About 8:30 this morning, I was sitting at my desk at home, working on something for work1. I heard this noise outside, and assumed that it was a delivery truck or something stopped at a neighbor’s house. After 10 to 15 minutes, I decided to go look and see what was making all the noise, since it hadn’t gone away…
I spent 12 total hours banging my head against a maddening problem.
As you probably know by now if you’ve ever read this blog before, I like to ask questions of my readers. It’s a way for me to gain some added industry experience without actually having to live through any some of the common pitfalls of the day-to-day life of a Systems Administrator, and typically you guys are pretty helpful and informative while being only slightly snotty…
It was four months ago, almost to the day that I first found and read the 2005 Commencement speech that Steve Jobs gave to Stanford University, but the words still echo in my mind on a regular basis. When I wrote that post, I was trying to help out a friend who was having trouble seeing the path life was mysteriously supposed to take, and yet it now seems that I’m the one finding comfort and meaning in those words.
For the first time in quite a while, I got to write some PHP for an actual work-related project. We’re receiving some address-correction data (you know, zip+4 here, wrong city spelling there, that kind of thing) back from the guys who actually mail out all the checks for claims we pay, and I wrote a quick batch of PHP functions to import, parse, and load these corrections into the database.