All posts by Richard S. Crawford

Today is the Day

Today is the day that I leave for Europe. In less than half an hour, Jennifer drives me to San Francisco International Airport, and from there I fly to London, then Dublin. I don’t know how often I will be able to post to this journal, even with the cool web interface I wrote for it a couple of months ago. I am taking a pocket journal with me, so that I can write on the road… and anything I write will, of course, be posted here.

I will, of course, miss Jennifer more than anything else.

Until I return… Be well.

Everything I Need To Know I've Learned Since January 20, 2001

President Bush’s first 100 days or so has certainly been instructive to me; I’ve learned quite a bit, most of which has proven to me that everything I ever thought I knew was wrong. For example:

  1. Arsenic is good for you.

  2. Good neighbors are good, but good enemies are better.
    China would probably be a good ally, but it’s better to piss them off. You never know when you’ll have to divert attention from a sagging economy or messed up domestic policies with a strong-arm conflict with a large nation. Same with Russia. Planning ahead, you see, is very important. Besides, when was the last time we had a good arms race? And treaties, like rules, are meant to be broken anyway.

  3. Good friends are good for you
    Especially when those friends have lots and lots of money. Lots. And when they help you get elected. Be sure, though, that you reward those friends with everything they want, regardless of whether those rewards are good for anyone else.

  4. Clean air is bad for you, bad for your children, and bad for the planet.
    Of course, the health of the planet doesn’t matter anyway. The health of your children matters — barely — as long as concern for their health doesn’t get in the way of rewarding those rich friends of yours.

  5. Conserving what is in limited supply is bad. Wasteful consumption is good.
    Just ask Smilin’ Dick Cheney.

  6. There’s no such thing as a non-renewable resource. Everything is in infinite supply.
    Again, just ask Smilin’ Dick Cheney. In spite of all available evidence that suggests that fossil fuels are in limited supply, there really is an infinite pool of oil and coal existing in an alternate dimension just beneath the surface of the earth, more than enough to justify building one power plant per week, every week, for the next twenty years. Most of the portals to this Dimension of Infinite Oil are located underneath wildlife reserves.

  7. Animals just don’t %@#$@ matter!
    They’ve been telling us that for years! If an species is endangered, just let it freakin’ die out already and decrease the surplus population! If we started a job of extinction, we’d better finish it off. Winners never quit, and quitters never win.

  8. When you have alienated half the nation (or more) then you have achieved true bipartisan unity.
    Not to mention most of the rest of the world as well.

It’s good to see that my old feelings about politicians in general were justified all along.

Just remember: If God had wanted us to vote, He would have given us candidates. Sheesh.

One

When I first met you two or three years ago, at a Dungeons and Dragons game that a mutual friend was running, I thought to myself, "That is the woman I’m going to marry."

It was just a flicker of a thought. I didn’t give it much thought, because we met and then we were slaying orcs or Squirrels of Rage together or something. And we talked and I noted how your smile made your whole face light up, how your laugh was infectious, how beautiful you were, how easy it was to talk and laugh with you, and how being in the same with you made me feel.

Of course, at the time, you were working in another state during the week and I was dating someone else, so, of course, nothing could come of it.

Time passed; we each dated other people, each of us made some errors in judgement. Sometimes we went months without seeing each other. One night you came over and we watched Drop Dead Fred together… I almost kissed you that night, but something wasn’t quite yet in sync. I don’t know what it was. There were some things we each had to go through first.

At our friends’ wedding, we were both in the bridal party and we sat next to each other at the bridal table, laughing, writing notes, teasing the best man. I noticed again how beautiful you were in the dress you wore. I thought to myself, "I really should marry this woman."

But you were dating someone else, and things still weren’t quite right. I met someone else that night and she and I spent time with each other, even though my heart was with you most of the time: at the Halloween party you threw, at the New Year’s Eve party, at Christmas when we were teased into a perfunctory kiss under the mistletoe.

Then, one year ago, we went to the Scottish Highland Games with a friend of ours. We watched the caber toss. We ate nachos at a Mexican restaurant in downtown Davis. We laughed, you bought a stone dragon (one of the two stone dragons that guards our front door even now), we went for ice cream, and then we called it a day.

But the day wasn’t over. I got home and started to watch a movie I’d rented, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, with Danny Kaye. And I couldn’t stop thinking about you and the day we’d just spent together. On a whim, I sent you an Instant Message and asked if you wanted to come over and watch a movie with me. I was expecting you to say no, that you were too tired, that you needed to work the next day. But you said yes, and I hurriedly cleaned my room so that you wouldn’t be too appalled when you came over.

And that night after the movie was laughed, we talked, we teased. And there you were, your face just a few inches from mine. I hesitated, knowing that if it was the wrong thing, I’d lose you as a friend and I wouldn’t have been able to stand not having you in my life at all. But I kissed you anyway. And to my amazement you kissed me back.

And that night when you lay in my arms, I knew I’d been right all along. You were the woman I was going to marry.

We spent a couple of days dancing around the issue: what did it all mean? Were we friends? Would we keep seeing each other? What would happen next?

Since then, we’ve at least spoken to each other every single day; even when we were in two different states, even when we were on opposite ends of the continent, even when we were tired, sick, angry at each other, angry at our jobs, we always talked. Not a single day has gone by that I haven’t heard your voice or thought about you or marveled at how lucky I am that I get to be the one to marry you.

I’ve always laughed when hearing the term "soulmate"; I never believed in such things. Now I do, and I wonder how I ever felt complete without you.

It’s been a year now. And it’s been the best year of my entire life.

Pretenders

For the past couple of months, I’ve been focusing most of my time at work on developing a single product: a reengineering of a popular and wide-spread PHP program to work against an entirely different database schema than what it was originally designed for. It’s been an interesting project: at times quite rewarding but more often singularly frustrating. I’ve learned a lot about PHP and how it connects to Oracle. It’s a close second to some of the learning opportunities I’d have had at the University, and once it’s complete I will probably end up relegated to HTML monkey-work again, but this has been fun while it’s lasted. We’re due to release this product this week, after two false starts and an original sizing that was woefully inaccurate.

The frustrating thing about this project, though, is knowing that it probably won’t be used. Once Quality Assurance is finished with it and Product Management has given their final writeoff, we go live… but who knows if it will ever get used? We’ve had the original product in place for nearly ten months now, and it’s barely gotten any utilization at all. The new product will have an identical user interface to the old one, and our users — whoever they are — won’t notice a difference at all. And according to our reports, this product hasn’t been used since February.

So I can’t help but wonder what the point is.

At a development staff conference call last week, the development manager up in Portland announced that our parent company will be hiring three new developers, that these were critical hires because of urgent customer issues. With the "mute" button on the telephone activated, I looked at one of our PDA developers and said, "Because, after all, we might have a customer any day now." The announcement of the hire of three new core developers came shortly after the announcement that my own company wasn’t meeting its revenue goals and that our plans to hire a new developer to focus on front-end HTML monkey-work were canceled.

I don’t like developing in a vacuum, making products that no one will see or use. I like feeling like I’m doing something worthwhile, that what I’m doing will making a difference. But working for this company hasn’t felt like a real job ever since I saw our first utilization numbers back in September. It feels more like the way it felt when I was running a Live Action Role-Playing game in Davis. We pretended it was important, we pretended that the fate of the world rested on what our characters did, we pretended that what we did was important… all the while knowing that we were just a bunch of kids (and not-quite-kids-anymore) pretending to be vampires in a college town in Northern California, and that what we did really didn’t affect more than a couple dozen people, max — and even then, in it affected us in game time only.

I remember thinking, when I worked at IT at the University, that it was amazing that I was getting paid to actually do what I was doing. I still feel that way, but for much more cynical reasons: back then, I was amazed to get paid for doing work that was fun. Now I’m amazed that I get paid for doing work that no one will ever see.

I’m developing in a vacuum, and I don’t like that feeling at all. While in the PHP community there has been considerable interest in what my fellow programmer and I have been doing, I doubt that it will be noticed by our customer base — such as it is — at all.

£!

Even with the clean bill of health from my doctor, it doesn’t feel real. Even with the airplane tickets, the hostel reservation confirmation form, the passport, and the rail pass on its way, none of it feels real. The fact that one week from tomorrow, I’m flying overseas to spend a month in Europe, it just doesn’t feel at all real.

It doesn’t feel real that I’ll be taking a full month off from work — my first real vacation in over five years. Jennifer and my boss conspired to give me this time off so that I could go on this trip which I’ve dreamed of for years, ever since I took a thirteen-hour train ride to Simi Valley to visit a composer friend of mine who was conducting a concert of his own music.

Sitting here, in the office of this, our new house, which we’ve seen grow from a mere patch of weeds to the beautiful home that it is now, it doesn’t feel real to know that when I leave, I’ll have only been in this house for three weeks. Jennifer said that the house didn’t really feel real to her until we’d spent a couple of nights in it; the house is real to me, but the trip still isn’t.

I’ve planned this trip out; I’ve made my hotel reservations for the first couple of nights, I’ve gone through the guidebooks (I still haven’t finalized my itinerary), I’ve got my Eurail pass and my airline tickets. I’ve gotten fresh prescriptions for all my medications. Jennifer bought me a backpack, and I’ve started a list of things to take with me — I’m still debating with myself on whether I’ll be bringing my Palm Pilot. I’ve made arrangements to meet an old friend of mine in Dublin in front of Trinity College.

But none of it feels real to me.

Less than an hour ago I went to the bank and picked up the IE£85.00 that I’d ordered so that I’ll have some spending cash with me when I arrive in Dublin. Irish currency is colorful and attractive, a lot more interesting than American currency. It looks something like play money, but the fact that it is worn and wrinkled convinces me that perhaps it is honest cash after all.

On her way home from work, Jennifer stopped at a produce stand and bought two bags of English peas. This things are huge! Monstrous! They’re as long and thick as my finger, and break open with an audible *snapping* sound; and inside are the peas themselves, sometimes as big as marbles, sometimes as small as pencil points, and all of them sweet and delicious. I’m sitting at my computer, writing this, seated next to the woman I love and who still surprises and amazes me on a daily basis, and eating English peas by the handful.

That is what feels real to me right now.

Angry Candy

One morning, in cold blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree; — hung it with tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart; — hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence; — hung it because I knew that in so doing I was committing a sin — a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it — if such a thing were possible — even beyond the reach of the infinite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God.

Edgar Allen Poe, "The Black Cat"

Tuesday.

After a long day at work I drove nearly a full hour to the hospital in Davis to work out. When I entered the cardiac rehab room, where those who participate in the Healthy Weight Program work out, I told the trainer that my gout was flaring up pretty badly and that I would not feel comfortable on the treadmill that day. I wanted to stay on the elliptical walker and possibly the stepmill and stationary bicycles. The trainer agreed that it was a good plan, so after ten minutes of stretching and chatting with the other members of the program, I got on to the elliptical walker and began to do my routine.

Twenty-five minutes into it, I had to stop. One of the trainers was telling an amusing story about something that had happened to him in San Diego, but I could not concentrate; I had become overwhelmingly nauseous. I excused myself, and went into the bathroom and kneeled over the toilet for a good five minutes, my stomach trying to heave up its contents but not quite making it. When at last I gave up, I went back out. My blood pressure was taken — it was low, normal numbers for a normal person, but alarmingly low for someone who tends to run a little hypertensive like me. The trainer told me to rest and to head home when I felt more steady. I agreed.

But that’s when I started having chest pains. The trainer was alarmed and walked me to the emergency room. The doctors looked at me, prodded my sternum, took a chest X-Ray, did an EKG. My chest X-Ray looked normal (though the doctor expressed concern over some patches she found on my lungs near my heart, then suggested that it was probably just scar tissue left over from thirty years of asthma — it didn’t look serious, certainly nothing like pneumonia), and my EKG was normal. The doctor said it was Reflux and sent me home to a Jennifer who was worried that I was an hour later than I had said I would be.

Wednesday.

A pretty normal day. My gout is still flaring up but not overwhelmingly so. I thought that maybe I’d go work out again that night. Circumstances being as they sometimes are, I couldn’t find time that night, and I went home to Jennifer, who was sick with a cold. We had visited the house and observed its progress. I had slight nausea during the day and didn’t eat much, but I didn’t worry about it.

This morning.

I woke up with a migraine. Not a killer one, not painful enough to keep my home, but bad. But on top of the migraine, the gout in my right foot was flaring badly, to the point where I nearly cried out whenever I stepped on it. Jennifer and I drove to Starbuck’s in separate cars, as we often do before work, and the pain was enough to make me cry out every time I stepped on the brake pedal at every stop sign and red light. After our breakfast, a latté and a scone, I decided that I’d better work from home today and try to get an appointment with my doctor.

Throughout the day, things got worse. My head continued to throb, my foot continued to pain me. I called the doctor’s office and made an appointment for this evening at 5:40. I also called the pharmacy and refilled a number of prescriptions.

This evening.

The doctor looks at my foot and says, "Yep, that’s gout." She prescribed some medication for me, something that apparently has some nasty side effects. I told her about what had happened at the workout room on Tuesday night, and she expressed concern that my heart rate slows down and my blood pressure drops whenever I work out. "It’s not normal," she said, and told me that she thought I might have a blockage near my heart. We scheduled an appointment for a treadmill test in early May, just to make sure.

I drove from the doctor’s office to meet Jennifer at our weekly Weight Watcher’s meeting. I’d lost ten pounds over the past month; good news. Then I told Jennifer what the doctor had told me. "Did you ask about biofeedback?" she asked, reminding me that I had thought to do that to help my migraines and my gout and my blood pressure. "No," I told her. "I was too busy freaking out."

After the meeting, I drove to choir practice in Dixon, meeting Jennifer’s parents. Her father agreed to assist me in purchasing Jennifer’s wedding gift, and her mother complimented me on my weight loss — more good news. But during practice I began to feel faint and nauseous. My asthma began to flare, and my foot began to throb.

I wished for one day when I wasn’t dealing with asthma, hypertension, migraine, gout… or anything else.

After choir practice, I left the church, shivering. I’d started having chills. I turned the heater in my car up to full blast, and that helped. Then I drove to the pharmacy and spent sixty-five dollars on medications to keep me breathing, medications to keep my head pains low, medications to keep my heart pumping at normal pressure. The gout medication was new, and the pharmacist needed to do a consultation.

"Look at the instructions," he said. "Take two tablets now, and one tablet every one to two hours thereafter until you experience relief of pain or until you start vomiting. Hopefully," he added with a wry grin, "you’ll experience relief before you experience vomiting."

I thanked the pharmacist. Then I made one more purchase and I left and headed out to my car.

Inside my car, I unwrapped the candy bar I’d bought and ate it. It had chocolate, coconut, and a cherry filling; three of my favorite flavors. I have no idea how many calories were in it, nor how many grams of fat, nor whether it had any dietary fiber — I crumpled up the wrapper and threw it away before even looking at the label. I couldn’t calculate the points on it, so I had no idea if it would be detrimental to my weight loss. I didn’t care.

Poe’s Imp of the Perverse took over. I bought the candy and ate it for no other reason than because I knew it was bad for me, because it was loaded with calories and fat and probably bad for my heart, if I do indeed have a blockage.

That’s why I ate it.

Candy never tasted so sweet.

Calendar Watching

Things kind of settled down for awhile. I got engaged, I got a new job in a new career field, and I moved to a new town. Then, for a few months, things sort of settled into a new pattern. Jennifer and I lived together, I’d drive the hour to work and back each day (or fly up to Portland), every weekend we’d drive out to the site of our new house and take pictures to put up on the website. But on the whole, things were pretty stable.

But now, once again, things are starting to get exciting. It’s like the second of two windstorms; or, better, yet, the period of calm routine was more like the eye of the hurricane. The house will be finished and ready for us to move into in two weeks; in just about a month I’m flying to Europe; and in less than four months we’re going to be married.

It’s kind of like being at your desk at work and watching the clock, waiting for 5:00 to roll around so that you can go home and settle in for some serious television-watching or gaming.

Except that now I’m watching a calendar, not a clock. And instead of the boring meeting that lies between me and going home, is the move the lies between me and my trip and the wedding. While I’m really looking forward to being in the new house, I’m not at all looking forward to the actual move itself; I’ve always hated moving, and I doubt that I will ever be the kind of person who will ever like the process of putting stuff in boxes, lugging them around, and then taking the stuff out of the boxes again. But maybe that’s just me.

When I worked at the University, I had a five minute commute from home to work and back again — on a rough traffic day, my commute might have lasted fifteen minutes. Often, I simply walked to work; that way, if I left early enough, I could stop at a downtown café and get a cup of coffee or tea and read over a book or a newspaper before walking the rest of the way to work. I think that is one of the things I miss most about working at the University; that and the learning and training opportunities I gave up for a bigger paycheck and a cooler-sounding title.

So the countdown continues. E-minus 30 days and counting. Less than two weeks until we move. Less than four months until the wedding. All of this is still overwhelming but I can’t help but be excited. I still feel woefully unprepared for my trip to Europe — I need to finalize my route, I need to make sure my equipment is up to snuff, I need to… you know how it goes) but I know I’ll be just fine and that I’ll have the time of my life.

When I worked as a secretary at the University, I would watch the clock and wonder what I would do after five o’ clock in the evening. Now I watch the calendar, and wonder what I will do with myself after the wedding, when all of our major planning projects — wedding, house, trip, move — will be over. I’ve been fantasizing already — I’ll have more time to write, to game, to simply sit down and watch the old horror movies that I love. But life has a funny way of continuing to throw new curve balls at you, and, somehow, I think that we’re never going to run out of ways to keep ourselves insanely busy.

E-Minus One Month

Warning. Convoluted logic and unmarked segues ahead.

        My tickets for Europe arrived in the mail today. For some reason it seems very odd to me that I’ve been planning on this trip for nearly three years, and now it’s finally going to happen. It hasn’t seemed very real to me yet, until today when I held the tickets in my hand. My itinerary looks something like this:

  • Saturday, May 5, 2001:Fly from San Francisco International airport and arrive in London
  • Sunday, May 6, 2001: Fly from London to Dublin, Ireland
  • Sunday, June 3, 2001: Fly from Amsterdam to San Francisco (with a 1.5 hour layover for customs in Washington, D. C.)

        There’s about a month between my arrival in Dublin and my departure from Amsterdam that I’ll be spending wandering around: Ireland, England, Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. There’s a lot of planning that I still need to do, and with the move happening in less than two weeks, I’ve had quite a bit on my mind. Fortunately, with this on-line journal entry system that I created for myself a couple of years ago, I’ve got a great tool for updating and editing my journal on-line; all I need to do is find cyber-cafes in Europe where I can have web access and all will be well.

        I’ve also finally been able to return to the Healthy Weight Program at the hospital. With our release finally finished at work and my travel brought back down to reasonable levels, I’m finally finding time to actually get back into a regular workout schedule. It’s funny that all of the trainers at the program remember me, as do the other members of the program. And they always ask me the same things: "How is the house coming?" and "How is Jennifer doing?" and "How is the new job?" I give them the details of my life, and pester them for details of theirs, and exercise heartily. I’m hoping that in the one month that’s left before my trip, I can get myself into at least a little better shape than I am now.

        I’m excited about my upcoming trip, but I’m pretty nervous about it as well. I suppose that a large part of my anxiousness has more to do with my normal tendency to imagine the worst about everything: what if I get over there and have a severe asthma attack and wind up in the hospital? What if I get lost in Amsterdam and miss my flight back home? What if all of my belongings get stolen on a night train from Italy to Switzerland? All possibilities, of course, but none of them very likely.

        So I’ve been reading up on Europe; Bill Bryon’s Neither Here Nor There has been a great source of inspiration, and so has Rick Steves’ Europe Through the Back Door. I’ve participated in on-line forums at Eurotrip, and I’ve talked to a lot of people who have made the same sort of journey. And yet, I feel so unprepared. I’ve never been to Europe, of course; I don’t know any languages outside of English (aside from a few simple phrases such as je ne parles pas Français, which I believe means "I do not speak French".

        But in spite of my worries, I know that this trip is going to be fun and important for me — probably even life-changing. It’s in my nature to be anxious about these things. And somehow, they always turn out just fine.

        On another note, one of my other pipe dreams has come true, and I’ve finally gotten around to making The Big Leap from Windows to Linux — this computer I’m running at the moment, in fact, is running Red Hat Linux 7.0 (it’s really a dual-boot machine with Windows 2000, but I haven’t started up Win2K on it for a couple of days now). So far, I love Linux much more than I do Windows; it just seems a lot more intuitive to me (and it gives me a lot more power over this computer, as well as plenty more ways to break it). As a Linux evangelist, I felt it was my duty to suggest to Jennifer that when we install our home network in our new house next fall or so, she should switch to Linux as well. Our server will probably be a Linux server after all (at least it will if I have my say — FreeBSD is fine but I want to have Java EE running as well as an Oracle back end if possible, and there is no reliable port of JSEE to FreeBSD, go figure), so it only makes sense. Jennifer sniffed haughtily and said, "I’m happy with Windows, I know Windows, and have no intention of ever switching." Perhaps, though, she can be converted from the Dark Side. As a co-worker of mine told me when I worked at the University, "If Windows 95 was good enough for Jesus, it’s good enough for me."

        Perhaps. I suspect, though, that Jesus would probably have been an open-source platform kind of guy.

Mutant Fungus from Outer Space

If you see it on the TV news, it must be true.

According to a report on Channel 12, a UPN affiliate here in Portland, one of the grave dangers of the de-orbit of the Russian space station Mir is the possibility that mutant fungus growing on the surface of the space station may pose a serious biological risk. I didn’t actually watch the news show itself, figuring that the teaser commercial during Star Trek: Voyager was probably more than enough. Especially since I haven’t been able to follow up on the story on any of the news sites I frequent. And you’d think that a story this big would be all over CNN, MSNBC, Space.com, or at least the Weekly World News.

Strangely, though, I can find no further coverage of this breaking story. Perhaps the fact that the surface of the Mir chunks will be sterilized by the heat of re-entry has something to do with it?

So, I’m sitting here now, trying to figure out which is weirder: Oregon, or people in general.

Point. There is an adult bookstore set to open in Washington County, Oregon. Because people are people, there are large protests naturally scheduled. Protests at adult bookstores (or against convenience stores that carry adult magazines) are pretty regular events. It’s as natural as sales managers promising software products that are technologically years beyond what humanity is capable of producing. What makes this protest different, though, is that the organizers say that they will be taking license plate numbers of the people who go to the store, finding out contact information, and getting in touch with their families.

Is it just me, or is that sort of intimidation just as immoral as these people believe these adult bookstores are? I’m not the kind of person who would frequent this kind of store on a regular basis (only once or twice, I swear!), but this sort of thing almost makes me want to go there, just so I can be there to hear Jennifer say something like, "Yes, he was picking up a few things for me" when they call her on the phone. I would really like to be there for that. Yes, indeed.

Now Oregon is also considering closing its nude beaches. I have nothing against nude beaches — I don’t have any feelings towards them either way, really. But I always worry when government of any sort gets involved in trying to legislate morality like this. Funny how the people who are often so unwilling to trust the government with their money are so eager to trust the government with their souls.

Yet at the same time, there are big protests by college students who are opposed to the cutting of college funding. I heard a speech by one protester on Public Radio this morning which decried the governor for being out of the state. What polarity! I would normally think that Oregon is just plain odd, but then I remember that California legalized medicinal marijuana in the same election where we outlawed providing educational and medical services to children of illegal immigrants.

The only conclusion I can reach is that it’s people that are weird. People in general, not just people of one state or another.

But back to the mutant fungus from outer space.

I am a bit fan of SETI — the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. I am of the school of thought that there are certainly other forms of intelligent life in the universe. They may be rare, but they are certainly there. I don’t believe that any extraterrestrials we find will look like human beings with funny foreheads, as in Star Trek; in fact, I doubt we’ll even recognize them as intelligent life forms at all. As my favorite comic philosopher, Calvin, once said, "I think that the surest sign of intelligent life is that none of it has tried to contact us." Somehow, there’s a common assumption that alien intelligences would be somehow superior to us in technology and in their civilization.

As for me, though… Well, I’m convinced that if there is any intelligent life out there, it will be just as weird as we are.
There’s a weird sort of comfort in that. Don’t you think?

Primitive Man, Primitive Code

This is the scene:

The database lives at the top of a tall hill surrounded by a moat filled with monsters and dragons. As you climb the hill you fight off soldiers armed with crossbows, swords, and tight security packages. The database is inside a castle, and any attempt to breach the castle wall is met with vehement resistance; dragons and carnivorous plants block the way. When you get through the door, a powerful wizard demands that you answer three questions correctly and perform a heroic task before he allows entry. "What is the user name? What is the password? What is the global alias? Now you must slay the mightiest ogre in the land."

When you have answered the questions properly and slain the ogre, the wizard tells you, "Very well, you have been granted access to the wisdom of the database. But you must approach only along this path. Stray off the path, and your code will crash, and there will be much woe within the company."

Let’s assume for a moment that your horse actually can make it along the path. You reach the database, and you ask your question: "Oh, wise database, please select all of the users who have registered with us over the weekend."

The database replies, "kasdhf293847i1 09384rv hkqsdf".

The database is wise, you see.

This is why it’s called an Oracle.

But let’s get back to that horse. And let’s call it, "Perpetual Horse Perambulating", or "PHP" for short. The problem here is that given the paths that the powerful wizard (known as the DBA, just for the heck of it) has defined are not compatible with the horse. In other words: we PHP developers were told that in order to make this project work on our new platform, we must rewrite the PHP code in order to work with the Oracle database through certain restrictions that he (in consultation with the platform engineer — another type of wizard, somewhat akin to a wizened alchemist) has defined. Simple INSERT and DELETE commands aren’t good enough for our database. It insists on blocks of customized insertion code called "primitives".

The Oracle is a finicky Oracle.

Unfortunately, PHP isn’t set up to talk to these primitives. So we need to hack at PHP a bit and make it work. Shorten the legs a bit; lengthen the tail; dye the mane; chop off its head and replace it with a tiger’s head. But that involves messing around with source code that the other PHP developer and I are just uncomfortable touching.

I have this vague memory of my first job ever, working for a large aerospace company, building a little program (in a commercial product which is still around, though it’s no longer the Big Kid On The Block, the way that it used to be) to make the database talk to these punch cards that the Navy insisted were the most efficient means of communication. Things were easy back then. Or, at least, easier. When I sized the project at taking six weeks, the manager was annoyed. When I announced that it was ultimately impossible since the Navy was sending us sixty-seven essential bits of data and the database could only take sixty-four, I found myself shunted off rather quickly to a new department. Back then there was no Oracle, there was no PHP, there was no web. Things were simpler.

And my mind wanders back to even more ancient days. What were things like in the caveman days? Did Og say to Ooog, "Club no longer work, not compatible with newer model mastadon. Fod."? And did Ooog reply, "New mastadon crash today, kill three hunters. Double fod."? Of course they did. Some things just never change.

So here I sit in Portland once again (helpful note: when your manager says, "This is your last week traveling out of state", what they really mean is, "You’ll have at least two more weeks of this"), with Og and Ooog, trying to pound PHP into understanding primitives so it can talk to the Oracle database. Well, pulling information out of the database is easy; but putting information into it is a bear. In a meeting we had with the DBA, the DBA explained his proposed schema to us, and it made us queasy. Then the DBA chuckled, "I sure don’t envy you guys. Maybe we’ll just give up on PHP and seek out a Perl solution."

In general, I like this web programming thing. I love building databases and making websites that talk to them. But there are times when I feel like grabbing Og’s Club 2.01b and pounding the hell out of my computer…