12/12/12

Finally! The last one of these darned ambiguous dates that have given me headache, well, for a long time. One of my first blog entries back in 2003 is reproduced here under permission:

03-03-03

Two things about the date (even though the date is gone): First of all, I was trying to configure a new software, and it was using some sort of a strange US date format. So, I go to Preferences, and try to set it to our normal dd/mm/yy. I am presented with these options:

Please choose your date format

  • 03/03/03
  • 03/03/03
  • 03/03/03
  • 03/03/03
  • 03-03-03
  • 03-03-03
  • 03-03-03
  • 03-03-03

Um. Err. Do I actually have to wait for a frigging day to figure out which one of these is the day and a whole month to figure out which one is the month? This kind of a configuration might have been useful in the last century, but certainly not now... Well, at least I can choose whether I want to have a dash or a slash as the separator :-).

The other thing: when my (probably never-to-appear) grandchildren ask what I did on this grand day, at 3:03, I can tell them that I was sitting on the toilet. Hooray for magic dates.

For the record, when my grandchildren ask about 12/12/12 12:12:12 I can tell them I was looking at the world in infinite detail, bending it to my will. Or to be precise, tweaking ThingLink's source to do something I've never attempted before. Then again, most of software development is doing stuff you've never done before - or possibly nobody has ever done that before. Which is precisely which makes it so interesting and frustrating.




Comments

The probability of grandchildren ever appearing seems to have gone significantly up from 0.

--Niksu, 12-Dec-2012


Indeed it has :-)

(Unfortunately, thanks to humanity not agreeing in climate change, the odds of great-grandchildren being the last human generation have also gone up significantly from zero.)

--JanneJalkanen, 12-Dec-2012


Can I quote you about that software development? (On a big paper on my cubicle and to my friends.) That nails it so nicely.

--Nimril, 14-Dec-2012


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"Main_blogentry_121212_1" last changed on 12-Dec-2012 21:31:26 EET by JanneJalkanen.