• Unreasonable maximum bids:
  • Emergency!  Expert needed!  Must fix absolutely everything wrong with my system!  $25 maximum bid
• Unreasonable communication requirements:
  • Bidder must be reachable at all times, 24 hours a day, Antarctica time zone
• Unreasonable experience requirements:
  • Bidder must have written 20 apps from scratch using the TwitBook API.
• Unreasonable demonstration of experience:
  • Bidder must show us 20 apps they have written.  We require an NDA before you get any more info
• Unreasonable grasp of reality:
  • (repost) (repost) (repost) Why isn’t anybody replying to my ad? $25 maximum bid
• Unreasonable grasp of geography:
  • Need programmer for North American properties database.  Geographically restricted to Antarctican coders only.

Yes, it’s better than going out and trying to find clients, but some of the ads are painful to follow.

However, hunting through the docs was painful.  The official docs aren’t organized in a logical way (I had to rely heavily on example code, rather than proper API documentation).  Then, there’s the errors.

You see, unlike a local library, there is no debug version of the FB API.  This means that, if I’m having issues, all I can do is plug in a parameter and rely on the error code to tell me what I’m doing wrong.  This doesn’t help AT ALL if the error message I get back is:

{“error”:{“type”:”Exception”,”message”:”(#1) An unknown error occurred”}}

Not very helpful.

Eventually, I figured it out, but couldn’t find any documentation (or even a blog post) on it.  Facebook only allows Unix-style EOL characters (LF), not DOS-style (CR LF).  Not fun to debug

Anyway, I’ve re-found the site Rent a Coder, where programmers (such as myself) can find projects to work on, without dealing with the hassle of advertising, accounting, management, etc.  In other words, for an administration fee (taken from my payment), I’m cleared of dealing with non-payment (everything is held in escrow), advertising (although I do have to propose my services in response to RFPs), accounting (client pays RaC, RaC pays me), etc.

It turns out to be a supplement to my income, and allows me to keep my skills in play.

On the plus side, this means that I have 6 months of (mostly) 8-to-4 days, located here in beautiful Esquimalt.  Unfortunately, 2 1/2 months are on the other side of the country, freezing my ass off in Halifax barracks in the winter.

Homework is not going to be cool, but hopefully it won't be too plentiful – this is a mostly practical maintenance course, as I have already completed the academic portion.

This morning, we played water polo.  For my ship's CSE department, water polo has the following rules:

• In the water is in bounds
• Out of the water is out of bounds
• One point for knocking down the other team's goal
• Full contact

Needless to say, we ended up pretty bruised and tired after all this.  But it was a good workout

Hear there, officer of the day speaking. The worker who came aboard with a white hard hat marked "Bob" report to the brow immediately.

We thought this was a bit odd, but didn't think much of it.  We continued on with the tour, until we heard the action alarm.

Bong bong¹…Intruder alert.  Ship's company muster flight deck.

So I escort my guys to the flight deck, where we learn that a Sea Training instructor has walked onboard, failing to show his ID card.  This brings us to a security alert situation, which in turns brings everybody else in the dockyard to security alert stations.

I ended up posted as an upper-deck sentry, so at least I got some fresh air today!  And it got us out of a couple hours work today.  This was my (and several other members') first time doing an intruder alert, so it was a changeup from the normal routine, where Sea Training will come in with a smoke machine an red glow sticks, to tell us that a fire is onboard.

I'm sure that I'll get hit with that one again soon enough.

"Hey Lacqui," he says.  "Is there anybody doing hot work¹?"

I look at him, then at the clock.  "It's 5 in the morning.  Why would anyone be hot working now?"

"Well, then, you may want to smell this."

He leads me to the galley entrance, where there is the unmistakable smell of burning electronics.  My first reaction is that it is a power generator (#1 generator, currently undergoing a maintenance/inspection, is located directly beneath our feet at this point).  I go down into the AMR, but find that all is good down there.

Then we did our Toucan Sam impressions².  This led us to the CCR door, which is a secure area, and therefore locked.  Fortunately, the duty tech (my on-watch supervisor) is awake, having done his rounds an hour before.  A quick discussion with him, and we go wake up the officer of the day.  The OOD is responsible for all the keys on board; he and the duty tech go to the CCR and investigate, while I return to the MCR, and prepare to press the Big Red Button (action alarm).

It turns out, after all, that there was nothing to worry about.  A transformer blew, causing the electronic smell.  The smoke was sucked directly into a ventilation intake, which spread it throughout the forward part of the ship.  In the end, no major damage, no need to wake everybody up, and a bit of fun out of the normal, boring, duty watch routine.

With my copious spare time (I sit here for six hours at a time, waiting for an alarm to go off. I actually do have copious spare time today), I’m doing some work on next year’s NaNo project. I’ve set up a private wiki, where I’m keeping my notes on the characters, and hoping that the linking between characters, events, locations, etc. helps me to avoid too much conflicting detail in the writing, and allows me enough to get my 50,000 words written this November.

At home (and completely inaccessible here) I’ve set up my old desktop computer as a Gentoo system. I’m trying to get some time to get my hand back into programming, so I do my development from my laptop (running Vista), save my files to a Samba share on my dev box, then compile remotely through SSH. It seems to be working so far, and hopefully I’ll get something decent pumped out soon.

Finally, this is my first post-by-email using Postie. Hopefully the combination of Postie and the ship’s email system won’t mangle this post up too badly, because I won’t be able to fix it until tomorrow morning.

In response to concerns about high-profile event security, Bruce Schneier, an internationally-recognized security expert, has this to say:

This is certainly the conventional wisdom, but is there any actual evidence that it’s true? The 9/11 terrorists could have easily chosen a different date and a major event — sporting or other — to target, but they didn’t. The London and Madrid train bombers could have just as easily chosen more high-profile events to bomb, but they didn’t. The Mumbai terrorists chose an ordinary day and ordinary targets. Aum Shinrikyo chose an ordinary day and ordinary train lines. Timothy McVeigh chose the ordinary Oklahoma City Federal Building. Irish terrorists chose, and Palestinian terrorists continue to choose, ordinary targets. Some of this can be attributed to the fact that ordinary targets are easier targets, but not a lot of it.

So how effective are we being, by emphasizing Olympic security?  Are we concentrating our attention at one “weak point”, opening security holes to be exploited elsewhere?  Or possibly when we stand down from Olympic high-security, will the lull make us a target?

Anyway, I got a bit of writing done during lunch.  495 words (about a page and a half, handwritten), which brings me up to a running total of 4106.  Unfortunately, that leaves me 896 words behind my daily milestone

Guess I know what I’m doing when the kids go to bed tonight.