jumpingfish › version 3.0

Screaming Wrens

Mon, 16 May 2016, 07:40 PM (-06:00)

You might have heard a Wren complain, chattering and scolding, shouting at you to get away. They do that sometimes when we get too close to their house in the backyard. There’s no mistaking their instructions.

Go, go, go away! Go away, you! Get out! Get out! Get out!

Yesterday afternoon, there was a disturbance of some kind in our front yard. A great noise was coming from the Monterey Oak, and the racket was deafening. It was Wrens — perhaps a dozen of them chattering and scolding and hopping angrily from branch to branch.

I stood there looking up, trying to find the source of their concern, expecting to find a cat slinking through the Salvias and Sunflowers, but there was no cat to be seen.

“Where’s the snake?” Trudy asked as she walked up behind me, having herself heard the ruckus from inside the house.

We walked closer to the tree, expecting to find a rat snake slithering in the branches, but there was no snake to be seen, either.

And then I saw it — the cause of the commotion. Sitting motionless on a branch about fifteen feet off the ground was an Eastern Screech Owl. It blended (almost) perfectly with the gray-brown of the oak tree’s trunk, staring toward the neighbors’ Live Oaks, evidently unfazed by the Wren racket around it.

We sat on the bench. The Wrens began to quiet down. And then they started screaming again.

I stood up. The Owl was gone. Except the Wrens were still up there as loud as ever. So I looked harder.

And there… there perched on a branch that extended horizontally from the trunk and took a sharp turn vertically upwards… there was the Owl. And that poor Owl, I kid you not, was leaning against that vertical turn of the branch, as if the screaming and scolding of the Wrens had worn it out. A dozen scolding Wrens — who could blame the Owl for needing a little rest?

Worms

Sun, 15 May 2016, 07:32 PM (-06:00)

When watching me work in the yard a long time ago, one of the three sisties said to me, “It’s a good thing you don’t do this for a living.” She had noticed my slow, inefficient way of doing things and correctly observed that they wouldn’t scale well if I charged for the work. Of course, my time in the garden isn’t a money-making venture. It’s an escape from the daily keyboard and monitor. I am content with the dirt under my fingernails, even if it comes only slowly.

That having been said, there are tasks I dread. And for these, I concede that I need to learn to work efficiently so that I can dilly-dally in the fun stuff. Improving clay soil is one such dreary task.

I can attest that there is no joy in thudding a shovel into clay, in struggling to scrape gunk off the blade, in breaking up sticky clods or in trying to mix good stuff in. Yet the formerly rich topsoil of the garden bed outside our kitchen window has been diluted with big clods of brown and red clay (as the result of the deep holes we dug for the new grounding plates), so the soil there needs improving. I confess, I have no interest in applying my inefficient approach to that task.

However… I have been trying to create a rain garden to capture the (usually rare) rain that runs down our driveway and pours off our roof. And as I have been digging, I have found earthworms by the handful. I spent more than an hour digging today, and as I dug, I collected the worms and dispersed them on the mulch outside the kitchen window. Handsful of them, many handsful. At the end of my otherwise inefficient labor, I must have distributed one hundred worms. And with each toss, I could see that the previous batch had already burrowed down into the mulch, no longer visible on the surface.

Somewhere down there under that mulch, my army of worms is even now at work breaking up the clods and aerating the gunk and pulling organic matter down into the soil — doing the dreary work for me. The paradigm of efficiency.

The sisties would be proud.

Two Days In A Row

Fri, 13 May 2016, 10:48 PM (-06:00)

1. Thursday

We had tested the logic. We made some changes and tested again. And when we deployed into production, we tested again, pushing a few small datasets thru the route to make sure that everything worked as expected, which it did.

“Let me give you a complete data dump now,” Vyas said.

And we ran it thru the system.

“The route is processing the input files,” I reported. And then a few moments later, “It’s generating the output files.” And then finally, after a few more moments, “The output files are being picked up by the listener.”

After all the output files were picked up, we waited a moment, and then he confirmed, “I got the data in our system.”

But a few minutes later someone chimed in on one of our Skype channels, “We’re getting a bunch of bogus messages without a time tag. And soon after that, there was a cascade of automated notifications and alarms sent out by email.

Although in our post mortem we weren’t so sure that those alarms were related to our errors, and although the root cause of the problem was the format of the input files, it’s indisputable that it was the execution of my code that unleashed those furies.

“Sorry guys,” I later said.

“Tomorrow,” Vyas said, “we’ll turn the system on.”

2. Friday

The next morning, I Skyped Vyas my plan. “I’ll manually process a few of the oldest files. If they run ok, then we can turn the system on.”

“Awesome,” he said.

Moments later I was again reporting the progress.

“The route processing the input files,” I said. And then, “It’s generating the output files.” And finally, “The output files are being picked up by the listener.” (Sound familiar?)

This time, I could see the results showing up in the output queue. The message count kept rising. I kept watching. The curve kept going up. As the count reached 1200, it was clear that the worker was not pulling anything out of the queue.

“Hmm…” Vyas said. “I’m seeing empty payloads.”

There was again an error of some sort, but worse, this one was blocking all incoming data from any customers.

It was Friday afternoon. The room was dark and mostly empty. Being relatively new to the team, I was woefully unequipped to debug the problem. Fortunately, there were a few generous souls still hanging around.

After about two hours of spelunking, we came up with a workaround. An hour later, sitting alone in the darkness and quiet, I put the final touches on a trouble ticket for the outage. I had also come up with a credible explanation of the root cause which, again, absolved my code of responsibility.

But absolved or not, the indisputable fact remains: my stuff broke things in production two days in a row.

TGIF!

Oblivion

Thu, 12 May 2016, 08:57 PM (-06:00)

1.

We were sitting at the dinner table talking about politics and journalism. (Now isn’t that just the stuff of dinner table talk?) Trudy had an observation, and I had a meta-observation about her observation.

“Well, that’ll be a jumpingfish,” she said, smiling sincerely.

I chuckled. It was a tiny thing, not particularly profound. An offhand comment. Indeed, as I sit here, I have no recollection what I said and neither does Trudy. Yet she was right. It was a little ditty that mixed dry humor with political observation and might have been something fit for these pages.

But it won’t be. Because the moment came and went and the minor brilliance of a triviality is lost to oblivion.

No big deal, right? It happens to us all the time. Moments come and go, and it’s not like we can hold on to them all. I mean, that’s the stuff of life, right? Yet it’s… it’s just that the oblivion thing has always seemed to happen so much to me.

2.

So in the interest of rescuing another triviality, here’s something that I managed to jot down into barely comprehensible notes on my phone as I was leaving work, yesterday.

On the long walk. Past the waterfalls and lily pads, up the hill to where my car is parked (as far from the office as can possibly be) in the shade of a cluster of Live Oaks and Yaupon Hollies. The long walk. On a sunny day like today.

Another moment saved from oblivion!

Are You Tired?

Wed, 11 May 2016, 08:35 PM (-06:00)

Are you tired? I am. My legs are aching with it. And my feet. And the palms of my hands. And my eyelids.

My eyelids are tired, but they will not close. I lie in bed with chapter 12 of Natalie Goldberg open above my head and a tower of books beside me on the table. But I can neither read, because I am too tired, nor fall asleep, because… well just because I can’t seem to fall asleep.

The dogs don’t have this problem, especially Mr. Guinness. Nor does Trudy. The house is quiet.

“Are you ok?” she asked me this afternoon. “We need to go and do something.”

I guess planting those salvias amid the fog of mosquitos didn’t count as something. I guess we need to do something else. Of course, she’s right. We were going to go camping, but it rained. And I was going to go kayaking in the bright red kayak, but it rained. And because it rained, the mosquitos came. And…

Are you tired? I am.

HOV Lanes

Mon, 9 May 2016, 08:57 PM (-06:00)

“Do you want to try the HOV lane this time?” Trudy asked.

She was behind the wheel. I was navigating. We were high-tailing it as fast as we could out of Houston, trying to beat rush hour.

We’ve been thru this before. To HOV or not to HOV? Even though we’ve been two or three people in the car — a veritable high-occupancy — it’s never been absolutely clear to us that the HOV lanes are indeed free, anymore, combined in places as they are with toll lanes and TxDOT-quality signage.

I grumbled something about not knowing. But then a sign appeared. High above the roadway. With clear rows and unambiguous words: HOV 2+ FREE.

We decided to merge into the fast lane.

And so there we were, sailing along between the concrete barricades passing the slowing afternoon traffic. As rush hour was beginning to condense, it was all Trudy could do to keep our speed to 65 miles per hour, even as the cars in front of her began to pull away.

We win! We were thinking. And then, a funny thing happened.

The HOV lane rose up and began to curve to the north. The concrete walls squeezed in, and the traffic slowed. We were coming to a park-and-ride, not a surprise, I suppose, but the puzzling thing was that the signs only gave us two choices: exit into the park-and-ride or continue around the tightly turning roadway on the HOV lane to FM 1960.

But… but… we didn’t want to go north. We wanted to go west. You know: west, like the HOV lane had just been doing five minutes ago. But no. We were beginning to realize that this was not the Katy Freeway HOV. And now having passed the park-and-ride, there was no exit until the far northwest side of Houston.

Incredulous at our failure, at my failure as a navigator, I murmured something like, “Oh well, I guess we’re going home on highway 290.”

Let’s just say, that in all my years of coming and going between Austin and Houston, I’ve never taken the highway 290 route. From the side of Austin where we live, you’d never do such a thing. You’d end up on the wrong side of town when you got home.

The wrong side of town. That’s where we were headed.

There was however, one upside. You see, there’s this gas station just outside of Brenham on highway 290 that serves hand-dipped Blue Bell ice cream. And OMG how long has it been since we’ve sunk our teeth into a cold scoop of Blue Bell.

Oh well, we’d just have to make a stop.

Mother’s Day #2

Sun, 8 May 2016, 05:56 PM (-06:00)

This year the dogs didn’t get cards for the mommy. They had a different suggestion, leaving the execution to the man, of course.

Mother’s Day 2016

Sun, 8 May 2016, 11:00 AM (-06:00)

Happy Mother’s Day, mom and moms!

Barium Swallow Test #3

Sat, 7 May 2016, 09:22 PM (-06:00)

Last time I was here, I had a little trouble with the final swallow. The first one was ok — watery barium liquid. The second one was ok — something more like milk. The third one was, too — barium pudding with a spoon — although it did take a little work. But I couldn’t get down the last mouthful of pudding mixed with crushed saltines. The x-ray video of me-the-skeleton showed the problem. There I was, my skeleton jaw moving up and down and my skeleton tongue (?) and skeleton throat trying and trying to swallow. But there it was, that lump of pudding-and-cracker stuck at the base of my tongue in the back of my throat going nowhere.

That’s what happens when the shoot radiation at your throat day after day, week after week, after cutting out a chunk of your tongue.

But this time, three months after their gun fired its last shot at me, things were different. The first liquidy swallow went fine. So did the second milky swallow. And the spoonful of pudding. And finally the pudding-y crackers. As I chewed and swallowed, I could see the x-ray video in a reflection in the window, and I could see the dark lumps slip cleanly down my throat each time.

The technician was almost giddy.

“You did great!” she said. And she called me over to her monitor to show me the video close up.

“A lot of people still can’t do that,” she said. “Look at you. Right there. It goes right down. Let’s watch it again. You’re doing great!”

As an additional bonus: I actually tasted the saltines!

Manhood

Sat, 7 May 2016, 08:51 PM (-06:00)

Gary is a spectacular nurse. His jocular, slap-the-back manner is comforting for patients who have a lot of things to worry about.

“My memory isn’t as good as it should be, Mr. Hasan,” Gary said as he was getting the room prepared, “but as I recall, you did well.”

He put a clean scope on the tray, and he mixed the mixture that they would spray down my nostrils to deaden my nerves and open things up to make is easier to push the scope up my nose and down my throat.

“In fact, you did really well,” he said, “although… you know, you didn’t look that tough…”

“…Sorry Mr. Hasan, I didn’t mean to insult your manhood.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ve had testicular cancer twice. There’s not that much manhood left to insult.”

Gary stood speechless.

There was another nurse in the room. She had been typing at the computer with her back to us. And in that momentary silence, a huge smile came to her face.