I’m not dead. Not anywhere close to dead. Haven’t been sick. Haven’t been going through anything particularly rough. I moved, and that changed so much about my regular schedule that blogging sort of fell by the wayside.

I had thought about writing about so many things, but then I never made time to do them. Several months ago I had so much to say about Hilaria Baldwin. I had never even heard of her before everyone was talking about how she was pretending to be from Espain. There are definitely different levels of pretending to be from somewhere else. When I am in NYC and someone asks me where I am from, I will say “Albany,” no matter where I am actually living at the time. The kid who sat behind me in eighth grade English pretended that he was from Alberta. Someone I grew up with started pretending to be from one county north of where we lived, but this is sort of understandable if you are trying to be fancy and you are really from Albany Schenectady. Putting the whole fake-Spanish thing aside, Hilaria Baldwin named her first two children after Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and then gave up on the theme.

If anyone finds this blog after following the link on my LinkedIn profile and came here expecting serious business updates, you might be disappointed by the fact that I am posting about very stale news about a minor celebrity.

However! This blog is very useful! Which is why I am finally updating it today. On Friday I was working and doing work-stuff, and I was getting a really stupid error. My data structure was full of nonsense, and it was very clear that things had gone extremely wrong. Normally what one does in the software biz is to google the error message. But in this case, there was no error message. There was just mangled data. I bravely googled some key features of the nonsense. You probably see where this is going. About halfway down the first page of search results was a link to this very blog. Long story short, this sort of nonsense happens if you don’t check that the thing that you’re conditioning on actually exists before you start seeing if it applies to stuff.

In other serious business news, I am helping to build a data warehouse! So far it is not living up to my dreams, but if the performance gains are something as simple as “still runs slowly but does not time out with a 502 error,” I will probably take it. Perhaps vendors of business intelligence software will find this blog when I reach out to them about buying some software. Hello vendors! We have promised everyone that this data warehouse is going to solve all the problems that we have not been able to solve by trying to run analysis queries on the production database. My secret suspicion is that this is going to turn out sort of like a rich parent buying a very powerful sports car as a birthday present for a 16-year-old who doesn’t know how to drive. Hashtag big data! Considering how much we already pay for SaaS, might as well get us a nice data warehouse.

In less serious, less business news, I have too many hobbies and do not allocate time to them appropriately. This weekend I knit the sleeve of a sweater, and now I have to rip it out and start over because I was not getting row gauge. I find this crazy because I was getting stitch gauge, but row gauge was so far off that the sleeve was almost three inches too long by the time that I realized where all this was heading. This time spent on the ill-fated sweater could have instead been spent working on getting my robot to draw cool things or setting up one of my Raspberry Pis to supervise various IoT devices.