I’m not wrong, I’m just an asshole.

I'm such a goof!

I observe that I create problems out of nothing when I'm stressed or even when I'm excited.

Had my US visa interview few days ago.

I might be one of stupidest person this particular consulate employee has seen.

My visa interview was done, I came out of the building and I noticed one of my passport was missing. I panicked and told an employee ( who also happened to be the same employee who took my biometrics - I had also goofed up a little there ) that I forgot my passport in the counter.

Duh, if visa is approved they will take the passport. I already knew it, but still I forgot!

🤦🏻‍♂️

People calling themselves "Thought Leaders" on LinkedIn.

Torn between wanting to know what the fuck this means and knowing that the answer will doubtless make me lose even more faith in humanity.

The one I just saw referred to as such (probably by himself) is that Simon Sinek goof who went viral a while back for saying that all millennials are useless lazy dopamine junkies because their parents spoiled them beyond repair. He looks like the kind of gold-plated twat who would definitely consider himself a Thought Leader, even though 'millennials are a bit lazy' is the kind of insight you can get down your local pub from the guy who'd otherwise be trying to sell you tickets to a dog fight.

How do you qualify as a Thought Leader? Do you just need to dress like salesman of the month, or do you actually need to be good at anything?

I love LinkedIn.

The network guy in me screams in agony!

I Just started watching person of interest, and this happens...

All these “top password” lists appearing.. Who audits this? Like ain’t that stuff supposed to be cooked with some salt or something?

So for those of you keeping track, I've become a bit of a data munger of late, something that is both interesting and somewhat frustrating.

I work with a variety of enterprise data sources. Those of you who have done enterprise work will know what I mean. Forget lovely Web APIs with proper authentication and JSON fed by well-known open source libraries. No, I've got the output from an AS/400 to deal with (For the youngsters amongst you, AS/400 is a 1980s IBM mainframe-ish operating system that oriiganlly ran on 48-bit computers). I've got EDIFACT to deal with (for the youngsters amongst you: EDIFACT is the 1980s precursor to XML. It's all cryptic codes, + delimited fields and ' delimited lines) and I've got legacy databases to massage into newer formats, all for what is laughably called my "data warehouse".

But of course, the one system that actually gives me serious problems is the most modern one. It's web-based, on internal servers. It's got all the late-naughties buzzowrds in web development, such as AJAX and JQuery. And it now has a "Web Service" interface at the request of the bosses, that I have to use.

The programmers of this system have based it on that very well-known database: Intersystems Caché. This is an Object Database, and doesn't have an SQL driver by default, so I'm basically required to use this "Web Service".

Let's put aside the poor security. I basically pass a hard-coded human readable string as password in a password field in the GET parameters. This is a step up from no security, to be fair, though not much.

It's the fact that the thing lies. All the files it spits out start with that fateful string: '<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>' and it lies.

It's all UTF-8, which has made some of my parsers choke, when they're expecting latin-1.

But no, the real lie is the fact that IT IS NOT WELL-FORMED XML. Let alone Valid.

THERE IS NO ROOT ELEMENT!

So now, I have to waste my time writing a proxy for this "web service" that rewrites the XML encoding string on these files, and adds a root element, just so I can spit it at an XML parser. This means added infrastructure for my data munging, and more potential bugs introduced or points of failure.

Let's just say that the developers of this system don't really cope with people wanting to integrate with them. It's amazing that they manage to integrate with third parties at all...

Security is a joke. And people don't seem to get it. Especially Data mungers.

I've spent about half an hour trying to work out how to securely connect to power BI using PowerShell in a renewable manner for unattended access later on.

Every single example I've found seems to involve you storing $user and $password variables inside your script. If I'm lucky, they're going to pass them through ConvertTo-SecureString. And nobody talks about securely storing AD auth tokens, or using the Windows Credential Manager.

I know it's possible, but it's going to take me ages to work out how from all sorts of disparate sources...

Reading Fanfiction. Specifically Harry Potter fanfic

First time making a bootable HDD partition and I've either deleted its boot sector or succeeded in making my external HDD bootable.

I wanna restart to test if it works but I'm actually really scared. Rip.

Big launch on Monday. This weekend I will do absolutely nothing but watch movies, rest and goof around in preparation for the inevitable craziness to come

I was just going hit send on a slack message:
"Issue for this fix is deployed on production"

Just a few moments before I realised my goof up in the text😂

Best way to learn to code? More specifically, best way to avoid distractions whilst learning? I find myself easily tempted to play video games or watch YouTube videos instead that has nothing to do with coding...

Did anyone else suffer from this? Is this just a phase and once I break past it, I'll be really into programming & forget about everything else?

Power BI: wonderful tool, pretty graphics, and can do a lot of powerful stuff.

But it’s also quite frustrating when you want to do advanced things, as it’s such a closed platform.

* No way to run powerquery scripts in a command line
* Unit testing is a major pain, and doesn’t really test all the data munging capabilities
* The various layers (offline/online, visualisation, DAX, Powerquery, Dataset, Dataflow) are a bit too seamless: locating where an issue is happening when debugging can be pain, especially as filtering works differently in Query Editing mode than Query Visualisation mode.

And my number 1 pet peeve:
* No version control

It’s seriously disconcerting to go back to a no version control system, especially as you need to modify “live code” sometimes in order to debug a visual.

At best, I’ve been looking into extracting the code from the file, and then checking that into git, but it’s still a one-way street that means a lot of copying and pasting back into the program in order to roll back, and makes forking quite difficult.

It’s rewarding to work with the system, but these frustrations can really get to me sometimes

Our prof told us we could goof off for the rest of the afternoon.

So we deauthenticated clients from every access point our antennas could pick up.

We all gave each of our best evil laughs, but the prof's was just too on point, we cant help but to burst out laughing.