Slave Drivers

I'm in the process of teaching myself Python, which is a relatively simple scripting/programming language that I'm finding more and more commonly scattered around my work. I've got some programming background beginning back in the day when we used a butchered COBOL variant in the military, up through FORTRAN and into early C. I was never a programmer, mind you -- my feeling always was that there were plenty of people who were willing to write a bazillion lines of code to do some vaguely useful thing, and I was always willing to let them. But I needed to be up to speed on whatever I was using enough to write some small "not worth aggravating a real programmer for" stuff as well as to audit and do initial trouble-shooting on code that real programmers had done.

That's not the point of this post. That just explains what I'm doing putzing around with Python.

Last week I fired up the laptop after a week of not. I'd been engaging in a not-doing-anything-useful week, which specifically resulted in NOT doing anything Python-learning related. When I got into the course I was signed up for, I discovered that I had several chapters, three exercises, a homework assignment, and a quiz that needed to be done. By midnight, that very night. 

Now, this is one of those "we don't grant extensions, too bad about your dead relative" outfits, so midnight was a no-bullshit hard deadline. Crap. 

I dove in, muttering horrible things...and damned if I didn't pull it off. Every single bit of it was done with nearly 25 minutes to spare. I punched the "Submit" button, and shortly got a "Piss Off, You're Too Late" notice. I cursed and resubmitted with the same result. I was about to introduce Support to the Major Asshole part of my personality when I took it into my head to actually read the course intro stuff to get supporting material. And there, where it had always been, was this: "due Feb 14, 2016 at 23:59 UTC"

I have REALLY got to start reading the instructions on shit I'm doing/putting together/fixing.

So, did you spot the problem? If not, the answer is "UTC." Universal Time Code. Also known as GMT. Also known as six fucking hours ago.

Fortunately, (again, reading for the first time) they throw out the lowest quiz and lowest homework grades. Since this particular batch is scored "zero," I'm thinking they'll be it.

Now, all this preliminary explanation is tied into "right now" by the fact that I spent a fair-sized chunk of last week sicker than a dog. I suspect this involved God smiting me for the hubris I displayed recently on this very blog by explaining so smugly how I never get sick.  

At any rate, whether turning me into a double-ended firehose of death was in fact divine retaliation, or possibly was related to that rather suspect burrito I got from the street vendor, or both, is immaterial. What IS material is that I am today, right now, this second, a week behind on Python. 

Again. 

And since I now know that UTC is involved, I know I've got about 3.5 hours to get it all scraped together and done. 

And I know that some of y'all have newsreaders that send my little blurbs here out to you, and I can't stop that once I hit the "publish" button. Which means that if I don't get off my ass and get it done, y'all will doubtless heap scorn on me, if only in your black hearts.

So, to keep you slave drivers out of my ass, I now HAVE to get this done. 

It's called "Accountability" by all the popular management school kids these days. Very trendy.

I'll let  you know how it went. In about 3.5 hours.

In Our Next Episode:I explain why I'm fucking around with my blog instead of actually doing the work. The phrase "I needed a challenge" will probably be tossed around, perhaps ironically. Or defensively. Or perhaps as the completion to the sentence, "Well, I'm kind of a dumbass and... "

UPDATE!