E-mail is so cool. But it can be such a persnickety pain in the ass.
As Magilla Marketing’s readers are no doubt aware, this newsletter went out with broken links last week. Ouch.
What happened? Well, stupidity on my part, of course.
Did I test the links before the newsletter went out? Of course, and they worked in two out of three of my test accounts.
After several hours of fiddling, I convinced myself the non-working links in the one account were an internal issue and sent the newsletter.
Oops.
The e-mails from readers informing me of the non-working links began arriving as soon as that newsletter went out. Fortunately, Justin Khoo, president of Advenix, spotted the problem. I had neglected to include “Http://” in the links.
D’oh!
The episode reminded me of another one 20 some years ago in college that prompted me to switch my major from computer science to journalism.
One Sunday in the mid-80s, I was sitting in the school’s computer lab working on a project for a class on Assembly language—a mind-numbingly tedious, low-level computer language.
I was attempting to write a simple “if/then” function in which if a field called “code” equaled 1, the program would do one thing and if it equaled 2, it would do another.
It was doing neither. I worked on the problem for six hours.
Six … friggin’ … hours.
I force fed the program ones. I force fed it twos. Nothing.
And this was on a mainframe computer with a shared printer. Every print job ended up in a queue with the other students’ projects, invariably one of which would put the printer into an endless loop, delaying everyone else’s work until the printer was reset.
Six hours. No progress.
Then it hit me. Boy, did it hit me. I had reserved four spaces of memory for the field labeled “code” and, as a result when I had the machine compare the field called “code” to the number, I was asking the machine to compare “space, space, space, 1” to “1” and “space, space, space 2” to “2.”
Spaces have value in Assembly language. As a result, “space, space, space 1” does not equal “1” and “space, space, space 2” does not equal “2.” The computer was accurately telling me the two values were not equal.
“Of course!” I shouted, startling everyone in the room.
“Space, space, space 1 doesn’t equal 1! And space, space, space 2 doesn’t equal 2! Everybody in this room knows that!” I yelled.
“You know that, right!?” I shouted to the guy next to me. He nodded. “YOU ALL KNOW THAT! I yelled to the room. “WHO DOESN’T KNOW THAT!? YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO DOESN’T KNOW THAT?! ME! F&^%ING ME! THAT’S WHO DOESN’T KNOW THAT! SIX! F&^%ING! HOURS! AAAAAHHHHHH!!!”
I then went into the hall and had a smoke. Yes, I smoked cigarettes back then, multiple packs a day. And yes, you could still smoke indoors.
I lit that cigarette as a computer science major and stubbed it out committed to becoming a journalism major.
Judging by last week, I made the right decision.
And for the record, I passed that Assembly language class.
