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Lots of code and lots of crap


April 20, 2007 - 4:26 p.m.

I have... a shitload of code to write in the next three days.

We have a demo coming up at work for some fairly influential executive types that could mean a completely new direction in the project I've been on for the last eight or nine years. Lots of cool new interface tricks, user-provided tagging (like Flickr or SlashDot, not that anyone there will know what the hell Flickr or SlashDot are), concept-based grouping of documents and document fragments, all that sort of shit.

And a layout that doesn't look like it was done in 2001 (which the current one was and does).

All the various chunks of code work, now all I have to do is bolt them onto the frame and start the fucker up. Check for oil leaks and see if anything rattles, then demo it. If it works, we show it off to everyone, and if they OK the project, I basically throw all the demo code away and write the real stuff with a bit more care.

Problem is, I have a long-standing appointment the morning they want to do the Demo For Bigwigs, and really, there's nobody else who can demo my code. Like Gates and Jobs, I have a talent for talking around problems in experimental code, so that people think they've seen the feature when in fact they've seen part of it (the other part being a buried land mine which would hose the system). Done it for years, but I don't think I could ever transfer that skill to anybody else.

Complicating this is that the mirrored drives in my server at home have decided to shit a brick. Fucking Maxtor drives... every damn one of them I've ever owned has crapped out at some time or another. By contrast, Hitachi, Western Digital and Seagate are like trucks. Since the Maxtors haven't failed completely yet, I went out to WalRusMart last night and bought a 250Gb Seagate 7200rpm drive for $109, and am copying the readable data off the sick drives onto the big monster. When I can get another drive just like it, I'll mirror it to the first 250 and they'll be reasonably safe again. I already know I lost my ancient backup of MP3s, but that's not a huge deal because my iPod and the other Apples have more up-to-date sets of my music. I may have lost a few digital images that were on the drive, and while I think I may have a backup of those somewhere, I am not immediately sure exactly where. Time to look around on my mountain of USB and FireWire drives.

I remember when 20 megabytes was a lot of disk space.


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