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seven words from metahacker
Jun. 18th, 2012 08:44 amRaise. Temper. database migration. Aroma. Adaptation. Celestial bodies. Language.
Raise: To work against gravity. To make your dough better through hard work. To ask for more money from an employer. To increase the stakes in a game of chance. These are all linked.
Temper: In *The Avengers*, Bruce Banner reveals his method for summoning the Hulk: he's always angry. Always. Sometimes I feel like that, but I'm glad it's not generally true. Specific things enrage me, not everything. Abuse of people or pets. Abuse of the public good. I shout more than I ought to.
Database Migration. Erm. In the sense that Ruby on Rails uses, which is a theoretically reversible schema change. There's this problem: the biggest and dirtiest database is for production. Sandboxes and alpha and QA and even customer preview have cleaner and smaller datasets. So when development tells me in my role as release gateway that a certain migration (which will enable and require a major code release) is going to take an hour or so... and it actually takes almost 4... I am miffed. The mismatch of expectations and reality was not helpful. And next weekend we move HQ to a new building, which will require me to work all weekend. And after that, jury duty. I need a vacation, and I can't afford to spend much on it.
Aroma: a fancy word for smell, usually meaning a good one, sometimes used in sarcasm. Last night there was curry, dal, dosas... all full of good aromas. Aroma is the harbinger of gustatory delight.
Adaptation: the central facet of successful life. The ability to make changes in response to your environment that lead to survival and success. Correspondingly, a procedure of transmuting a story told in one medium to another, often unsuccessfully. I just read Warren Ellis's _Red_, which turns out to have been improved by adaptation to the cinema.
Celestial bodies: anything outside of the Earth's atmosphere that we notice. Historically, the Sun, Luna, the planets out to Saturn, and a dozen handfuls of named stars. Now? Thousands of objects in our system, billions of stars, and hundreds of planets in other solar systems. Hardly anyone in, say, the 1970s, thought that there would be such a high proportion of stars with planets. I have high hopes for the infrared surveys turning up evidence of Dyson spheres...
Language: is a code, not a cypher. Systems for transferring meaning from one sophont to the next. Sometimes it appears straightforward, but even the most direct statements carry cultural baggage like Hannibal's elephants. Metaphors and similes are wonderful things. Neruda wrote: "Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos." Simple words, full of meaning.
Raise: To work against gravity. To make your dough better through hard work. To ask for more money from an employer. To increase the stakes in a game of chance. These are all linked.
Temper: In *The Avengers*, Bruce Banner reveals his method for summoning the Hulk: he's always angry. Always. Sometimes I feel like that, but I'm glad it's not generally true. Specific things enrage me, not everything. Abuse of people or pets. Abuse of the public good. I shout more than I ought to.
Database Migration. Erm. In the sense that Ruby on Rails uses, which is a theoretically reversible schema change. There's this problem: the biggest and dirtiest database is for production. Sandboxes and alpha and QA and even customer preview have cleaner and smaller datasets. So when development tells me in my role as release gateway that a certain migration (which will enable and require a major code release) is going to take an hour or so... and it actually takes almost 4... I am miffed. The mismatch of expectations and reality was not helpful. And next weekend we move HQ to a new building, which will require me to work all weekend. And after that, jury duty. I need a vacation, and I can't afford to spend much on it.
Aroma: a fancy word for smell, usually meaning a good one, sometimes used in sarcasm. Last night there was curry, dal, dosas... all full of good aromas. Aroma is the harbinger of gustatory delight.
Adaptation: the central facet of successful life. The ability to make changes in response to your environment that lead to survival and success. Correspondingly, a procedure of transmuting a story told in one medium to another, often unsuccessfully. I just read Warren Ellis's _Red_, which turns out to have been improved by adaptation to the cinema.
Celestial bodies: anything outside of the Earth's atmosphere that we notice. Historically, the Sun, Luna, the planets out to Saturn, and a dozen handfuls of named stars. Now? Thousands of objects in our system, billions of stars, and hundreds of planets in other solar systems. Hardly anyone in, say, the 1970s, thought that there would be such a high proportion of stars with planets. I have high hopes for the infrared surveys turning up evidence of Dyson spheres...
Language: is a code, not a cypher. Systems for transferring meaning from one sophont to the next. Sometimes it appears straightforward, but even the most direct statements carry cultural baggage like Hannibal's elephants. Metaphors and similes are wonderful things. Neruda wrote: "Quiero hacer contigo lo que la primavera hace con los cerezos." Simple words, full of meaning.
