Useless Blogging

I posted over at Tactical Gamer. I do that a lot. Thought I’d share this one in particular.

(Speaking Oracle, specifically)
When trying to SELECT INTO a variable, if the query returns no rows, an exception is thrown. I’d have thought that the variable would just be NULL, but noooooooooo…

You can nest BEGIN..END blocks to your heart’s content, but you can’t have more than one autonomous block within a given BEGIN..END block. (not that I’ve found, at least).

Exceptions don’t always tell you that they’ve been raised. Sometimes you have to figure it out by noticing that a NULL is where your return value should be.

That is all for now. Carry on, people, carry on.

Discover Magazine pits two chatting bots against one another. Jabberwacky and ALICE sit and kibbutz for a bit.

The real winner piece of conversation is at the very end:

A: What is the meaning of life?
J: If you live it to the fullest, it has meaning. If not, there is no meaning.
A: I’m not too good with negative counterfactuals.

Four years isn’t enough. Even being autistic doesn’t slow down the speed at which your kids grow up.

Some people, when they look at their kids, remember holding them in the hospital, or cooing over their crib, or something similarly meaningful from their child’s infancy. That’s something I’ve never been able to do.

With Emma, my mind races to the future. I look at her, I see her in high school, college, at her job, with her future family… it’s scary. I figured that would be my thing, but Sara broke that pretty well. With Sara, I’m very much made to be in the present, experiencing everything now, with an eye on the future, certainly, but the possibilities seem more open, I guess, and the furthest I get is maybe six months down the road before I’m yanked back into today, the now, the real.

For teaching me about living for the present, I thank you, Sara. I love you honey… happy birthday!

In the past month or so, I have flown four times (twice to Tampa, twice BACK from Tampa). Flying is something that has yet to get old for me, and I really hope it never will.

I’m a window-seat person. I love looking out and seeing the world below, and the heavens above. Know what my favorite thing to spot is? My most favorite sight, from thousands of feet in the air?

Baseball fields.

Why? I don’t know for certain, except to say that the shape of a baseball field is remarkably distinct, even when miles in the air. It conjures images of games in my past, and of games that might be in play as I look down on them from row 25, seat F. It makes me smile every time.

I don’t own a dog, but dogs have made me miserable today.

Four weeks. A solid month (kinda).

For four straight weeks, Emma’s behavior in school has been such that she remained “on green” the whole time. This means that acts of disrespect were curbed, attention was paid, and focus was given.

In fact, in the past eight weeks, there have been only two days she wasn’t on green. And it shows: Emma received her first academic award last week (for “Efforts in Achievement”).

My deal was that I’d kick in a full twenty bucks toward whatever she wanted to buy next. And given that she’s doing pretty well with the behavior money and such, according to Julie (who’s done the math), Emma could have fifty dollars at her disposal next week.

Poor house or no, I’m incredibly proud of her.

When pausing external plugins from within another AMXX plugin, that “c” flag makes all the difference.
pause("acd", "externalplugin.amxx")
Lawdy that’s key… otherwise, the plugin that CALLED it will be the one that stops, and that isn’t likely to be what you’d like to have happen.

A couple of days ago, Emma asked me to make a paper airplane for her. She handed me a sheet of loosleaf on which she had drawn pretty patterns. She remarked that she liked paper airplanes, but since she didn’t know how to make one, she just decorated one in advance.

So yesterday, I hunt the internet and go searching for some planes to make. I create three, and have them on Emma’s desk when she gets home. She’s pretty thrilled.

After homework, we go outside to chuck them around. One of the planes flies like a champ. The other two, not so much, but they weren’t designed for the long haul. We throw them. Emma is suitably impressed.

Two boys from the neighborhood walk by and marvel at the planes. Emma hands me the good flyer and starts shouting “Hey! Watch how far my dad can throw this paper airplane he made for me!” I throw. There are “Whoa!”s and “Wow!”s. I get more paper and make another. Soon, everyone’s throwing airplanes in our front yard.

Toss in a quick fix of another neighborhood kid’s bike, and yesterday, I took home the Cool Dad award.

via lifehack.org
#10:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.