absolute disappointment

good thing i read the comments on chitty's blog

the penny dropped on my way home from work: a couple of months ago i was offered exactly the assistance that i now need, and i rejected it outright. it's not that the risks were any different, but if i'd actually had the presence of mind to inquire further i would have known then what i needed to do, not a month before my release date.

there's nothing like being horrifically disappointed in oneself. i sat alone at the cafeneto (i had to eat), just staring at the wall and ruminating over my stupidity. talking to my mother did help a little - at least she didn't disagree with me about my idiocy.
let's just say that i've definitely learned a lesson, and a lot more humility than i thought i had in me. my army experience has taught me, over the years, that i'm not as intelligent as i always thought.

i moped home, sat for a while zoned out with a cup of hot chocolate, had a shower and went to bed.

the kid, his shag and i got to base late this morning, after a huge fight over whether or not my feeling like a moron is justified. as i said above, it's not about the decision, it's about my lack of curiosity. for something this important to me, i didn't handle the situation with appropriate care.

anyway, i walked into my SC's office and apologized, and we talked about what needs to be done. during the day we did progress a little, but it really is complicated :S

i spent the day working with the forms / java thing: gotta love oracle. the only command that allows communication between the form and the bean is completely undocumented. it's definitely validated - it won't compile if the parameters aren't correct - but the online help doesn't acknowledge its existence unless it's saying "use Set_Custom_Property to do x" without examples.

so after cursing a little (not under my breath, everyone was smiling and saying "yep, totalwaste's back"), i found a computer with internet access and discovered a forum posting by somebody with the same grievance. a long set of posts later, and i found a couple of almost-relevant examples from people who'd employed that far-superior-to-documentation tactic of trial-and-error. fortunately somebody mentioned another function (Set_Item_Instance_Property) which turned out to have an almost identical parameter listing, because without seeing it i would never have gotten the example to work.

at least it finally worked, but it took a while for the stream of curses to slow.

i read a bit from digital communication (a tidy recap on probability) on the bus to work, and then walked in to discover that spot's been canned. i must be honest, i didn't see that coming so quickly; 20/20 hindsight, however, allows me to see the long conversation i had with the boss last night as completely riddled with hints.

nql and i finally finished the image producer, which is in production and looking sharp.
it unfortunately took a long time to discover that what appeared to be a really weird bug in the application was actually the windows viewer adding a border around the picture... DOH! i haven't done web development in a long time - i'm forgiving myself for forgetting that the only valid check is through a browser :S

wolfman enlightened me as to writing a good cv (and i thought i had a clue), and i've now written out a draft for the development team policy that we're going to have to start working against because our entire system is a bloody mess.

it's been a long day, i'm leaving and hoping that the weekend will be a good one. got lots to do, and no inclination to do any of it, but isn't that normal?

everyone's been talking about the iphone today - i must admit they've outdone themselves. again.