Take 5, D.

Weekly Update 2025-12-21: OBE Edition

What happened during the week of December 15th - December 21st:

πŸ—ƒοΈ This was a week where I was OBE1 at work for a couple of reasons. First, this was the last week of S., the now former senior team member who will be moving to a non-Epic part of IT. I was officially assigned his old responsibility of BCA, as mentioned last week, and I will now become the team's point guy for all of Epic's major mobile apps: Haiku, Canto, and Rover. Speaking of which...

πŸ‘©πŸΌβ€πŸ’» Many companies implement a code freeze at the end of the calendar year, as they are acutely aware of their reduced staffing levels around Christmas and New Years Day. My employer is no different, as they applied a code freeze within Epic as of Thursday 12-18. One of the last accepted changes before the freeze went live on Wednesday 12-17, which would have allowed a Comment button next to an Epic user's In basket or Staff messages folder. The change worked on Epic workstations, but if you were using Haiku (or Rover or Canto) from Wednesday evening onward, your app would crash if you checked your In basket or Staff messages there. This problem blew up on Thursday 12-18, with about 25 tickets sent my way as a result! In spite of all the activity, I was oddly calm about it, as I knew it was a problem within Epic itself and therefore well above my head. My role was to pass messages along to end-users, and gather data from them to help Epic fix the problem. But wait, there's more!

πŸ†˜ Two weeks ago, I linked to an article from Hackaday that talked about MUMPS, an ancient database/programming language from the 1960s that is still prevalent in many hospitals today. Epic runs on code heavily derived from MUMPS, and its syntax is rather baffling to the modern eye. Case in point: the errors in Haiku, etc., mentioned above were caused by ONE missing character when setting up a value definition. Instead of entering in "$$" to set the value, only "$" was entered. A fix for the errant Wednesday 12-17 code was published early on Friday 12-19, which ended up resolving the errors on the mobile apps. By the time work ended for me that Friday, all but one person reported successfully being able to read their In basket or Staff messages while mobile. I'll follow up with that lone person next week.

🎞️ When I was searching for a real film camera earlier this year, one of the websites that proved invaluable for research was 35mmc. Their user-driven reviews of the Canon Canonet QL17 GIII led me to buy that camera, so after months of reading them in my RSS feed, I decided to sign up for membership this week. I had hoped I could submit an article for my favorite photo of 2025, but I'll likely miss their deadline of Sunday 12-21. If I do, I still have my recent favorite photos post here, which will have to suffice.

🌲 It's the last full week before Christmas, and I have to confess: it hasn't really felt much like a holiday around here. Not specifically in my home, just *spreads hands* everywhere. There's a real sense of malaise in the air, where very little feels celebratory, many things feel off-kilter, and folks look like they're fighting off sadness or boredom or both. The predicted weather for Christmas will be sunny and in the upper 60s, which is nice on a micro level, but it will only contribute to the overall off-balance feeling.

A Couple Two Tree Items To Note From Last Week:

External Actions

Internal Labor

Media

Obligations:

More Info About The Media Selections From This Week:

My, my, my, my Mitchell! One of these days, I may break down and watch the full unedited film. In the meantime, there's no tradition like the Christmas tradition of watching MST3K take on a 1975 Joe Don Baker film. If Die Hard is a Christmas film, then so is Mitchell. Upscaling it to HD does not do the film any favors, as Joe Don’s clothing and sex scenes gain little in high definition and arguably get worse with the additional details.

What does collapse look like? Is it one big event, or a series of small events that only make sense in retrospect? Historian Patrick Wyman joins the folks of Trashfuture to talk about the (Western) Roman Empire, as one does, and how its citizens were likely unaware of their empire collapsing until well after the fact.

My other podcasts were about background/ambient music, as I was attempting to put some order to the noises around me. I either needed to drown out other stimuli, which was accomplished thanks to Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith's episode, or I wanted something more stimulating than driftless ambient, which is where the door.link episode comes in. The Flow State episode would have been a great musical accompaniment to reading about the Japanese internet, as the Japan Times article posits that the "typical" website in Japan appears to be overstimulated with information and graphics. Japanese signage often errors on the side of giving too much information, and it's easy to pack more Western characters into one Japanese kanji symbol, so when websites first came into being, these practices made their way online and have become difficult to change.

The last Japanese-related media I enjoyed this week was with our friends from It's Time To Travel, who checked out a ryokan along the Izu Peninsula. This particular inn has a lot of atmosphere, both with its design and its surroundings, and by ryokan standards, the pricing is reasonable. Now if you want unreasonable pricings for items like, say, an espresso machine or a Porsche Design toaster, you a) have too much money to waste, and b) are the target audience for the Williams-Sonoma catalog. As per holiday tradition, Drew Magary of Defector reads the catalog so you don't have to.

Finally, here's an object with a price that has not yet been deemed reasonable or not: a new film camera from Lomo! Yes, the same folks who have sold cheap film cameras with flaws deemed as pleasant aesthetics are now trying to sell a new $549 (at pre-order) camera with modern technology like an LCD info screen on top, full auto and manual exposure, a rechargeable battery with a USB-C connection, LIDAR autofocus, and more. It's an intriguing piece of kit, and in many ways proves that the resurgence of film photography has some staying power. I'm not sure this camera would be for me, but I'm glad it exists or at least will exist early next year.

  1. OBE = Overtaken By Events.↩

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