BOFH: SQL For Retards

SQL for Retards. Hysterical. You can only imagine how often I dreamed of this conversation:

“But I’m not responsible for the which of the volumes he puts his tablespace on.”

“Uh?” The Boss responds, reverting to subhuman IQ as a defence.

“OK, an analogy. Let’s say I was the building owner and I rent you 30 offices.”

“Right.”

“And you have 30 staff.”

“Yes.”

“And you put them all in one office because then you won’t have to go all around the floor to see what people are up to.”

“Yyyess?”

“And then you complain to me about the air-conditioning because that one office is stinking hot, humid and smelly.”

Nice Boston weekend

I just noticed–though I managed to blog every day this weekend, I didn’t write much about anything going on with me. This is called either “healthy” or “avoidance,” depending on your perspective.

Well, Lisa got a lateral move within her employer that puts her in a more geographically independent job, which frees us up for our move when I graduate. We celebrated with a dinner with friends on Friday night preceded by the customary tasting at the Wine Bottega in the North End. In the middle of dinner, my friend Bransby got a phone call with a job offer–so we had a double celebration.

Saturday we went to Lala Rokh, a Persian restaurant in the middle of Beacon Hill. I haven’t spent much time on Beacon Hill; after the bustle of the North End its silence was either refreshing or tomblike (see, there’s that perspective thing again!). The restaurant was great–I’ve had kebabs and such before, but the inventiveness with ingredients turned everything up a notch.

On Sunday I worked all day when I wasn’t blogging. I’m having some thoughts about the dynamics of that. After I finish my system dynamics homework (or before, if present practice of procrastination continues), I’ll post the causal loop diagram that explains most of my blogging recently.

CSS from both sides of the fence

I’ve tried to stay out of the blogwar over using CSS vs. tables for web site design that has been brewing at Scripting News and other places, but I think it’s time to jump in. I’ll be working on a CSS-based redesign of this site over the next few weeks. I’ve noticed how slowly this page renders in Netscape 4.x (because of all the nested tables), and hopefully moving to CSS will either make things easier or convince the 4.x readers to move to more modern browsers (hi, Dad!).

Two quick resources to get started: Microsoft’s CSS node in the MSDN library, and Apple’s series on CSS in its developers’ site.