2001-04-19 - 1:57 p.m.

Part of the Problem

I was reading Mer's diary tonight, and while I doubt she had it in mind, I suddenly felt like I was nagging her to feel better rather than actually helping her feel better. In a moment of self-disgust, I thought, "Jason, you'd rather be part of the problem than have the problem solved without you."

Then I decided I was fine with that, and moved on. Hi Mer! :)

Bench presses are hard.

I spent most of the day at the office looking through whois output and typing into a database, feeling pissy the wholetime. Why was I pissed? I was pissed because the database peoplehaven't penetrated the market yet. When I say "the market", whatI really mean is "everything."

Ever since I first understood what it means to normalize a database, I've wanted to put information in databases. I adore the simplicity of the idea: Every piece of information belongs in exactly one place. When you need to correlate the data, you perform what's called a table join. When information changes, you change it in exactly one spot. Beautiful.

All the information I'm stuck dealing with right now could easily be in a relational database. But some of it had just never been put in one, and other elements had been put into a heinously misused database. It hurts my soul to look at output from what *should* be a proper database and see that someone had put into two records for the same thing because they either didn't know how or just didn't bother to update the first one when it changed.

Arrrghh.

OK, fine, databases suck for some things. They suck at handling heirarchical data, for example. I'm just bone-sick of trying to gather simple table data from piles of paper, old email, and collected program output. It transgresses against my fundamental laziness.

And laziness, as we all know, is one of the three key virtues of a programmer.

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