Day: July 28, 2004

I sent a little email to both people responsible for the McGill job. One answered back telling me he was on vacation, and that the best person to talk to was the other guy. Still waiting for his answer to see what's happening.

*crosses fingers and toes and rubs lucky Tia's foot*

Edit: Just heard back from other fellow. He's also on vacation until aug. 12, but said he'd get in touch with me when he got back. Squeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

Aaah, where to begin.

Get in to the office at a decent time again this morning, even though waking up is a cast-iron pain in the ass. First thing that's dumped on my head is that I must babysit the new intern on a project he's working on. Actually, that sounds a lot worse than it was. The intern is a nice guy, and I don't really mind doing that. What I do mind is that bossman managed to screw up a complete code package that I had written a few months ago. For those technically-inclined people out there, it's a JDBC connection pool to a mySQL database server, plus class wrappers for basic SQL operations. Anyway, nothing worked. He'd somehow – and I have no clue how that's actually humanly possible – corrupted the code archive files. So he has no clue how to fix the problem, and it's now my responsibility. Fun.

For some obscure reason I can't fathom, he insists that the intern must write code using an IDE. (Now let me take a moment to digress here. Personally, I find integrated development environments – or IDEs – to be unnecessary for most projects. They're big, bloated, slow resource whores that are a complete pain in the ass to configure properly. It's a question of preference, as most things are, but I can't stand them and find I can do just as well without them. My usual dev environment is lean, mean and efficient. It also works. Which is more than I can say for all of the other computers in this office, but that's me being nasty). Getting back to the rant at hand, I need to setup the intern's IDE.

I've already bored most of you with technical details. Suffice it to say that the software he has to use, poor bastard, is the most retarded piece of shit I've ever had the misfortune to deal with. It took me 3 hours of putzing around with the computer's firewall, database, software and settings to realize that the code that I wrote was, indeed working. If I executed it OUTSIDE of the IDE, it worked hunky-dory. If I executed it inside, all hell broke loose. Why? because one little checkbox hadn't been ticked. Buried deep within tons and tons of configuration screens, a trivial option – unset by default – would prevent most code from working. I'm disgusted with this. It just proves my point.

Boss' reaction: note it down so it doesn't happen again.

*runs screaming away*

I have the firm conviction that on the day I leave this office, the technical infrastructure will fall in ruins. Not because I'm such a genius, but because most of the people are… for practical day-to-day purposes, complete boobs!