“You Dog!” is a phrase my father frequently yells at the computer when it does something stupid and annoying while he is coding–especially if he wasn’t expecting it, but also sometimes when he does… He also likes to speak in the voice of the computer to personify it’s actions. The technique is both funny & effective to the point that I found myself doing it also to explain to him how I understand a concept. In fact, just today, I was explaining to a newer engineer at work how a transaction in SAP works by taking the tone of SAP… Weird how something can rub off quickly.
Anyway, working with my father can’t be considered anything but a treat or at least an opportunity that you don’t pass up. I felt so bad having to take phone calls for work or do stupid little tasks for work while on his time. My dad’s time is so much more valuable, and I kept having the guilty thought in that i imagine there are several thousand, if not more, coders out there who would jump for the opportunity to code with my dad, and here I was making him wait on me so that I can figure out how to get someone at the plant to pick up a damn containment berm before the driver had to leave…
What I liked about working with my dad was that he taught me a lot of very important and probably often overlooked concepts–or if not overlooked, not learned until you’re facing the problem, hopefully before the customer finds the problem. I learned about why ten years ago, toyotas started losing their break controls over and over–that has to do with the stack, which is the second set of memory that a program uses. He laughed as the light came on over my head when we navigated to the StackOverflow website–”ohh… ‘Stack’ overflow!”
We also spent some time making a “horse race” (actually, they were just circles) to get me some more exposure to using graphics & creating GUI’s.
With this, I’ve now been able to start a Tic Tac Toe game. I’ve got the board laid out and have a start button. This has been fun so far.
As for work, I should know more next week… But my boss is being very flexible with me now, so that’s great.
Don’t use floats for money!
Rex:
It is one of Rex’s jobs to give treats to the dogs every morning. One for Brusly, and one for Tails. One day last week, Tails got Brusly’s treat too, and Rex cried and cried until I went in and got a new treat for Brusly–he was more careful that time.
Rex also had a great weekend with Bobby. Bobby is Rex’s best friend! He was sooo excited to see Bobby when we picked him up from school last Thursday. He loves to ride on his shoulders to see cars & trucks..
This weekend, Rex came into the trailer, aka my office, and started screaming “I love YOU, mommy!”. I would repeat back to him, “I love YOU, Rex!”, and every time he would say it louder & louder. He also went poddy & poop in the poddy! The highlight of the weekend.
Leo:
Leo has started babbling, and I think he is calling me now with “Momomom!”. He’s also in the 8 month sleep regression, and thus he is waking up every 1.5-2 hours at night–it’s awesome…
I think Leo also crawled a couple steps actually on his hands and knees instead of doing his desperate wounded warrior crawl. He’s also standing on his own if he’s holding on to something stable–can’t pull up, but getting there.
Lastly, because he wakes up every 1.5-2 hours, he nurses every 1.5-2 hours at night, and he has 5 teeth, and likes to chomp as he falls back to sleep… Then I’m really up… ***