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I want him to have something show up in his RSS feed that says, “HEY FATTY! QUIT READING RSS FEEDS AND GET BACK TO WORK!!”

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I hate shopping. I really do. I think buying something online while risky, is still better than braving your local Wal-Mart and putting up with the general public. I don’t hate people. I just like to avoid uncomfortable situations. However, I do go to the store with my wife on occasion. I hate it. Here is one reason why.

Have you ever noticed the shopping carts that are left in the parking lot? No, I’m not talking about the ones left in the receptacles marked, “PLEASE RETURN CARTS HERE.” I’m talking about the ones that are wandering the parking lot like a 3-year old in Wal-Mart who can’t find their parents. Do you leave them out there to wander on their own? Are you one of those people? Are you THAT lazy?

Let’s be honest. We are human and by nature we are lazy. I think that returning your cart to a cart return or even taking it back into the store is not too much to ask. I’m sorry but those clever islands in the parking lot are not “ramps” for you to leave your shopping cart on as you are talking to your girlfriend about the latest vampire-romance-suck-face novel.

I hate carts that are left unattended. They (like small children) are now an obstacle to be avoided otherwise you can get a nice scratch on your car. Oh well, I don’t drive a nice car anyhow. It was nice. It got left in a parking lot full of runaway carts.

Chicken Poop for the Disgruntled Soul Rant!

I’ve never been (pronounced “bean” for all of you from Canada or the UK) to the state of California. Wait, let me repeat myself.

I’ve never been to the state of California…and I don’t care.

Now all of you reading who have been, are from, or are planning on visiting said state have most likely just had the thought erupt in your brain, “Glen, you haven’t?!” No. I have not. I’m not going to. The reason is mainly because I like the reaction I get from people when I tell them I’ve never been. Their reaction to the California thing is what I imagine people would do if I informed then I had never tried drinking water.

On the other hand, the exclamation, “YOU HAVEN’T?!” does seem to get a little old. Here is why. If I said to you, “I saw that <insert_cool_movie_name_here> movie this past weekend. Have you seen it?” and you reply, “No”, I think that pretty much answers my question. To those of you who insist on exclaiming “You HAVEN’T?!” with a total look of incredulity on your face, I say to you, deal with it.

The simple fact of the matter is that if you have experienced something and you ask another person if they have had the same experience and they say they have not, believe them. Please. People don’t seem to believe me when I say I haven’t been to California. Please believe me. I haven’t. I’m not lying.

Chicken Poop for the Disgruntled Soul

My mom is a junkie. She takes more drugs than south central LA. She has a couple of reasons why she takes them:

1. She has had polio, a shattered wrist, a shattered hip (which is now bionic with 17 pounds of metal), and 4 kids who made her hair change color at an early age.
2. The doc prescribed them

And you thought she was taking illegal drugs. PFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFT!

I called her earlier in the week to see how things were going and she informed me that a doctor we all had went to growing up was back in Gladewater. Long story short, she needed a prescription refilled that requires the doctor to call it in. The reason? If she were a junky, she’d be abusing the heck outta this particular “medicine.”

She had driven to the doctor’s previous office to have this prescription filled. When she got there, they informed her that her doctor had moved back to Gladewater. After outsmarting the receptionist (the receptionish tried to make my mom get an appointment with the new doctor at this office which is a LOT farther away than the Gladewater office), she had her medical information faxed to the Gladewater office. Apparently in the previous office, it isn’t a big deal to use a fax machine or help out customers/patients.

My mom called the new office in Gladewater later that day to see if her records had made it over. She dialed the number and was helped by someone we’ll call Floreetha Jane. I think it went a little something like this:

Mom: “Hello, my name is Glen’s Mom and I had my medical records faxed over there. I’m one of Doctor OldDude’s patients from his previous office. Have those records shown up yet?”

Floreetha: “Um, there have been a LOT of records faxed over here but I’m too lazy to get off my cornfed butt and go see if they have made it. What do you need anyhow?”

Mom: “Well, I have a prescription that needs to be filled.”

Floreetha (with a condescending tone): “Uh, you can just call the pharmacy.”

Mom: “I understand that but this is for a controlled substance and it requires that I have to be in the office with the doctor for him to record this on his special this-lady-uses-controlled-substances-pad.”

Floreetha (still condescending but now more confused because the only controlled substance she knows of is the nicotine in the pack of cigarettes she is jonesing for): “Well what do you want me to tell Doctor OldDude? I’ve got the Internets to surf and I get a smoke break in 15 minutes. Come on lady, just call the pharmacy!”

Mom (now frustrated and wondering if Doctor OldDude hired this blight on humanity): “It sounds like you are really busy. I’ll just come in tomorrow and see Doctor OldDude so he can write his special codez (send teh codez plz) on his special-controlled-substance-register. Thanks.”

Ok peeps. I don’t know about you but does that sound a little jacked up? I thought about this for a while and even if Floreetha Jane was seriously busy helping other customers, wouldn’t it have been easy enough for her to take my Mom’s name and number, check on her records, and get the doctor to call her back. Take a little pride in what you do. I’m sure Floreetha makes a little more than minimum wage but even when I was slingin’ tacos at the Bell, I tried to do the best job I could for $4.26 an hour.

Chicken Poop for the Disgruntled Soul Rant!

A buddy of mine blogged recently about pair programming (http://adotnetdude.blogspot.com/2008/11/benefits-and-costs-of-pair-programming.html) and the costs/benefits. I chatted with him after reading the post and we talked about how being under pressure makes you want to cut corners when developing software. By cutting corners, I mean things like copying and pasting blocks of code rather than extracting methods or creating base classes. You know, all the cool refactoring things, unit tests, etc.All the things that create successful (easy to maintain, little to no bugs, etc.) code.

I never really wanted to cut corners but I did. I admit it. I felt like I would get in trouble or something if I missed a deadline. I finally decided not to cut corners anymore. I decided to write the best possible software I could no matter what. The reason? A buddy of mine named Wlen Gagley told me the following story.

Wlen was asked/told/commanded to work with one of the financial gurus at his company and create an intelligent credit card re-billing agent. The basic idea was that based on the response code from the payment processor in the event of an auth failure, this re-biller would try to authorize a credit card payment at a later date, X days from the last attempt.

Wlen felt it would be a simple task until a matrix was presented to him defining all the possible criteria on how the re-biller should act. At least he had requirements… That was when the pressure set in. Wlen’s boss and the financial dude stopped by at least once a day to see how things were progressing. They wanted to get this into production by the beginning of May and here we were in the end of March.

Wlen got all sweaty and nervous. What if he missed the deadline? What if he got called in for a “review” and it wasn’t that “review time” of the year? Why did these guys (let’s call them buzzards now) keep bugging him every day?! Then Wlen had an idea. Instead of dreading the time when the buzzards would start circling, he would use that time to further define requirements and fill in the missing bits of the re-biller puzzle. Each day when the buzzards would show up, he would show then where he was and what he was working on. Oh, did I mention he used TDD for all of this? Yeah, he did (TDD, look into it and use it). It was at that point when a lot of great discussion about how this thing should really work came into play. What do we do if we have a catastrophic failure? Are there any business rules or legalities around how often we are trying to auth a payment?

Long story short, Wlen got a little more information every day. That information made the software much easier to write. The information also made the test suite easier to write. Of course he used TDD for the initial design but went back to enrich his suite of tests using all the little edge cases that had come up in the daily buzzard meetings. He started getting kudos because the buzzards felt involved. They felt like they were right there coding (they weren’t but they can dream, right?).

In the end, the intelligent re-biller rolled towards the end of June. June? JUNE! Yep and no one said a thing. The more the buzzards saw of the development process and just how tricky this thing was, the more they realized the date THEY had set (not Wlen) was ridiculous. Not to mention that a few features had been requested that weren’t in the original requirements. This was ok though because Wlen could show them how long the feature was taking.

The re-biller went into production. It had two bugs. It has been in production for over two years now. It has had a total of two bugs. After the bugs were fixed, no changes have been made to the code. It made Wlen’s company a significant amount of cash. Wlen was happy. Wlen didn’t cut corners.

Tech pair programming, refactoring, TDD

I’m riding home from work this week and I’m about to cross a rather major street in my town. On the other side of the intersection, I notice some blond chick zooming through the intersection. The funny thing is that she:

1. was riding a bright purple-bluish scooter with one hand on the throttle
2. had her head down like she was reading an interesting news story on her shoes
3. had those huge sunglasses on that are too big for one’s head
4. was talking excitedly on her cellphone as she rode her scooter through rush hour traffic

I’m no expert motorcyclist or any other sort of expert but riding a scooter one-handed whilst talking on the cell phone is DUMB!!!! What a dummyhead…(thanks Scoob)

Chicken Poop for the Disgruntled Soul chicks man, dummyhead

Yeah, I should get back to writing on this stupid thing. Not only is it therapeutic, it makes me laugh. I mean, I really need therapy. I’m 32. I weigh 270 pounds (fatty)! I ride a scooter. Son of a mother duck…Ok, back to your regularly scheduled brainwashing…

Chicken Poop for the Disgruntled Soul fatty, Rant!

Are you fat? I am. However, I do appreciate all the little kids, teenagers, in-laws, doctors, and other random people reminding me that I’m overweight. Here’s a news flash: NO ONE ON THIS EARTH REALIZES THAT FACT MORE INTENSELY THAN I DO.

Have I made my point clear? Cool.

Now, for the rest of you who thought that making fun of fat kids in school was cool, this is for you. We grew up and now we don’t care what you call us.  These terms make me laugh:

• fatty
• fatso
• lardass
• chubby
• fatty mcbutterpants
• tons of fun
• fat bastard (i love that one)
• husky
• jumbo
• …

I hope the pathetic individuals who read this will send me more fat-isms. I kinda love ‘em these days. They make me laugh. They don’t hurt us, precious. In the words of Bruce Bruce, “Calling me fat bastard don’t bother me. Tell me Popeye’s Chicken is shuttin’ down and I’ll set this place on FIRE!” Amen, brutha!

Chicken Poop for the Disgruntled Soul fatty, Rant!

I’m not a perfect parent. I’m not even a good parent. I do, however, believe that you should be nice to your kids. Does being nice to your kids mean:

1. Buying them anything that they want (i.e. booze, smokes, a zillion toys, candy, happy meals)
2. Trying to be their best friend instead of their parent (It’s cool if he sleeps over honey. We’re BFFs!)
3. Not punishing them when they have done wrong because Oprah says they’ll turn into axe murderers after too many sessions of “nose in the corner.”

No. I mean, be a parent, but be reasonable with your kids.

I’m at the mall a few days after Christmas. Sure, I can go on about the lack of XXL shirts because every damn little teenage boy in the mall is wearing them (that means big guys like me get jacked) but I won’t. Me and my novia are walking out to our car behind this younger mom and her cute little daughter, Nicole. (You may be wondering how I know the daughter’s name. No, I’m not a stalker or a pedophile, stay tuned.)

I’m thinking the daughter may be three years old at the most. You can imagine the mall traffic with all the unhappy wives returning clothes that are the wrong size, color, style, etc. and of course, this little girl ventures out into the parking lot. I suck in half of the oxygen in Utah as Nicole walks (head-down of course) through traffic as her mom continues to walk farther and farther away from Nicole.

“Nicole, come here!”, says the mom. Ok, I won’t type it but she said it like 3 or 4 times. That’s how I know the little girl’s name.

It was obvious to anyone within a 100 foot radius of little Nicole that she either couldn’t hear her Mom or was being three and not listening. Heck, I almost walked up and took the little girl to her mom. I’m sure I would have been arrested (I always wear a hat, backwards of course). Ok people, be nice to your little kids. Don’t let them die in crowded mall parking lots. Go take them by the hand and lead them. Oh yeah, and quit buying them booze and stupid crap like that. They get plenty from their crappy friends that you don’t care to meet…

Chicken Poop for the Disgruntled Soul

There must be about a million different ways to skin a cat. I believe the same is true when you are developing web services with java. To date I have only done serious web service development using .NET and Visual Studio. Once you go that route, you have signed on to IIS, insert favorite .NET language here, and all of the tools the come packaged with the .NET framework and Visual Studio to generate WSDLs and your proxy classes. I miss writing java code from time to time and thought that I should see what it is like to develop a web service using Java. Here is what I have done so far:

1. I need an IDE. I like Eclipse. I’ve used Netbeans but I like Eclipse better. That’s a whole different story which I won’t discuss here.

2. I snagged the latest JDK from sun which is 6 (wow).

3. I installed mysql version 5.x on an Ubuntu Linux server.

Now, I realize that I probably don’t have everything I need yet. In the .NET world, if I have IIS and Visual Studio installed, I’m good to go for web service dev. I found a simple java web service example that had a mysql database backend (pretty handy since I already install mysql). It’s a very simple service that given a zip code will return a weather forecast.

I needed something to act as the app server and remembered using tomcat a few years ago to do servlets. I also found a few Eclipse plugins for tomcat. I chose the sysdeo/sqli eclipse tomcat launcher plugin. more to come!

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