And so but anyway, did I ever tell you about my most humiliating experience as a skilled and successful computer programmer?
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@GeePawHill Thanks a lot for sharing your great story!
@GeePawHill thank you for sharing this story with us
@GeePawHill Delightful thread -- and you lived to laugh about it! Also happy at the mention of Canadian icebreakers. My grandpa was a merchant sea captain and was responsible for delivering a much-needed icebreaker abroad during the war (to Russia, maybe?). Got a medal for it and they used his silhouette in a poster. Bc when you need an icebreaker, even when lots else is going on, you NEED an ICEBREAKER. 😸
@GeePawHill what a great story! I'll be using it to teach juniors about fun... And talking to your users before even planning anything 😉
@GeePawHill Thank you for the story!
@GeePawHill
Fantastic story!
Another way of summing up the issue: When doing data analysis, get real world data as quickly as possible
What an awesome story. And congrats on helping an icebreaker momentarily attain lightspeed!
@GeePawHill This is a great story. Thanks for sharing.
@GeePawHill a good read, you made my lunch break, thanks!
@GeePawHill A great story, and well told. Thank you for this!
Canada has serious ports that are, well, kinda up-north-ish. In order to get ships in to those ports, which include some significant manufacturing and other supplies, one must use a kind of ship called an icebreaker.
Icebreakers are, basically, a big-assed razorblade at the prow, and big-assed engines at the stern.
Being an icebreaker captain is one of the most stressful jobs you can imagine.
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@GeePawHill actually, icebreakers use thier mass to break ice. the engines push the dull prow on top of ice and ice gives in. there is also one icebreaker that goes sideways https://akerarctic.fi/arctic-passion/the-world-s-first-oblique-icebreaker/
You're working in harsh weather. You can't see shit. You have these client ships that are very slow and very large and very expensive. If you even *touch* one of the client ships, that's $3m, minimum, instantly.
An icebreaker would go right through an oil tanker, and come out the other side of it with a broken radar antenna, covered in oil.
And the icebreaker runs in front of the client breaking ice so it can get where it's going.
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There are three main modern tools you can use, versus the old days: You have a radar system, you have a speed log, and you have GPS.
All of those tools have serial outputs on them, good ol' RS-232.
So here was the concept: take a PC and make a custom "ice breaking" UI, taking input from the three devices, and rendering it in such a fashion that the icebreaker skipper could get all the info in one place.
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And I was sub-contracted to do that. It was about a six month long project. I wrote an entire windowing system on top of DOS to use VGA to show the display.
(I'm a good fucking programmer, and that's not the only time I've written a graphical UI from scratch.)
And. A comical note: about six weeks before the project was due, my hard drive died. And. My backup drive died.
All I had were some two-month old printouts.
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So, for my juniors, when I tell you "typing is not the bottleneck", I know what I'm fucking talking about.
It took me a couple of weeks to re-create 4 months worth of work. If I had to bet, I'd bet my second edition was *better* than the edition I lost.
So we come down to the day, and I am ready.
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First, I had to go before the admiral's board of the Canadian Coast Guard and give a demo.
*Second* comical note: the fucking app froze in the middle of the demo, and w/o in any way acknowledging this, I used it as an opportunity to demonstrate that even if we lost power, the app would restart correctly.
Yep. That's right. I rebooted the computer and startup.bat did its magic.
Anyway, the admiral's board is like, "cool, let's try it in the field."
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So I fly to Newfoundland, and I get on an actual icebreaker ship.
Oh my people, it was so fucking cool. Icebreakers aren't gigantic, like container ships or tanker ships, but they're *big*, just the same.
And the Canadian Coast Guard is a commercial service, not a military one, so even tho they spend months at sea, they take very good care of their sailors, so, broadly speaking, the place was all modern cons.
(You still have to take navy showers, but other than that.)
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Now. I was afraid of sea sickness. I'd been on fishing trips on the open ocean, and had been very sick. So I wore a patch.
You may not know this, but there are still Royal Navy traditions practiced aboard ships.
One of the important ones: there's always a comedy officer. Someone whose job it is to be funny, to make sailors smile.
You think that's silly, but sometimes these people are on board these ships for a *year*. It is important that they be amused.
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And the other Royal Navy tradition: Captains are inviolate commanders, at all times in all settings. They present "serious". They eat and drink separately from the crew. They have only three or four other officers that they ever get to, comparatively, relax with.
So, you have a comedy officer, and you have a captain, and the captain simply looks the other way when the comedy officer is up to their hijinks.
He *knows* the hijinks. He *sees* the hijinks. But he pretends not to.
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I'm up on the bridge, with my PC, connected to my three devices, and we're getting close to the ice.
Comedy officer comes up to the bridge, and *he* also has a sea-sickness patch.
Kids, the icebreaker, as I said, is not tiny. There's no tossing about in the waves. You do not need a seasickness patch.
Then he comes back an hour later, and now he's got *two* patches.
An hour later, he's got *four* patches.
Then he comes to the bridge and his whole jaw is covered with them.
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The captain is totally ignoring this guy. He's not even spozed to be on the bridge, let alone covered in little patches (just circular bandaids, actually). But the rest of the crew is laughing their ass off.
And it's *funny*.
I mean, yeah, I was embarrassed, but, whatever, I got it. I took off my stupid patch.
We're getting to the ice, and getting to the ice is so amazingly cool, I didn't even mind the comedy officer making me the butt of the joke.
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Now we're in the ice. We have a convoy of 3 container ships behind us.
If you stand at the stern, you can see those huge twin engines throwing 4-meter chunks of ice up into the air.
And I have my PC. And it has its three devices feeding my slick-assed custom icebreaker display. "I'm from the government and I'm here to help."
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Here's the thing. Three devices, innit:
1) The GPS works but is spotty, cuz you're in a constant storm.
2) The speed log is basically a vent on the bottom of the hull, measuring the water passing by. But the ice is rushing under the bottom of the hull, and it jams the vent.
3) The radar tracks the target, but the target is so close it might just as well be the icebreaker itself, and the tracker gradually creeps on to the icebreaker's own ass.
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So my display, which is accurately showing the data, is like:
We're going slower than a Toronto pub crawl. No, wait! We're going faster than the speed of light!
We're somewhere in Mexico. No, wait! We are probably in Kansas.
The client ship is going the exact same speed at the exact same location as us! No wait. It *is* us. No wait, it's *ramming* us at full speed!!
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Man, I had some fails in my time, but this one wasn't just a fail, it was fucking *embarrassing*.
"Build a special custom icebreaking display using the hardware on the ship, it'll be brilliant!"
The hardware doesn't work in the ice. Any actual icebreaker captain could have told me -- us -- that, had we -- they -- ever actually consulted one.
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Not, I repeat, my only great failure as a geek.
But, *damn*, that was humiliating.
I wrote an *excellent* program that *brilliantly* displayed data coming from hardware that didn't work.
It was a gig. I got paid. That's not the point. I was a pro, and pro's deliver *value*.
All I delivered was a good laugh.
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Upside: I saw many many seals, and a polar bear from a distance. The comedy officer was actually the helicopter maintenance guy, and I got a helicopter tour of an iceberg. All of that was rather awesome.
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And, for the record, I have been a successful professional programmer, an independent, for 45 years. I've failed more times than most people have even tried.
Some days you get the bear.
Some days the bear gets you.
Find joy in it. Without joy, why are we even doing this shit?
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@GeePawHill your writing is so engaging, I had a lot of fun reading it. Thank you for sharing! Anywhere else you put up your writings?
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@adityakhanna Sure, check geepawhill.org , tho I must say I don't usually just tell funny stories about my career. :)
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@adityakhanna True 👍. I think, @GeePawHill wanted to be the comedy captain on this ship here 😀.
Thanks a lot for the story, GeePaw, it made my day 🐻❄️
