Nesting

A few years ago, when horses still roamed, I found a tiny little nest woven with horse tail hair and fine grasses. It was just so perfect. I stuck it safely in a cupboard cause I couldn't think of a safe way to display it. Well, I was reading a crafty blog and they had buttons, and stuff in jars which seemed like a brilliant way to display my little nest. So Tuesday I went through my jar cupboard and found just the perfect one. I have some fake eggs that we used to encourage nesting when we removed Timneh eggs for incubation, but they were too big for this tiny nest. I'll save a few little candy eggs next Easter.

 

At one point in my struggles with my machines I looked out the window only to see SNOW FLURRIES - oh my gosh - I guess it really is mid November. Actually we've been really lucky this fall for these to be the first I've seen.

The IT World is just not what it used to be. In the "olden days" when software developers had rigorous testing plans that had to be run before anything was released to production. There were pre-production environments where users and testing plans would test the user experience. This type of rigour seems to have gone the way of the mainframe. Case in point - BNS (a bank) recently released a new front end. It was totally buggy with some drop downs not working, some things just missing and even more alarming in one case a decimal point was moved. This is a bank folks! Some things would work for Carm one day, only to be fubared^* the next, and working again later in the day. Hummm - it looks like they are changing PRODUCTION on the fly - gasp.

And my example, yesterday I had everything working on my prun. My files were uploading and downloading, the tables were showing up properly, the pictures in the files were showing up too. Everything was hunky dory - I was finally happy. This morning when I turned the thing on it said there was a firmware update and I could apply it now or in an hour. I ran it "now". Well, strangely the documents no longer display properly - the tables go all wonky and when I send them to the cloud to edit them on my laptop they are corrupt. Wait, there's more - I can't download software from the Android market, nor does the screen timeout seem to work, it can’t see the second sd card anymore, and times on the calendar are now loosing the “:30”. That’s what I’ve noticed so far. Are there other fubars^*? Possibly... Is this another case of rolling something out without testing?

In my early days of computing we had things like development lifecycles and rigour and testing and planning, etc.  With the advent of distributed computing things got a little less structured. And the final few years I think it denigrated to chaos. They started using a methodology called "Extreme Programming". In other words, don't bother planning, just make a bunch of changes and hope they work with everything else.  Whew - I feel all worked up and somehow glad I'm not in the thick of it all.

 

^*Glossary: fubar - f_cked up beyond all recognition/repair ; mainframe - really, really big computer - think Watson of Jeopardy fame.

At least I had some nice non-computer time with my friend Christina. We got outside for a little walk - it was blustery and cold, but sunny. We had to cut it short cause I didn't bring enough Kleenex - it's that time of year I guess!

Keep love in your heart. A life without it is like a sunless garden when the flowers are dead.
Oscar Wilde