Programming rant, No Country for Old Men

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Quickly the days they seem to pass. They sure do when you've had a few beers, as I did Friday. 

Actually no, now that I think of it what I had wanted to say was that I was extremely agitated by ASP.Net, Microsoft Access and... just IIS and Microsoft and the whole kit and caboodle. At first, I was upset by one of the controls that I was using did not work -- it had a minor bug, fine. I trudged on, only to discover that the database table I had based my documentation on was tragically flawed: not only did it not have a primary key, but the data itself was actually full of duplicates. An affront to my data analysis mores, and also, most regrettably, unusable in certain ASP.Net structures (and with good reason). So, I modified my code to handle this abnormality, this flagrant transgression against all things logical, only to encounter yet another roadblock, the dreaded "Server Application Unavailable". Oh, I'm sorry, did I tax IIS too much by asking it to serve a page? Perhaps I'll come back later, when it's feeling better. What poppycock! I was very nearly postal at this point, I will say that.

So I finally "resolved" the problem by avoiding it -- I have no idea why hooking up certain events in my sample cause ASP.net/IIS to die the way it did. I chalk it to black magic.

I went and saw No Country for Old Men, the new Coen brothers film. I rather enjoyed it, despite the insipid comments of the teenagers who decided to site within earshot. Earshot, there's an odd term. Gunshot is the sound guns make, "rim shot" is that drum sound to punctuate a one-liner, but earshot? Anyway, yeah, kids these days can be stupid as hell. Why oh why must I have heard one of these fine upstanding upstarts comment, "Hybrid cars are the worst thing for the environment. The way to leave a small footprint is to buy a used diesel and drive it to the ground."

In an unrelated incident, I lost my scarf! Alcohol was involved, but still. Scarves are kind of fated to get lost, I think. I mean, unless you're already in the habit of throwing one around your neck, it's seems inevitable that they are left behind. Oh, occasional piece of fashionable winter accessory, we hardly knew ye!

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