[random][geek] Life... Don't talk to me about life.

Sorry for the light posting - work's been somewhat crazy (good crazy, not bad crazy), and I've been working on a new version of the Mystery of the Haunted Vampire site. And while I'm still somewhat cranky about some stuff that went down at work last week, I'm now a little more sympathetic to our client's position. You see, the product that we're working on is to be used for a data-collection project related to agricultural pesticides, which means that our client is working on an agricultural schedule, ie. entirely at the whims of Mother Nature. Evidently, the weather in Western Washington has changed such that the apple growers are about to conduct their first major aerial spraying. Data collection will need to begin Right Now, or we run the risk of missing a significant phase of agricultural pesticide use in WA. Fortunately, our client has agreed to use this first round as pilot data. We're probably 95+% code-complete, so everything but uncommon use cases should be accounted for, but still... Personally I'd feel better with another couple of weeks to work on it, but evidently the client is happy with the software as it is now. And who am I to argue with a happy client? As for the MotHV adventures, let's just say that I'm learning lots about MySQL and PHP. The MySQL part is proving surprisingly frustrating - I haven't needed to write a whole lot of SQL code for a while, certainly not nearly as much as I was writing even 3 years ago, and MySQL's dialect of SQL is just different enough from Transact SQL to throw up more stumbling blocks than I'd have thought. It's kind of like having to speak a language that's closely related to but not exactly the same as a second language you haven't spoken in a while... Sort of like comparing your high school or college Parisien French to québécois (or in some cases, kreyòl ayisyen...) - it's almost what you know, but not quite. But it is a perverse kind of geeky fun, so I'll take it.