hardware sucks, software sucks, taxes suck
This morning, I stumbled out of bed and to my laptop, only to find the machine asleep. It wouldn’t wake, which told me that the battery was nearly empty. It was still plugged in, but the plug light was off. I unplugged and replugged it a few times, but nothing helped. I used Gloria’s brick for a while and just before leaving home gave it another go. This time, it worked.
My power brick is in poor shape, and is probably slightly dangerous. Tomorrow I should tape it, and soonish I should replace it.
I did a little bit of Rubric work tonight, adding some little user features. A number of people have suggested that clicking on the tags listed on the posting form should cause the tag to be inserted into the form for submission. I got that working in an ugly way, copying and pasting some code that has gone from “ready for refactoring” to “screaming for refactoring.”
There are two little bugs lingering, and I hope I’ll get them taken care tomorrow. I now list the tags used for this link by other users, but the list can get hidden by the form itself. Style is hard (let’s go shopping)! I also seem to have at some point in the past broken the code that fills in your existing tags if you try to re-post something you’ve posted in the past. Oops.
Gloria is working on an application for student loans, and it is freaking insane. It seems much harder, in fact, than filing our taxes was. It refers back to our taxes a lot, which wouldn’t be so painful if the PDF export from TurboTax (the only way to get the actual 1040, as far as I can tell) didn’t cut off the right .25” of the page. You know, where the numbers are.
Why should it be this hard? It’s wildly discouraging. It makes me angry at the whole government-education consortium. Boston U is now $40,000 per year, and even /asking/ for help from the government is like something from Brazil. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Signes, but you wanted a 4223B stroke 6, not a 4223 stroke B6. In fact, we’re going to have to levy a fine.”
I did get a fair bit of work done at work today, though, even if it ended up with a bizarre and critical bug left unfixed. I also made some progress in RE4, destroying “it” at the expense of many shotgun shells. I also gave in and sold some unfinished treasures.
I hope tomorrow is a joyful frenzy of bug fixing. That would be nice.