WhimsyLand

I'm thinking that I don't actually grok the whole Facebook thing.  I mean, Harold Bloom is now my friend.  I'm pleased and gratified that Lara Glenum is my friend (with all its gothic undertones), but Harold Bloom seems like an entirely different category.  By that standard, I think I should be Helen Vendler's friend and Marjorie Perloff's friend and William Logan's friend and perhaps even Randall Jarrell's friend?  I am also Richard Siken's friend and Gabe Gudding's friend and Kazim Ali's friend and Mark Doty's friend and Suzanne Frischkorn's friend, which I'm quite pleased about.  And I'm friends with people who have 50 friends in common and I haven't the foggiest idea who they are.  Is that OK?  Should I google them and read about their exploits?

I had written this long paragraph before my new Nike Air-Something tennies (usually called trainers in English murder mysteries and Harry Potter books) hit something on the UPS under my desk and rebooted my system.  Yes, most of the Office products were doing backups every couple of minutes, but apparently not Front Page, where I type in my blog entries mainly because there's a spelling corrector built in.  The paragraph was about how much I like Jim Jubak, and his recent article on Asian inflation.  About Vietnam, he says:

Those interest rate increases have crushed the nascent Vietnamese stock market. The VN, an index of 151 companies on the Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange, was down more than 60% for 2008 as of June 11. And the government is predicting economic growth will slow to 7% for 2009 from last year's 8.5%.

The Ho Chi Minh Stock Exchange?  I mean, do the affluent belong to the Karl Marx Yacht Club?

I spent all morning working with our 25-year old product that we retrofitted a MySQL interface to.  One of our clients is one of the largest organic foods distributors in the U.S., and they are having problems that cause dozens of IT workers and data entry personnel to pull their hair out.  Basically, it seems that updates we do are incurring huge time lags, up to 3 hours before they post.  It's pretty inexplicable, actually, since our software does really simple MySQL queries via their C API.  I VPN'd in to their system last week and Remote Desktop'd over to their Terminal Server and was able to reproduce the problem, but not fix it.  Today, I spent all day working locally and was able to reproduce the problem, as well.  It turns out that I need to reconnect to MySQL from time to time to flush transactions.  I don't know why this is necessary, it certainly isn't required on other database products.   It feels good to win one every once in a while, though, and I shipped the new version off and started cutting up carpet again.

An interesting project came over the transom this afternoon.  It's one of those ugly projects where the product is a commercial product in a sensitive industry (think aerospace or the military) with dozens of compliance requirements and a large handful of specifications to which it must conform.  Of course, these are the kind of projects that are farmed out by giant megabusinesses, which is the case here, and the expectation is that the cost (think, $4,500 toilet seat) is 10X what it would be in the commercial market for the same basic device.  We would be subcontractors to subcontractors to subcontractors to subcontractors to the general contractor, so whatever we charge you can bet it the eventual bill for our labor will be a multiple of that.  Also, the general contractor is based in Paris and wants all kinds of manufacturing test software.  Sweet Junie and I have a Paris Fund that has a healthy, but inadequate, balance right now, but I would love to think that I could combine business with pleasure and be paid to work a few days and spend a few nights with my love on the Champs Elysées.  OK, I've already been there a few times, but Sweet Junie hasn't and once you get over the fact that a coffee is 5 Euros, you're home free with a nice view of the Arc de Triomphe and a little biscuit on your plate.  Actually, my favorite place in France is probably Nantes, right on the Loire.  But, Paris has a lot to keep one busy for a week, assuming you're not staying in the Amarante Beau Manoir and have spent all our money on tips.  When I left to live in a small town in Germany, I listened to tapes for a month.  It was amazing.  When I was done, I knew the 200 most common sentences in German, and I used them 80% of the time I was in Ochtendung.  The rest of the time, I just waved my arms, and made shapes with my hands.  I gave those same tapes to Dave and Kevvy to listen to on their long drive from my place to Hannover Messe.  After a half-dozen hours of lessons, they arrived in an Irish pub on Saint Patrick's Day, and the only thing they could say was "I am not an English woman" (Ich bin keine Englanderin, as near as I remember).  So, I figure a dozen hours of tape will get me way past the cultural problems of the Griswalds.  Besides, Sweet Junie majored in French a long time ago, so she can correct my transgressions, and all the locals will be so happy that we are trying so hard to disassociate ourselves from the American hubris of the last decade.  That's the plan, anyway.