Friday, May 16, 2014
So I sez
The last few entries about laborers, sweat of brow, etc, were spun off by a tiny stupid internal struggle I'm having with professional pride. Or something like that. It doesn't remotely compare with the true soul-struggle of a business owner forced to violate his religion, but it's still a struggle.
Now that I've got the functionality of new courseware working reasonably well, publisher wants me to use the super-fashionable 'twitter bootstrap' stuff for styling. The whole JS/CSS/SVG setup is already annoying, as I've noted before. You can't build a self-contained product that's guaranteed to work on every proper system.
Tacking on an external library makes things even worse. Especially when the library is open-source with dubious rights that could be yanked at any time. I've seen several previously good programs ruined by breaking the self-contained EXE rule and hanging out with external libraries.
I keep trying to convince myself: It's NOT MY PROBLEM. It's THEIR PROBLEM. They're paying me (at least in theory) so I'm simply a bot serving their purposes.
Maybe it's time to rerun Chuck's Law, for my own benefit:
Back when I was teaching electronics, I endured a fellow teacher named Chuck, who had been an Army Tech Sergeant. Chuck loved to pin me down and tell endless boring stories about his Army days. Each story was about some Lieutenant or other boss giving stupid orders, and the climax of each story was always the same: "So I sez Ho Kay, we'll do it your way." And Chuck led the other underlings in following the order precisely, with no allowance for real conditions. Everything fell apart. The Lieut finally understood and countermanded his stupidity when confronted with concrete consequences.
So I sez Ho Kay, we'll do it Twitter's way.
There. I feel better immediately after writing it! Now I just need to close my eyes and hold my nose and get this part of the work done as quickly as possible, so I can proceed to less annoying parts.
= = = = =
Three fucking hours later: Done. Wasn't so bad after all. Must admit the result looks better even if it's disgustingly fashionable.
¶ 2:29 AM 
