Saw a bit of Dogma last night before crashing at Mona's place. Got me wondering at what point it makes any sense at all to talk about God as something separate from her Creation. For something we can't comprehend that we believe affects our lives with some kind of direction, that we consider to be everywhere at all times, why should we say that this is anything other than a sentient universe?
At work we have a database, which is what I'm theoretically working on. Well, it hasn't been a database. It's been an Excel spreadsheet.
For those not used to dealing with these things, an Excel spreadsheet is an awful way to store information that more than one person needs to access and work on. Only one person can actually edit it at a time, and there can be inconsistencies between the edited version and the version that people are reading--we geeks call it a race condition, because the end result depends on who completes their action first, like a race. The real solution for this is a database: this is the problem that databases were invented to solve, and with varying degrees of usability most of them solve it very well, using some other terminology that you probably don't find as interesting as I do, but trust me, it's one of the basic technologies that makes much of modern life possible, for better or worse.
Of course I work with smart people, so there has been a project underway to import the spreadsheet into the database. Yesterday I made everyone switch over to the database--one of those times when everybody was ready, but no one was gathering that information and producing a collective "ready" verdict. This is something I do well and often, so I got to walk through the office collecting information and giving the final order to import the spreadsheet. Hurray, we're done.
Except that today I went and worked on it for a few hours, got some good work done...and one of the permanent guys on my team comes over and says he just trashed the database. The whole thing. Deleted it all and then realized he wasn't in the test database.