the adventures of pinkaholic girl

UPDATE without WHERE = uh oh...

I wrote a great SQL command today that lets admins direct a downloadable data stream to a different computer for any given user. Yay me! There was only one tiny bug. I forgot to put a WHERE clause in the command, and now our director of development has downloaded the entire catalogue of movies the company has ever sold onto his laptop. Seems he's got a lot of space on there. (Lucky it was only on our dev environment. phew. :)

enough geekery; I'm heading off to Amsterdam on Friday for a weekend of flowers and debauchery, so I'm sure there will be photos of things that are pretty as well as things that are pretty illegal come next week. I'm a little bit apprehensive about Amsterdam; I've heard Stories. I'm also arriving by myself late at night, which really creeped me out in Munich, so I'd like to stop making it a habit. Note to self: next time, get earlier flights. However! I'm keen on the Van Gogh and Anne Frank museums, and we'll be spending some time admiring the tulips in the flower park, which should be colourful.

It has been super warm in London recently, many degrees warmer than average for this time of year (go global warming!). As a result of all this balminess, people are gradually waking up to the fact that there is actually an environment, and we need to stop screwing it over. Out of seemingly nowhere there are huge campaigns to reduce packaging and waste, and 'Carbon footprint' has become the new buzzword of '07, used to describe the level of impact you have on the environment. For example, camping has very little carbon footprint; easyjet flights are like pouring a dirty big vat of ugly sludge over a pretty rainforest, and taking ten of them a year is like running your own Pacific Gas & Electric company. In the past few days I've seen two TV news stories, advertising campaigns on the eco-friendliness of companies, new slogans to help people reduce their carbon footprints, and I just finished watching a TV show where this guy had hand built his family's self-sustaining home from scratch, all from environmentally friendly and recycled materials over eighteen months... This is not to say that everyone's changing their habits, just that a lot of the big companies are advertising the fact that they're being more environmentally friendly (ironically probably increasing their carbon footprint in the process). The Brits are a bit like the japanese in the packaging stakes - they make food portable for busy people, environment be damned. A news story on BBC this morning showed individually wrapped apricots inside a plastic bag of apricots. Isn't that just crazy?

Anyway, the advertising got to me, and I considered my current carbon footprint on the earth. I came to the conclusion that staying in Sydney was probably the best thing I could have done for this world, since we have no recycling in my building, we waste water, leave lights on, read free newspapers that generate 12 tonnes of paper wastage each day, eat packaged food, buy extremely cheap non-sustainable goods, and take our dirt cheap holidays overseas on a regular basis.

I have to start doing something better for this world :p

posted by d @ 10:32 pm