It was slightly less fuck o'clock in the morning when I shambled in to work on Friday. I was contemplating dropping the heaviest of my things at my desk before going to the departmental all-hands in the auditorium of the executive building, but then I saw Purple shambling forth. "Yo!" I called, and he waited for me to catch up with him, scowling in the not yet burning light of midmorning.

( All-hands. )

( Helldesk software meeting. )

Eventually I did get a good look at the time and I needed to rush back to my proper end of campus.

( Rainbow tables beer bash & dinner. )

I woke up a few minutes before the alarm was set to go off. I'm not sure if it actually did. I was out the door fairly promptly, and beat traffic in to work. I set myself against the task of attempting to replicate the structure of the old database in the new tool, and found myself asking many questions (many rhetorical, and moderately profane) about the designers of the new thing. Ahh, the honeymoon phase of a new tool, marked as it is by excessive sugar consumption (honey) and rude gestures to the program (moon). I also filed a bug, P0 catastrophic, against the old tool. I keep saving that for best.

Expected: selecting an arbitrary value from Company, Product, or State (individually or in combination with other items) would be searchable.
Actual: selecting arbitrary values from any of Company, Product, or State makes any search fail to run.

Expected: possible to use the Clear Filters operation.
Actual: the only way to clear values from any of Company, Product, or State is to refresh the page.

Rather than actually repairing this, I'd just like the contents of all the tables in .csv format, along with a diagram of the table relationships.

There was an all-hands early, which was why I was in at that hour. I might as well get the good commute and score a few hours of near-silence.

I found a seat next to Mr. Wizard Beard. I peered around for Purple but I didn't see him. It was equal odds whether he'd be on site or not.

Eventually it came to be Q&A time. I raised my hand for the microphone, and (hands starting to slowly turn to ice) rehearsed what I'd say. The bored-looking guy whose face reminds me a little of Shawn made some arcane signal to the guy covering the other half of the hall, and shortly an older man was behind me with a wireless stick microphone, avuncular and reassuring.

"I know this is somewhat of a squeaky wheel question, and I know a lot of people have been working very hard on improving this," I began, the first few words clipped off in the ears of the room as the mixer played catchup. "But how soon do you think [helldesk software] will be as functional as [beloved old zilla install]?" I handed back the microphone. If I was in trouble, so be it.

I got spontaneous applause and a wave of laughter. "That was a great question," the avuncular man told me in my ear, suddenly personally warm in a way that outshone his professional easiness.

The CEO indicated that this was a very important question to have asked, and put me at ease that I was not going to be in trouble. As for the substance, he was going to punt to the financials guy, but he saw the CIO there in the back of the room...

Later, my teammate would tell me that the CIO had seemed dreadfully embarrassed to be asked. Let us be clear: the CIO was attending this meeting as any employee might, in the standing-room-only area. He wasn't in some sort of reserved area. He was not mic-ed up. (This subtlety was lost on the folks on the phone.) The avuncular man with the handheld mic presented it to the CIO. He mentioned that they definitely knew that the helldesk software was terrible, and that they were also afraid that it was so terrible that people had sort of given up on trying to make it better and give feedback on what would actually work for them.

The CEO addressed me and told me that squeaky wheel questions like that are necessary and to keep asking them. I flashed back a thumbs-up and heart-hands.

"If you hadn't asked that, I was going to," Mr. Wizard Beard told me.

There was a sort of buzzing in my brain that obscured most of my senses; I only got it back when I heard a voice say the words "squeaky wheel" -- it, of course, was Rubber Chicken Guy, wanting to make sure that our route to complain was as clear as possible.

My phone started buzzing a little, with my team cheering at me in slack, some Twitter high-fives, plus godtributes.

There were a few more questions and then the meeting was over. I kept the CIO in my line of sight and wandered over the few meters to where his little group was standing, to take my place in the little knot of people that served as an informal line. I had a very nice chat with Rubber Chicken Guy and his buddy, a fellow who'd just been moved in to my building and who helps run a demonstration lab at one of the work conferences.

Eventually the topic of the helldesk software came up, brought up by some fellow in glasses with grizzled hair. I was able to explain where you file a ticket against the software within the software, which was news to the CIO -- he'd mostly been relying on not!Facebook, and that was such a yellfest that he was burning out on listening at all. Drinking from the flamethrower.

I said some things that I hoped were full of empathy and understanding, that it's super hard emotional work to face people who are that angry and in that much pain. I feel like we bonded a bit. The other guy had his pet feature, which will make things better if they do it.

( Also the rest of my day. )

Tomorrow's going to be interesting. First there's a greater-departmental meeting. Purple and I are both in that greater department. Then there's a helldesk software thing. Following that will be the diversity-themed beer bash. I will be there, I will be queer, and I think I'll pass on the beer.

Called norabombay this morning; she was driving through some spotty coverage areas and it was difficult to hear her cunning fic plans involving a Sherlock + Vanyel the Last Herald-Mage crossover.

The work QUILTBAG club has started up meetings again. The guy who was doing most of the organizing got super busy, yadda yadda, and I think this is the first time I've been able to make a meeting in over a year (and mostly because of lack of meetings). It was lunch and mimosas (bring your own lunch) in the milkshake bunker. I arrived a bit late and slid in at the end of the table. A little later a few other people showed up, making about a dozen of us, and two non-dudes.

We toasted around the table. My friend the usual organizer is nervous of champagne bottles, and somewhere along the line I seem to have become decent at popping the cork with only a little bang and a breath of vapor, given a nice sturdy table to put the thing on. I opened the bottle of strawberry syrup, which made some interesting variations on mimosa.

We talked about where we'd been when we heard about the decision. I'd been at Open Source Bridge, of course, and I'd woken up around 7:30 and I saw the news on Twitter, and I was delighted. kareila came in and told me there was good news. We squeed about it for a bit. That, of course, was the morning after Thursday night; on Thursday night after the code push, some of us had wound up in kaberett and me_and and batrachian's hotel room talking until about two-ish, and I'd been up until about three-ish. So after chatting with kareila for a bit, I went promptly back to sleep.

I was not tight as an owl when I traipsed back down the hill, but I was a tad giggly.

I promptly found myself in the middle of the wrap-up meeting for the conference. I have proposed that the search for external speakers commence basically immediately, since that part takes the longest and caused quite a bit of angst last time around.

Readers, if you ever ask a group of which I am a member a question shaped like "What's the minimum amount of work I have to do in order to make my software 508 compliant? Asking for a friend!" -- please do not be surprised if you find yourself in receipt of a broadside from the Accessibility Cannon that begins something like "THE FUCK YOU SAY. HOW ABOUT YOU STOP TRYING TO DO THE MINIMUM AMOUNT OF WORK NECESSARY TO COMPLY WITH THE LETTER OF THE LAW AND START THINKING ABOUT 'HEY IF I'M A USER WITH THESE CONSTRAINTS, CAN I USE THE FUCKING SOFTWARE?' P.S. THINKING ABOUT IT AS IMAGES WILL DOOM YOU TO FAILURE, THINK ABOUT IT AS INFORMATION THAT THE USER CAN CONSUME IN A FORMAT OF THEIR CHOICE. ENJOY THE USER EXPERIENCE OFFICE HOURS." As it happens, I got a (public and somewhat defensive) response that they were doing things right really, it's just that they were in review phase and they wanted to know what to expect/brace for, and then I got a (directly to me, from someone else) response dancing around the concept that maybe I could be less of a blistering asshole about it up front.

I topped that off by running into someone who thought that the slide-video based training system was the equivalent of documentation, and wrote "$TRAININGVIDEOSYSTEM is not a substitute for documentation" several times on not!Facebook, with a few points which documentation has that $TRAININGVIDEOSYSTEM doesn't:
* Does not require registration
* Does not require completing a course
* Renders on a maximum number of browsers, ideally in plain ol' HTML
* Explains how to do various tasks without starting at 101 each time
* Doesn't require a title card, theme music, or (necessarily) images

At which point I paused, contemplated life for a bit, and then opened up the Aleve jar on the grounds that I was about to have cramps from hell, because clearly my period was about to hit. (And it did.)

Purple skived off early for the weekend when a friend of his wanted to do something. I didn't stay too late, and wound up back on the correct side of the Bay before Costco closed. I chatted with Nora again, who had made it home safely.

I have had various things from Abney Park in my head all day, because yesterday I introduced them to Mr. Sub-tle and the Dean. I have a long game in mind.

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/us/20090403iowa-release.pdf

The following is an informal summary of the ruling.

Dude. Even though this state has a large number of bigoted twits who want to keep the gays out of your marriage, it's still fucking unconstitutional, and you can go shove beans up your nose. Let me compare you to people who wanted to keep slavery and segregation around, and keep women from voting.

If you want to discriminate against a group, your ducks has better be very well in a row, and we're going to go right on down and show you where your ducks just ain't.

Same-sex couples can't reproduce? Shove that up your nose. Same-sex couples are adult humans who want to get civilly hitched, and this is about getting hitched, not about getting knocked up.

You want to claim that this is about denying marriage to same-sex couples, not about discriminating against gays and lesbians? Shove that up your nose too. Who the fuck else is going to want to get a same-sex marriage?

Gays and lesbians get discriminated against, despite being productive members of society. You can shove your "ex-gay" therapy up your nose too, because anyone with more brains than a turnip can see that it hurts more than it helps. Despite it being fucking illegal to discriminate in some cases, guess what, it still happens.

Traditional marriage is traditional. If you can't think up a better argument than that circular one, you can bite me.

For the childrens! Um, while we see that you claim that a mother and a father are the best, but let's take a look at REALITY, where all kids DON'T HAVE THIS.

How about no. Deadbeat parents, child molesters, and murderers can still get hitched. Let's think critically about this for a moment. If we don't deny marriage to these people, why again are we denying it to a group that's, see above, productive members of society?

Same-sex couples are still RAISING kids, without being married. Um. So you want to deny the benefit of having MARRIED parents to these kids, while claiming that all kids should have married parents? Bite me.

Lots of same-sex couples don't have kids. Opposite-sex couples who don't have kids can get married. Bite me.

Exactly how is same-sex couples getting married going to stop opposite-sex couples from getting themselves knocked up?!

Exactly how is same-sex couples getting married going to make opposite-sex couples stop getting married or raise the opposite-sex divorce rate?!

It would save the government money if less people got married. Very much so. But why stop at excluding the queers when you could also exclude religions you don't like or races you don't like? Bite me.

"The sanctity of religious marriage is threatened! Our world is crumbling around us!" ...uh, have you read the marriage law? Your religion can define "marriage" all it wants to. This law is about civil marriage. Bite me.

In conclusion: denying same-sex marriage to gays and lesbians is discriminatory, wrong, and above all, unconstitutional. Get hitched, guys and gals. And those opposed? Bite me.