned near close to breaking all of his fingers. I didn't break any of them, but breaking fingers is like eating potato chips; hard to stop once you get started.

I took apart the grinder and cleaned all of the parts that I could, but the oils from his coffee coated everything, and it was weeks before we finally couldn't taste hints of shitbark in our coffee. He couldn't understand why everyone on night shift was pissed at him, even when I explained it. "Have you never wondered why coffee shops always have a separate grinder for their flavoured coffees?"

It was an honest mistake, and it showed just how little of those raunchy flavoured oils it takes to ruin a pot of otherwise good brew.

This was the same guy who would use a single scoop of coffee to make a pot that usually needed three scoops. He would make it stronger if it was flavoured, but if it was regular coffee then he would complain if it was any darker than burnt umber when you held it up to the light. His typical modus operandi was to pour half a cup, complain about how strong it was, and then top up the rest of the way with hot water. It occurred me much later that he probably didn't like coffee, and he preferred the flavours because they masked the taste. I wish I could project my brain back to my past self, so that I could stand there sipping my coffee while he complained about how strong it was, and added enough water to make it, well, water. "Tell us the truth, D. You don't really like coffee, do you?"

So, about this project...

I've had a regulatory report/tool running on a computer sitting under my desk since sometime back in 2006, and over the years we have made a number of aborted attempts to move it to a supported platform.

We have come close a few times, only to lose funding, lose the programmers to another project, or get the rug pulled out from under us at the last second by our own architects making up new rules on the spot and tripling our expected costs.

This latest round round is coming at the directive of one of our vice presidents, and he has an impressive list of other names next to his on the sponsorship list, so for a change IT is taking this project seriously. I spent a couple of hours on the phone last week with a BA and a developer, giving them an outline of what the report is, and what the interactive user components do. I offered a couple of suggestions for where the new platform could reside, and they agreed that they were both good candidates.

At the start of this week, the BA called me and asked if I was OK with them removing the interactive portions of the job and just sitting it on top of our Enterprise Data Warehouse. I informed him rather tersely that I was just the subject matter expert, and the guy who wrote the original report and UI, but that I was not even close to being authorized to make that kind of call.

Today we had another meeting with the IT project manager, and I again voiced my concerns about the proposed solution. I said, "If we just pile it on top of the EDW, then there is little point in turning this into a project, since my report already feeds from the EDW." I know what they are doing, and it pisses me off. They have realized that this thing is a slightly larger scope than they had anticipated, so they are looking for the cheapest, easiest solution. They are convinced that they can examine the reasons why the end users employed the editing UI to remove items from the report and automate that process at the table level.

What will happen is that they will produce a replacement report that comes nowhere near addressing the needs of the business, and they will turn to --- guess who --- to build a new desktop report with a UI that lets the end users edit the data into a form that has any value to them.

A few minutes ago I sent them a detailed spreadsheet with a couple thousand counts and details from my audit files, outlining the reason codes entered by the users for modifying the report output. ~50% of the edit reasons were for the free-form reason "Other - specify reasons." I had argued against including that reason code at all back in 2006 because I knew that it would get abused, but I was overruled by more knowledgeable people.

If only they could see my trollish grin as I mailed them this file and pictured them pouring through hundreds of free-form fields, trying to find patterns that they could automate in the tables. I wish them luck, because I want this thing off my desktop. Now.