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Sep. 10th, 2001
Much of a Muchness
Sep. 10th, 2001 12:10 pmAnd now, my story of our trip to Florida for Aunt Gerry's funeral. At least, selected bits.
Thursday
Travel
We went to bed late from packing, after a week that involved lots of missed sleep, and then we got up at about 5am to get to the airport. Fortunately, we got to the airport with plenty of time.
The flight was incident-free.
We had forgotten to print out the information about our car reservation. We asked all the agencies, but none of them had a record. But we easily got another car.
We drove off from Orlando to Daytona Beach and got to the hotel (just across the street from the Daytona Speedway)around 12:30.
Party Mix
On the drive from Orlando to Daytona, I found a radio station playing what they called "party music" (95.3, for anyone who might care). It's mostly simplistic pop with heavy drum and bass--and that was just what I wanted to keep my energy up as I drove in my sleep-deprived state.
I really like that music. I'd listen to Lawrence Welk if it had a drum-and-bass breakbeat.
Unfortunately, it makes Lori feel tense and edgy, so I don't listen to it much. :(
Naps
Both Lori and I dozed on the plane.
Lori slept a bit in the car on the drive.
We got to the hotel room and still felt like a lie-down.
I slept for about an hour during which Lori couldn't get to sleep. Then she fell asleep and slept for a couple of hours (during which I read most of Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions). We did a lot of napping that day!
Rain
When Lori woke up, we went to the neighboring mall to get a dress shirt for the funeral.
It was raining, and it had been raining for most of the time that Lori was asleep. And it was raining very hard; really bucketing down. The mall was a hop, skip, and a jump away, but it was raining so hard that we decided to drive instead. Even so, we got very wet dashing to and from the car.
Pittsburgh gets quite a bit of rain, but it can't sustain heavy bucketing rain for hours the way we saw on this trip to Florida.
LiveJournal frustration
I had installed the Palm LiveJournal client on my Palm IIIxe before this trip. I tried to use it in the mall while I waited for Lori to get her nails done.
It was horribly frustrating.
I composed a long post. I decided that I wasn't completely sure that I trusted the client, since I didn't have the Linux conduit and I wasn't 100% sure that I'd be able to recover that text without that conduit.
So I selected all the text of the journal entry and copied it to the clipboard. Then I switched to the memo pad, created a new memo, and tried to paste that text in.
No text appeared.
So, I switched back to the LJ client, and all my text was gone!
This is absolutely unacceptable!
(I later learned that even if I hadn't switched apps, it's still impossible to submit a journal entry unless you set up a user with the Linux conduit. But you can still create entries that you can't submit and can't copy to anything else.)
I cannot remember the last time I have been so enraged with a piece of software.
Visiting
After that, we went over to Aunt Gerry's house, where the family was gathering. I don't really know what to say about this; it was a relatively quiet time, with a fair amount of talking and quiet beer-drinking.
Lori received a nice brooch that Aunt Gerry had left; I'll let her tell more of that.
I know I had something more to say here, but I can't remember it.
Given how long it's taking me to enter these memories, I'm going to post subsequent days as separate posts.
Thursday
Travel
We went to bed late from packing, after a week that involved lots of missed sleep, and then we got up at about 5am to get to the airport. Fortunately, we got to the airport with plenty of time.
The flight was incident-free.
We had forgotten to print out the information about our car reservation. We asked all the agencies, but none of them had a record. But we easily got another car.
We drove off from Orlando to Daytona Beach and got to the hotel (just across the street from the Daytona Speedway)around 12:30.
Party Mix
On the drive from Orlando to Daytona, I found a radio station playing what they called "party music" (95.3, for anyone who might care). It's mostly simplistic pop with heavy drum and bass--and that was just what I wanted to keep my energy up as I drove in my sleep-deprived state.
I really like that music. I'd listen to Lawrence Welk if it had a drum-and-bass breakbeat.
Unfortunately, it makes Lori feel tense and edgy, so I don't listen to it much. :(
Naps
Both Lori and I dozed on the plane.
Lori slept a bit in the car on the drive.
We got to the hotel room and still felt like a lie-down.
I slept for about an hour during which Lori couldn't get to sleep. Then she fell asleep and slept for a couple of hours (during which I read most of Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions). We did a lot of napping that day!
Rain
When Lori woke up, we went to the neighboring mall to get a dress shirt for the funeral.
It was raining, and it had been raining for most of the time that Lori was asleep. And it was raining very hard; really bucketing down. The mall was a hop, skip, and a jump away, but it was raining so hard that we decided to drive instead. Even so, we got very wet dashing to and from the car.
Pittsburgh gets quite a bit of rain, but it can't sustain heavy bucketing rain for hours the way we saw on this trip to Florida.
LiveJournal frustration
I had installed the Palm LiveJournal client on my Palm IIIxe before this trip. I tried to use it in the mall while I waited for Lori to get her nails done.
It was horribly frustrating.
I composed a long post. I decided that I wasn't completely sure that I trusted the client, since I didn't have the Linux conduit and I wasn't 100% sure that I'd be able to recover that text without that conduit.
So I selected all the text of the journal entry and copied it to the clipboard. Then I switched to the memo pad, created a new memo, and tried to paste that text in.
No text appeared.
So, I switched back to the LJ client, and all my text was gone!
This is absolutely unacceptable!
(I later learned that even if I hadn't switched apps, it's still impossible to submit a journal entry unless you set up a user with the Linux conduit. But you can still create entries that you can't submit and can't copy to anything else.)
I cannot remember the last time I have been so enraged with a piece of software.
Visiting
After that, we went over to Aunt Gerry's house, where the family was gathering. I don't really know what to say about this; it was a relatively quiet time, with a fair amount of talking and quiet beer-drinking.
Lori received a nice brooch that Aunt Gerry had left; I'll let her tell more of that.
I know I had something more to say here, but I can't remember it.
Given how long it's taking me to enter these memories, I'm going to post subsequent days as separate posts.
Mike had a problem with code that I'd written back in 1998. It seemed that under AIX, if he compiled with optimization for the caller of document clustering, the regression test broke. Optimizing the document clustering code itself didn't matter at all.
I thought about this for a bit and suggested some debugging ideas, and finally thought, "Oh, maybe this could be the problem." I checked:
that hypothesis was the problem.
It was my fault; it was in the document clustering code.
The bug had gone unnoticed for three years (and the code had gone through code review).
It was fixed by removing a single character.
I am simultaneously proud for spotting this and embarrassed for having made the error in the first place.
I'll let the C++-heads think about this before reading ( the answer. )
I thought about this for a bit and suggested some debugging ideas, and finally thought, "Oh, maybe this could be the problem." I checked:
that hypothesis was the problem.
It was my fault; it was in the document clustering code.
The bug had gone unnoticed for three years (and the code had gone through code review).
It was fixed by removing a single character.
I am simultaneously proud for spotting this and embarrassed for having made the error in the first place.
I'll let the C++-heads think about this before reading ( the answer. )
