Unusual Christmas Gifts

   A lump of coal seems to be a pretty unusual Christmas gift. I suspect, however, to the starving people struggling through the Irish Potato Famine, it might not have been quite as useless as it is in our day and age.

   We’ve gotten used to getting kitchen appliances, tools, and snow shovels for Christmas. Sometimes those are our favorite gifts.

   But there are some people who carry the “I-don’t-know-what-to-get-you” thing farther than others. My Cousin Joy’s son, Evan, is one of them. For years now he has given her exceptionally unusual gifts, at no small expense either. The first one was a “Leg Lamp” like the one seen in the movie, “The Christmas Story.”

   One year it was a fully operational slot machine. It was a massive thing and sat in her basement for a couple of years until she finally found someone to take it off her hands. The smaller family members enjoyed playing with it…for a little while.

   This year he planned to give her a real shrunken head. Yes, you read that right. But then he forgot to get a favorite friend a gift, so he gave it to the friend, and Joy doesn’t have to figure out what to do with it.

   But the best of his unusual gifts was a fully articulated human skeleton (plastic, we hope).

   He brought it home where he and his brothers tried to think of a really unusual way to give it to Joy.  They all remembered that her mother was a heavy smoker who always smoked Raleigh cigarettes, so they decided to set the skeleton up in the driver's seat of Joy’s car, and have her smoking a Raleigh with a long ash on it.

   The next problem was to get Joy to go outside to find the skeleton. It took them quite awhile, but finally they convinced her that she needed something in the garage. She went out, got whatever it was, and came back in, never seeing the skeleton at all. Eventually they got her to really look, and the fun began.

   There was a woman in town who was really skinny. Her name was Marilyn, so Marilyn became the name of the skeleton.

   Joy likes a good laugh as well as anyone, and she set about entertaining Marilyn in every way she could find. She took her to coffee in the morning. She took her to the bar where they propped Marilyn up on a bar stool. She even took Marilyn to a dance where Marilyn sat in with the band and had no shortage of real live beaus to take her on to the dance floor.

   The next Christmas Joy’s family came up with another idea. They used a rocking chair as a sleigh and a reindeer made of a saw horse (with a real deer head attached). These they mounted to Joy’s roof and aimed a spotlight on it. And Marilyn, dressed in a Santa suit, brought Christmas joy to everyone.

   Unusual Christmas gifts that bring so much laughter are rare and wonderful.

https://www.facebook.com/

The Value of a Yellow Pencil

   As you all know, computers are very picky. You have to have every single dash, period, space and letter correct or you find yourself somewhere off in ‘left field.’

   An example of how important small things are when dealing with computers, Ellen Ullman wrote an article for the May 2013 Wired Magazine.

   “I once programed a system that came to me with a five-year-old bug. The value of a key data element – shrinkage in the customer’s inventory--always came back zero. Our company insisted the problem came from another vendor’s software, not ours; users had all but given up complaining.

   “The code logs showed that six programmers before me had failed to fix the bug. I followed the steps my predecessors must have taken,…but found nothing that accounted for that zero.

   "The company with the five-year-old bug was in downtown San Francisco. Every morning a legless man in a wheelchair sat before the main entrance selling yellow Ticonderoga pencils. He was friendly, and I was always happy to see him. My job was dull. I was staying on with one determination: to fix that bug, then leave. I bought pencils every day.

   "To track down that errant zero, I printed out key parts of the system—foot-high binders of fan-folded green-and-white lined paper with holes running down the sides—then sat down to read. Each time I needed to jump to another subroutine or subsystem, I inserted a pencil to mark the place I had to return to. Soon the floor was carpeted with blue and red binders lanced through with yellow pencils.

   "Watching a program run is not as revealing as reading its code. Entire sets of conditions may not be met, or met rarely, and sections of the program may lie dormant, seldom executed. The print-out, however, shows you everything. You can see the elegance of the programming or the lack of it…and also statements that are beautifully compact but barely legible, without comments, unkind to the next programmer who will come along.

   "And—dare I say it?—you can make notes in the margins with a pencil. Reading code is like reading all things written: You have to scribble, make a mess, remind yourself that the work comes to you through trial and error and revision. In today’s programming environments, objects fly in and out of scope—in and out of executable visibility—like asteroids crossing planetary orbits. If the code is on paper, however, you can cut out sections, tape them to other sections, get an idea of what is executing now, what came before, and what comes next.

   "Above all, paper helps you find bugs.

   "One day, after some 8 weeks of searching, I pulled a pencil out of a listing and saw the reason for the zero. I can’t recall the exact instructions, but a simplified explanation is that the code read:

key_data_element=I_value (capital I, which had been initialized to zero), when it should have read:

key_data_element=l_value (lower-case L, holding the real value.

   "Now this is truly awful programming. No variables should be given such similar names, especially not when their sole differentiator is two letters nearly identical visually. Six programmers before me, looking at code on our white-on-green character screens, could not tell eye from el. All the time I had spent staring into those screens, I could not perceive the difference. But here on paper I was reading slowly; the text was not scrolling by. Even against the lined background, with characters that had been chattered out by a dot-matrix printer—even here my eye sense something was wrong. Suddenly I could see the slight variation; the roof of that capital letter I.

   "I made the change and the bug was gone.

   "I fixed it while my boss was on vacation. When he returned,

he was furious at me, as if I had betrayed him, made a fool of him in front of users who had been assured the the problem was not in our code. I myself was in a cheerful mood. I gave notice."

Ellen Ullman is the author of Close to the Machine and the novel By Blood.

Aren't they cute, with their little masks?

    The only people who think raccoons are cute are those who have never had to deal with them. In case you want to give them their due, their scientific name is Procyon lotor. If they have infested your house, you will have other names for them.

    Although they prefer wooded areas near water and natural habitats, they are not averse to living in urban areas and often become pests of the first order. They are omnivorous, which means they eat both plants and animals. Animal foods include crayfish, clams, fish, frogs, snails, insects, turtles, rabbits, muskrats, and the eggs and young of ground-nesting birds, including waterfowl. In urban settings, in addition to feeding on backyard fruits, nuts, and vegetables, they scavenge from garbage cans and compost piles.

    The young are generally born in April or May and the usual ‘family’ is 4 kits. They  stay together as a family unit for the first year, after which they begin to assert their independence.

    Their little black-masked faces are adorable, making you think of kittens. But sweet little critters they are not. When looking for a nesting site, they will easily tear off soffits, roofing, gutters, air conditioning ducts and rooftop ventilators. They are amazingly strong and only the strongest measures will foil their attempts to get into your house, garage or barn. Good climbers, they will shinny up downspouts and jump from nearby trees. They will also make a den under a porch or patio.

    As a child you learned that raccoons were clean animals, because they ‘wash their food’ before they eat it. Nothing could be farther from the truth. They wash what they eat to moisten it. Human ideas of cleanliness have no part in their make-up. If they get into your house, you may not notice at first because they are nocturnal. But eventually you will be shocked to see the damage they have done to insulation, wiring, roofing, wallboard, and ceilings of the rooms below. They use their ‘den’ (your attic) as a latrine, and the odor is simply awful and almost impossible to get rid of. You thought cat smell was bad! Wait till you smell raccoon stink!

    They are also destructive in the garden. Sweet corn is a favorite food. They will climb the stalks, peel down the husks and eat every last kernel on the ear. Usually they harvest the corn when it is ripe,  the night before you intended to do it. They are also fond of melons and other fruits and vegetables.

    Raccoons are known to carry a number of diseases and internal parasites. The raccoon roundworm, an infection spread to people by the accidental ingestion or inhalation of roundworm eggs from raccoon feces, has caused increased concern in recent years. Roundworm infection can cause serious disabilities, and young children are thought to be most susceptible. Raccoons are also carriers of rabies and distemper. Be sure pets are properly vaccinated to mitigate this threat. Occasionally a whole colony of raccoons becomes rabid, and that is serious indeed.

    The best way to handle raccoons is to keep them from entering your spaces in the first place. Chimneys need a firmly-attached, strong roof cap; tree limbs must be cut back at least 5 feet from the roof; shrubs and bushes must be kept thinned out; holes dug under patios must be dealt with immediately. Garbage must be kept in tightly-lidded cans. Bungee cords can be used to keep cans firmly upright. Bird feeders are the candy shop of the critters, and their Subway is the pet food left out for pet cats.

    They are not bothered by moth balls, blood meal or any of the other smelly things that you might think would keep them at bay. Noise makers, flashing lights, shrill sound makers: none of them work. Fences won’t keep them out either, unless you add some DC current. Electricity is one thing that they respect, and strands of electrified wire like those used to contain cattle is often the only solution to keeping them out of a garden.

     Live traps are the best way to catch them, and the best baits are marshmallows, peanut butter or sweet rolls. They like fishy smelling food, too, but so do cats, and you don’t want to catch cats. Once they are caught, they need to be killed. Don’t fall for the old ‘trap and release’ thing. They will return to your house before you do.

    If you have a ‘raccoon problem,’ it’s probably best to call in professional exterminators. Make sure they are not proponents of ‘trap and release’ or you will be wasting your money.

    Does this sound like experience speaking? It is.

Resource: ucdavis.edu - Integrated Pest Management Program