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[Tack]

Yeah, I've eaten ghost-pepper jam before.

It was not an entertaining experience.

[Knit tie]

I once tried sulphuric acid. It tasted like lemon mixed with blood.

[Tack]

... Please tell me that is a (rather funny) joke.

[Knit tie]

Not really, no. I once took a drop of diluted sulphuric acid from my home cemistry kit, you know, the ones they sell under names like "Professor Swirly's Porta-Lab" and such, except mine was Russian-made so it was kinda ugly and hardcore with caustic and toxic compounds, and put it on my tongue. It tasted very sour, unsurprisingly, and gave me a blister which bled a little, but that was it.

If you want to hear something really crazy, my high school chemistry teacher used to take swigs of liquid nitrogen at parties and hold them in his mouth with no ill effects, because the vapor emitted by the liquid as it evaporated prevented it from contacting and flash-freezing his palate and tongue.

[Dutchling]

Not really, no. I once took a drop of diluted sulphuric acid from my home cemistry kit, you know, the ones they sell under names like "Professor Swirly's Porta-Lab" and such, except mine was Russian-made so it was kinda ugly and hardcore with caustic and toxic compounds, and put it on my tongue. It tasted very sour, unsurprisingly, and gave me a blister which bled a little, but that was it.

If you want to hear something really crazy, my high school chemistry teacher used to take swigs of liquid nitrogen at parties and hold them in his mouth with no ill effects, because the vapor emitted by the liquid as it evaporated prevented it from contacting and flash-freezing his palate and tongue.

I like how you said you're Russian twice.

[MorleyDev]

A common "chemistry magic trick" is to 'drink' near-pure alcohol. If you breath-out as you pour, the alcohol will evaporate quickly enough to not kill you.

[Knit tie]

A common "chemistry magic trick" is to 'drink' near-pure alcohol. If you breath-out as you pour, the alcohol will evaporate quickly enough to not kill you.

My miner grandma would like to say that you can actually drink near-pure alcohol perfectly fine, you know. You just need to hold your breath while it's in your mouth or it will evaporate out, as you said.

[Sirus]

Y'all should take these cool science facts to the SCIENCE thread. Because cool science facts are not sad.

I certainly am, though. Really wish I had gone ahead and stayed home today.

[Knit tie]

Y'all should take these cool science facts to the SCIENCE thread. Because cool science facts are not sad.

I certainly am, though. Really wish I had gone ahead and stayed home today.

Long and tiring day with no gratitude from anyone again?

[Telgin]

Speaking of programming...

...

Yeah, a huge part of the problem is our policy on testing: the developer is responsible for that as it's being developed.  He (we're all guys here at the moment) just fixes everything he comes across, finishes developing, thinks of ways it might break, and tries to fix it all before too much time has been spent on it and he has to move on to something else.  That is, testing is 100% informal.  Nobody here but me even knows what a unit test or integration test or regression test even is.  QA consists of the other devs poking through the system briefly and making sure nothing obvious is broken.  Then we wait for complaints to roll in and fix things as they're reported.

That largely stems from the fact that we work almost exclusively on intranet software and tools.  If they're buggy, nobody really cares.  They just come yell at the devs to fix it and we do.  Or silently ignore it and let bugs hang around for years.

When you combine that development practice with public facing software that can cost people money, bad stuff happens.  What's even better is when you don't have a dedicated development environment and can only work on live code.  We had to take the system down for a day because we couldn't develop anything without breaking the live site.  Even better is that our partner relies on this system to send emergency notices to people in the event of disasters or the like, so that part of the system had to remain online as we worked, whatever the costs.  So you can imagine how jittery I got when I broke that for multiple hours before I got it back online.  Thank goodness they didn't try to use it in that time period.

I've advocated formal testing many times.  Every time I do, the response is, "Yeah, we should definitely do that."  Then we don't.  As the one who knows something about how it's done, I guess it's my job to sort of spearhead that change.  We've tried using development sites in the past but never really made use of them.  It was just too annoying to work on the dev site, then copy the fix or changes over when you could just do it straight on the live site.  Even now, after finally using Git for source control, we do the same thing.  Git's just a way to keep track of code changes; the work is still done on live code and committed after the fact.

The problem of course, is that we've just got way too much to do.  3 developers and a huge mound of things that needed to be done yesterday don't leave a lot of room for experimenting with new technologies or methodologies.

I've considered trying to work on that some in my free time, but I am not turning into my manager who works almost every waking hour of his life.

[Sirus]

Y'all should take these cool science facts to the SCIENCE thread. Because cool science facts are not sad.

I certainly am, though. Really wish I had gone ahead and stayed home today.

Long and tiring day with no gratitude from anyone again?

Plus a dose of digestive system discomfort. But yes. How did you guess?

[Knit tie]

Y'all should take these cool science facts to the SCIENCE thread. Because cool science facts are not sad.

I certainly am, though. Really wish I had gone ahead and stayed home today.

Long and tiring day with no gratitude from anyone again?

Plus a dose of digestive system discomfort. But yes. How did you guess?

Truckers are the same everywhere, comrade.

[Gunner-Chan]

If it's any consolation Sirius. Yeah, I personally agree that truckers are unappreciated. They're the veins and arteries of the economy in a lot of different areas of business.

[Sirus]

...excuse me, got something in my eyes
_thanks

[Knit tie]

You are also an amazing roleplayer, Sirus. God knows I will never be able to imagine you as anyone other than a monocled Fire Emblem protagonist