Random Story – My dream house?

This is just an odd little story from my life.

Waaaay back when I was in my 20s, for a while I had the idea of moving out to the Dakotas, or somewhere.  Someplace where my nearest neighbor would be ten or more miles away.  And instead of buying an existing house, I’d build one.  I don’t know how long I spent designing this dream house, but it was a relaxing, escapist fantasy.  Eventually, I moved on to other escapist fantasies, and I didn’t think of this dream house for twenty years or so.  But recently, I remembered it, so here is what I remember of what 25ish-year-old me thought my dream house would be like.

The front door would open into a mud room.  From this an inner door would open to the first floor, which – except for the mud room and bathroom – would be entirely open.  There would only be some pillars, and there would be couches or bookshelves to break up the kitchen, dinning area, and living room.  The other odd thing about the first floor, is that it would be a few steps down from the mud room.  I distinctly remember that being a feature, but I can’t remember why I wanted it.  I think there was some idea of it driving home the idea that the first floor would be a big open space.

The basic layout of the first floor would have the mud room in the center with the bathroom to the left and a pantry to the right.  The inner door from the mud room would open to the kitchen/dining area, with the back of the first floor being the living area.  Except for the front, the first-floor walls would be large windows, to let in as much light as possible.  On both sides and the back of the house there would be doors that would go out to a covered patio.  On the sides, this cover would maybe only be ten feet, but at the back it would be twenty or even thirty feet.

There would be a set of stairs on each side going up to the second floor, the one on the left would go to the front of the house, while the other would go to the back.  This would be because the second floor would be in two sections.  The front section – over the bathroom, mud room, pantry – would have another bathroom and the bedroom.  The back part – over the living area – would have a study and a spare room.  The central area of the second floor would be open, with a walkway and railing going all the way around.  There would also be several doors to go out to the deck that would go around three sides of the building. 

I think at some points in the plan there would also be a third floor – perhaps just covering the front or back half of the house – that would be just for storage.  There might even be one spot with an opening all the way down to the first floor, just to be extra cool, I guess.

The big open space open to the second, or third floor, for some reason I thought it was really cool.  And I think that was the whole point of the steps down, just to make it seem even bigger.  I’m not sure why I thought that was important. 

That’s as much as I remembered.  But if I had to build this now, what would I change?  First off, the steps down into the main room.  I could live without them now.  Also, while having a big, two or even three-story open space would be cool, I don’t really feel the need.  I could still see a little open space on the second floor, just above the dining area, but it wouldn’t be necessary.  Instead of a third floor, those storage rooms could just go on the second.

I don’t remember where the garage was in the original plan, but I think it was detached just because that’s what I grew up with.  Now, I’d rather have an attached garage.  At first, I thought about swapping the mud room and the bathroom, but the first-floor bathroom would only be a half-bath, so instead of a squarish mud room, there could be a stubby panhandle hallway leading to the attached garage.  I also don’t know if I thought of it all those years ago, but this new house would have solar panels.  And depending on how bad the winters are wherever I built this, I’d probably cut back on the windows.  Unless there are some really well insulated windows that work as well as walls to keep the warmth in. 

I think the only other change I’d make would be the garden.  I’m sure there was one in the original plans, but now it would be much larger.  And there would be a greenhouse, possibly attached to the house either behind the garage or on the other side of the house, depending on how the house was orientated.  The greenhouse would let me grow stuff through the winter as well as warm weather crops.  And I’m sure I had house plants in the original plans, but now there would be far more of them.  Possibly even used with bookshelves to break up the first floor into little nooks. 

So that’s my dream house.  And unless I win the lottery, that’s all it will be. 

Short story – “The Santa Shakes”

“The Santa Shakes”

“Hello.  This is Amy at Doctor Bodden’s office.  How may I help you?”

“Hi.  This is Doug Ryan, and I guess I need to make an appointment.”

“Okay.  What’s seems to be the problem Mister Ryan?”

“I’m not sure what it is, but for the last few days I’ve felt rather … odd.  But not in like a bad way.  I don’t know.  It’s rather hard to describe.”

“Is it like there’s been an uncomfortable weight on you that’s suddenly been removed, but you’ve grown used to the weight so it’s absence is weird?”

“Yes.  Yes.  That’s it exactly.”

“Okay.  Something that’s pretty common around this time of year is Christmas Music Withdrawal.  People hear nothing but Christmas music for two months and they grow accustomed to it, then Christmas happens, and then it’s cold turkey back to normal music.  For most people, this odd feeling goes away after a few days.  What I can do, is I can pencil you in for an appointment for … Wednesday.  If you’re feeling better by then you can cancel, but if you still feel odd, the Doctor can check to make sure it isn’t something else.  How does that sound?”

***

As someone forced to listen to Christmas music against my will, I’ve more or less trained myself to tune it out.  The last day I worked before Christmas, I was thinking about how soon I’d just have to tune out the normal bland music, when I joking thought about people having withdrawal symptoms from quitting Christmas music cold turkey.  The original version had someone call the doctor and the doctor telling them to listen to “Frosty the Snowman” twice and call them in the morning, along the lines of the old joke of “Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.” But how often do you actually talk to the doctor when you call the doctor’s office?  In addition, I wasn’t sure where exactly Christmas music fit in the range of things that you should quit cold turkey and what you should wean yourself off of.  I just wanted to make a silly little joke, but then I had to try to be realistic about it.

Short story – “A Collapse We Can Dance To”

“A Collapse We Can Dance To”

In the disturbingly near future

Jodi stopped her cart and listened for a few moments.  Turning to her wife Emily, she asked, “Did this song just have something about ‘sledding pine trees?’ As if the trees were on sleds going downhill?”

Emily dropped a bag of carrots into the cart.  She shrugged and said, “Hey, if you tell AI to write a new Christmas song, it just grabs everything – snowmen, presents, reindeer, mistletoe, and, um, a partridge in a pear tree – and jams it all together.  Resulting in an incoherent mess where pine trees enjoy sledding.”

Jodi sighed, and starting walking again.

“I’ll say this,” Emily said, “at least it’s different.  You’ve never had to work some place like this where you want to blow your brains out after listening to different versions of the same ten songs hour after hour after hour.” Emily listened for a moment and started swaying.  “At least it’s got a good beat.”

Jodi snorted.  “It heralds the collapse of society, but at least we can dance to it.”

Ads for AI

I watch a probably unhealthy amount of YouTube.  And since YouTube likes to put fourteen ad breaks in a twenty-minute video, I see lots of ads.  The vast majority of these ads are for things I have no interest in, or no use for, or are just stupid.  So I do my best to ignore them.  I would skip all that I could, but I do try to watch some so the creators get some revenue. 

A month or so ago, it seemed to me like I was seeing a lot of ads for some AI thing or another.  To the point it felt like a third of the ads were for AI.  So I decided to keep track of what I saw in the next 100 ads.  Out of those 100 ads, twenty-six were for random things like furniture stores or whatever.  Nineteen were for cars, while only ten were specifically for AI, although there were seven more for other tech stuff that might have had some AI in them.  It wasn’t a third, but it did seem like that night when I was tracking ads there was a lull in the AI ads.  Because in the weeks after I tracked the ads, it seems like it’s back to a quarter, at least. 

One of the new AI ads I’ve seen, is something I can’t get my head around.  Apparently, there’s now a washer-dryer that’s AI powered, or something.  Why?  The only thing I can think of, is they have sensors in the machine that allow you to basically hit a button and it will wash your clothes until they are clean, and then dry them until they are dry.  Instead of having a standard wash-dry cycle that you hope gets them clean and dries them completely, this washes and dries only as long as necessary.  That makes sense because that can save water/electricity/time.  If they called this IntelliWash, that would be great.  But since everything now has to be AI, they have to call it AI Wash, or whatever.  Now I know that there are some cases where “some type of AI” is just the right tool for the job.  The problem is, 99% of the stories we hear about AI is the “stolen hammer being used to pound in a screw” stories, so why would you want to call your fancy computer algorithm AI?  Can’t we find some other term for the good AI usages?

The other type of AI ads I’ve been noticing lately, have some business person in a meeting or whatever going, “Me no understand me job.  What me do?” And their AI assistant or whatever goes, “You should buy at $47.” And the person parrots back, “Me buy forty-seven.” I don’t know if it’s a devious scheme by the AI companies to try to tell other companies that “Your employees are complete morons who can’t do anything without AI.  You should just have AI do everything.” Because they hope that eventually AI will run everything, and when AI runs everything, those who control the AIs will control everything.  It’s either that or as an AI company, they don’t understand how businesses … business. 

Random Story – Where’s the fire?

This is just an odd little story from my life.

I work until 10 at night, so I drive home in the dark.  And I go on windy back roads that go through a bunch of woods.  And I rarely see other cars, but I usually see a few deer.

A couple years ago, I was going home when I saw something through the trees.  It was this triangular, reddish shape that seemed to waver.  I only saw it for a second or two before it was obscured by trees, but my brain figured it must be a house on fire up ahead and I was seeing the flames reflecting off the smoke.  This concerned me for several reasons.  First off, I didn’t want anyone to lose their house.  Also, a few miles ahead was this small village I went through where a couple of my uncles live.  So I hoped it wasn’t one of their houses.  But I also worried that the road might be blocked by firetrucks, and depending on where they were, I might have to backtrack several miles to find a way around them. 

All these thoughts hit me in that first second or two, and in the next few minutes – as I caught further quick glimpses of this thing – I grew even more concerned.  Because I hadn’t come to a massive house fire yet, meaning for me to see it from so far away it must be multiple houses on fire, but then why hadn’t any firetrucks come up behind me?  For such a huge fire, they would have called out several companies, and I’m pretty sure the way I was going was the fastest way for some of them to get there.

And then, I couldn’t see it any more.  I caught a glimpse of it through the trees, but then I went through a very windy part thick with trees, and when I came out, I couldn’t see it.  I get to the little village, looking all around but not seeing any fire, or firetrucks or anything out of the ordinary.  Wondering how I could have missed something that big.  I go through the village, and I’m a mile or two down the road – trying to figure out what I had seen – when I see it again.  Only this time, I can see it’s … the moon.

So, it was like a quarter moon that was still rising when I first saw it, which is why I only saw it as a triangular thing.  When the moon is on the horizon, it can be rather reddish, and this was a few years ago when Canada was on fire, so there was a lot of smoke in the air to make it even redder.  And then there were clouds.  It must have been a thin layer of clouds that blocked enough of the moonness to make it not obviously the moon.  Also, the different thicknesses moving in front of it gave it a wavering effect you’d expect from smoke billowing from a huge fire.  But this layer of clouds thickened to the point it blocked out all the moonlight – or at least enough that I couldn’t see it over my headlights – which is why I didn’t see anything for a couple of miles.  But then the clouds cleared enough for me to see that the reason there weren’t any firetrucks is because I confused the moon for a housefire.

My Trump Ballroom prediction

If the monstrosity is actually built, I’m betting that it will only be used a few times.  And someone at one of these events will report some of the issues with the building.  Given that it’s Trump, it will be hideously gaudy.  But there will also be odd things wrong with it.  Like, for some reason there will only be one bathroom and the gold-plated toilets clog every other use.  And half the building will be freezing while the other half is sweltering, and the only thing that can be done is to alternate which half is doing what. 

Come January 2029 when – hopefully – a Democrat is sworn in, they will have 8,000 other Trump fuckups to fix, so this ballroom will probably just be used for storage for six months or so.  Eventually, they’ll get a reliable building inspector in, who will almost immediately condemn it.  Like they’ll discover that these load bearing “marble” columns are just plywood with some cheap marble pattern stickers.  Given the shoddy construction, the only way it could cost $300 million is if the people building it were paid $20 a minute, or half the money for it “mysteriously disappeared.”

So this Democrat President will – after going through proper channels – have the building torn down.  The Republicans in Congress will decry the destruction of this “Wonder of the World,” but the President will hopefully utterly ignore them.  Once it is gone, they’ll dust off the blueprints of the East Wing – give it some updates – and build a New East Wing.  And hopefully it – and a new garden – will be ready for the President’s second inauguration in January 2033.

That’s one possibility of what will happen to the trump ballroom.  The other is that when – take your pick of any 100 impeachment worthy scandals – finally takes hold and it looks like he’ll finally be held accountable, Trump will “have a stroke” and will resign for his health.  And the first thing President Vance will do is pardon him, not because he did anything wrong, but to stop the meanie democrats from tormenting this sick, old man who, by the grace of God, is out playing golf just days after he was on his death bed.  But Vance is not Trump, and I’m betting that whatever corrupt schemes are involved with the ballroom won’t immediately transfer over, so it might not even get built and will just remain this blot on the landscape until the Democrat elected in 2028 eventually has the time to just build a new and improved East Wing.

Personally, I’m hoping for that second option, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Code Autopsy

A few months ago, I wrote a post about the new computer system we got at work.  Since the post was titled New and … worsened, you can probably guess that I had issues with it.  It seems that for every one thing the new system does better than the old, it does like ten worse.  And some of the worse things it does is, kind of odd.  Which is nice since it gave me another idea for a post.

To begin, I have to describe two things the new system does.  The first is it counts the money in the till.  This is pretty straightforward.  At the beginning of each shift we enter the amount of money in the till, and it just has to add on whatever we take in and subtract whatever we give out.  And when we get to a point, say twice what we started with, it pops up a message saying we have to do a drop.  To start the next transaction, we have to tap “Okay.” (An example of how the new system is worse, in the old system to do a drop I just had to hit like two buttons and enter a four digit code.  Now I have to hit like five buttons, and enter a dozen digit manager code.  So instead of doing three or four drops a night, now I just do one when I go on break.)

The second thing I have to describe, is we print a coupon on each receipt.  But instead of just having one coupon code THAT WOULD MAKE THINGS SO MUCH EASIER, each coupon has to be unique.  Meaning, for each transaction, our system has to call up the corporate system and ask for a unique code that will be recognized at every one of the thousand or so stores across the nation.  But sometimes, there’s a bit of a glitch somewhere in the system.  Either the corporate system is down, or there’s some communications issue, or whatever.  So the system will wait five seconds or so to see if it clears up, but if it doesn’t it will just print the receipt without the coupon.  Which makes sense since you don’t want the customer to just wait there for five minutes waiting for the problem to fix itself.

So those are the two issues I want to discuss.  Now, you’re probably thinking these have nothing to do with one another.  And you’d be right, except there’s something weird with our system.  See, if the communication system is down for whatever reason and the coupon isn’t printed, the “You have to do a drop” message won’t show up.  The first few times it happened, I figured I was missing something.  But communication glitches seem to happen two or three times each shift, so it wasn’t long before I noticed that these two things were somehow connected.  It took me a while to work out how they were connected, but I think what happens is there is a series of things the computer does after a transaction to set things up for the next.  And I think one of the last ones it does is to see if it needs to put up the “You have to do a drop” message.  But for some reason, when there’s a communications glitch, it ends up skipping the “Drop_Check_SubRoutine” or whatever.  It’s probably just one line of code that needs added, or fixed, that whoever designed the code never noticed because it worked 99.999% of the time.

All of this brings me to the idea behind the title of this post: Code Autopsy.  I’m sure that every corporation that has proprietary code for their stores/restaurants/warehouses whatever, there are lines of bad code that lead to weird/annoying/stupid problems that employees have just had to learn to live with.  Code Autopsy would be a show where a group of experienced coders are told of these problems, and then they go through the code to see what causes them.  And then, they see how to fix them.  Like I imagine the coupon/drop issue our system has could be fixed with one or two lines of code.  That’s probably all it would take.

Of course, there are several problems with this idea.  First off, few companies would be willing to have their code issues discussed in public.  They’d probably claim “proprietary” reasons, but really it would be the PR black eye of letting the world know they have “bad code.” Secondly, while this is my idea, I’d likely only watch the episode for the company where I work.  It’s an interesting idea, but not one I’d really be invested in.  Unless there’s a really big company with really fucked up code, it wouldn’t be a huge draw.