Concern

I know you’re busy, but I’m really hoping I’ll get to see some of you in person later this year.

The Last King of Scotland is a very good movie. It chronicles a brief period through Uganda’s troubled history, through a Scottish doctor who becomes involved with the regime of Idi Amin, who is someone I’ll admit to never having heard of, and about whom I can only grimace with historical comfort in a darkened theater. I recommend it, partly because like everyone else, I can’t help but gush about Forest Whitaker’s seething performance as Amin.

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The plan was that our office was supposed to move to a newly built-out, much larger space, this week. We couldn’t go into our new cubicles today, because the movers and IT staff were moving and setting up the office, but we were supposed to have the lab (we have a lab! That’s kind of awesome) to show up to, and get some work done if we can.

But hey, guess what! The place isn’t even finished yet! As in, not even remotely done yet; as in, painting still going on, electricians still wiring things. I can’t imagine it being done by tomorrow, or even be done and cleaned up by next week. The new building also turns out to really, really suck, because there’s no accessible stairway, if you are going up to the office. There’s a fire stair that dumps you out into an alley, but you can’t get in that way from the outside.

I did think, weeks ago, that this was all going to get botched, because that’s the way these people operate. They can’t plan, nor execute. But I had this hope this morning that they’d get it mostly done, and that we wouldn’t be disturbed too much, and that finally we’d all get together and start, like, changing the world or something.

And, there was someone else’s junk all over my workbench, and my lab stuff scattered all over the place. I can’t wait to see how badly my workstations, monitor, and now rare and out-of-production keyboard fare.

I’ve been thinking recently, usually while driving, about hand signals. I think it would be extremely useful to have an “I’m sorry, my fault,” hand signal. Of course, we already have the “f- you, your fault” signal, which is a pretty easy sign to make with one hand. And many people do.

Of course, it’s counterproductive to give the one-finger salute, even if the other person did make a mistake, and even if they did something deliberately rude. Many drivers have this instinct: if someone does something wrong or rude, we feel the obligation to punish them for it. We yell at them, show rude gestures, honk, and what have you, to teach them a goddamn lesson. I don’t think this works. If anything, it makes the other person angry or frightened, and more likely to make another mistake, or be rude to someone else. I think the problem is that these actions serve more as challenges, and not punishments, which is why they fail to work.

I’m wondering about a different kind of approach, where you say “sorry” instead of berating someone. Even if something isn’t your fault, still, say you’re sorry. You don’t have to justify it, or believe that you were really at fault, because those things don’t matter out on the road. No one can tell, or care, if you say “sorry” but didn’t really mean it, while it’s equally difficult to see a middle finger as something you don’t mean.

The rub is what gesture to use. A little placard that lights up to say “I’m sorry” or “my fault” would actually probably work the best, because hand gestures don’t seem to exist for this.

We could try to come up with one, though. It would have to have at least two attributes:

1. It must be easy and safe to make with one hand, and
2. It must be very difficult to mistake for something rude, or mistake as disingenuous.

One possibility I’ve heard suggested is based on “I’m sorry” in American sign language, in which you make a fist, and make a circular motion on your chest. Now, you probably won’t be seen doing this gesture if you make it on your chest. It might be an alternative to do it in the air, say, next to your face. It could be mistaken for as “jerk off,” “punch,” or “roll down your window,” however.

Some ideas I was thinking of, none of which are good, include:

• Present an open palm, with all fingers extended. This also means “halt” or “stop,” which probably won’t work.
• Thumbs up. Probably, would be mistaken as sarcastic.
• The “hang loose” sign. Maybe confusing; I don’t know what effect it would have among drivers in Hawaii. Maybe inverted, so the “palm” side faces the other (like an ASL “Y”). Could be mistaken for “call me,” too, which is a kind thing to say to strangers, but confusing while driving.

Update: Europe, as usual, does this better than you. The open-palm, fingers extended gesture sounds like a winner.

Aside, of course, from the fact that I’m up at 1AM, with a cold no less, trying to debug this crap:

• You need to specify some magic arrangement of flags to a DbEnv, or else Db::open fails for no good reason.
• DbEnv squirts files everywhere.
• You try to: (1) create a new database; (2) write a thousand or so objects to it; (3) close the database; (4) open the database again; (5) read out all those objects again. It crashes with a SIGSEGV at stage 4, in Db::open. I get recompile the debs again, with debug info just to find out what the hell is going wrong.
• If you tried to create a database with the DB_DIRECT_DB flag, but passed that to Db::set_flags by mistake (which will actually set DB_DUP, meaning when you put records you actually put new versions of records), then every single database you create from then on has the DB_DUP flag set. This is with brand-new files, and without an associated DbEnv. Switching your DB type from HASH to BTREE then back to HASH fixes this.
• You apparently can’t set potentially useful options like DB_DIRECT_DB without using an environment.

And lastly, working with padded structures makes using structs for keys an extra special headache. That’s a C complaint, of course, but I’ve included it at no additional cost.