i'm a grampaw!!

my replacement arrived today: according to the army philosophy, i just became a grandfather... if the person you trained is seen as your "kid" (the kid), then the next one in is your grandchild. and the kid will be partially responsible for him, so that's just how it is.

it means i'm on my way out of our unit. a long, long period of tortured hours is coming to a close.

i cannot describe how absolutely awesome it was to take him around the base on his "form hike". and sit him down and give him the "welcome to your worst nightmare" speech. you see, i didn't actually *say* anything like that, but i got the message across. the kid and i are now officially playing "good cop, bad cop", and the little one is overwhelmed :D

our TL is totally comfortable with leaving me in charge of him. the only negative is that i forgot that i was supposed to ensure that they got a chance to talk before he left the base... whoops :$

this morning, we had an animated discussion over possible new logos for our team. the not-daft girl in our team (there are other girls, i guess "songbird" will do) came with me to search for ideas online... half an hour looking at screenshots of worms and lemmings just flew by.
but didn't really help much. the picture i just posted is what *i* wanted, and she's a fan of the new, cutesy-barfy worms graphics.

about half an hour after we'd gotten back. something clicked into place in my head, and i came up with an absolutely STUNNING concept. i'll display it when it's ready ;)

another highlight for the day. spot just informed me that he was aware of this one, but that doesn't bloody help because NOBODY informed me or the kid. wankers.

there's an enormous button (in production) on one of the screens for the idiot we sat with yesterday. it's description implies that it does extra-ordinary things, creating heavy load on the server and generally being helpful in the extreme. the kid arrived at my desk, completely in shock: "take a look at the code behind it."

so i opened the source, found the button, and double-clicked the code-block. then *i* was shocked:

//this function hasn't been written yet. (--my old sergeant--! GET TO WORK!)
print_message("operation executed successfully. results will be available within 24 hours.");
the system doesn't even inform us that somebody pressed the button. it literally does nothing. fantastic.

i walked into work this evening, and we were in trouble. one of my apps was failing in a really odd way - we discovered after poking and prodding for an hour that there is a really fun non-documented "feature" in the provider's api. it doesn't always return a value. because i didn't make a contigency plan for receiving a null value, the app just choked and died.

more fun api news: yet another function doesn't work as it should. and it always takes ages to figure that out. well colour me annoyed.

in other news: spot and i went out for a smoke, and i witnessed a stealth ember leave the tip of his cigarette, and slowly and sneakily drift into his collar. one second... two seconds... and then his facial expression turned to horror and he began desperately flailing at his neck.

*sigh*
spot, i'm going to miss you while you're in the states. nobody else has shit like that happen to them in quite the same way.