My Embarrassing Story

As I said before, if I got my BlizzCon predictions wrong. I'd tell an embarrassing story from my past. I was right about getting a World of Warcraft expansion, and the Starcraft II: Heart of the Swarm news, but we didn't get a Diablo III release date (we did get the box art and collectors edition details). I'll tell the story of how I tried to make a webpage.

When I was younger, I used the computer and the internet all the time, but I didn't actually know anything in depth about computers. I wanted to make a webpage but I had no idea how to do it. I knew nothing about servers, DNS, etc. I also didn't bother trying to learn how to do it. No Google searches for me. So how did I do it?

I opened up Microsoft Word and I typed out everything that I would want on the webpage exactly the way that I wanted it. I added pictures. All sorts of stuff. When I finished and everything was exactly the way that I wanted, what would I do? How would I make this a webpage?

It's simple you see. You save and tell Word that you want to save it as HTML. I typed in the URL I wanted into the 'filename' box and hit save. I then opened up Internet Explorer and typed in the URL to see if it worked. It, of course, didn't. So I deleted the file from the computer and just left, ashamed.

You might think, awww....that's so cute. It's really not. You see, I was probably in seventh grade or so at the time. And the webpage, it was about Pokemon. I even had a picture of Charizard  in it. It was so great. It was so sad.

That is my story. That is my shame.

Work Frustration + 3 videos!

Calamity? Check.

Hilarious Dr. Who parodies on Community? Check

Pokemon fart jokes? Check.

Hilarious Tweets? You betcha.

Four things I didn't create? What is this? Tumblr? Let's get started.

I had one of those hard-on-the-brain kind of days at work today. All I needed to do was adapt some SQL code so that it would do something slightly different, right? Well, that would have been too easy. I started to read into the code before I tried to do it and it was the weirdest and seemingly dumbest thing ever.

(Don't worry, this doesn't get very technical.)

One of the most basic things you do with SQL is say, "I want to make a new table with the lines from this table, but only the ones that meet this certain criteria." After you do that, whenever you work with your new table, you don't have to re-specify those criteria. So why was this happening ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE IN THIS CODE.

There are very is ways to say, "I want all the lines that DON'T fall into these categories." So why did the person who wrote this do it in THE MOST CONFUSING WAY POSSIBLE. Allow me to explain. He made a table of all the thing that he doesn't want, left joined it with the original table under the criterion original.(unique identifier)=(stuff I don't want).(unique identifier) and then specified the criteria that he only wanted the lines where original.(unique identifier)!=(stuff I don't want).(unique identifier). I know most of you are confused by that and you think it's just because you don't know SQL. Well guess what, it's confusing to people who do know SQL also. It works, it's just bad.

And none of this is commented, none of it at all. To make sense of it, I had to PRINT IT OUT and WRITE ON IT WITH A PENCIL. I had to summarize sections of code so I knew what they meant. He created tables that he literally never used at all. They were just dropped at the end of the code. Which, by the way, isn't supposed to be done as

DROP TABLE1; DROP TABLE2; DROP TABLE3; ... 

It's supposed to be done as

 DROP TABLE1, TABLE2, TABLE3...;

Lastly, the names of the tables that were created were not helpful. Such tables were "BASE9", "BASE8", "BASE81", "BASE181", "BASE281",  and so on. Using the suffix 'BASE' is ok, but why not number them with 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on. It would work tons better for me.

It wasn't very fun. And, of course, none of it was commented. I just don't get it. Tomorrow, I'm going to rewrite the shit out of that code.