Happy birthday to my good and longest friend Zoe-o! I’ve known Zoe since i was one year old. Until about the age of 20 or 21, we saw each other every single year (give or take one or two misses). Though, now I haven’t seen her in nearly six years (since my wedding), which is kind of astonishing to think about.
Today was a crazy & oh so busy day. We all woke up, and got ready for the day. Then I piled both boys and Tails into the car. I dropped Tails off at the vet, then took the boys to their doctor appointment.
I’ve always really liked our pediatrician, but today I was actually a little annoyed with him. While the kids are babies, he does a really good job of appealing to the ‘client’—making conversational small talk by asking about us as well as sharing little and relevant antidotes about himself and his family. He also does a good job of telling us, as the parents, that we are doing a great job with our kids. He’s very good at making the parents feel good and making us, the parents love him.
But Rex is 3 now. He understands what is going on, and he understands when someone is in his personal bubble. The entire time that the doctor was examining Rex, he continued to make small talk with me and try to appeal to my interests. I don’t have to tell you that an examination is a very personal and invasive procedure. Throughout the examination, while doctor was small talking with me and poking and prodding and examining my son, i found myself interrupting the small talk to let Rex know not only that what the doctor was doing was okay, but also to inform him of what the doctor was doing:
“Rex, do you see that thing he is putting in his ears, you know what that is. What is it?” ……
“It’s a skep-a-sope! You have a skepasope! Right?!”
…nervous nod
“It’s okay, Rex. He’s looking into your ears to see how you hear.”
“It’s okay, Rex, he’s just checking your belly and now your back to make sure it’s all very healthy and strong”
Rex just looked at me nervously and tolerantly.
The whole time, doc was talking to me about crap that doesn’t matter trying to appeal to me as the client while not really acknowledging Rex except to say hello and fist bump when it was all over—but I’m not the client, Rex is.
This exam caught me off guard, and so I didn’t realize all this until the tail end of Rex’s exam or I would have said something to him. I was a little disappointed in the whole thing. Rex is the patient, and Rex is a person. He deserves and, especially as a super young child needs to know why this stranger is touching him and why it is okay that he is touching him. That is obviously my job as his mom, but I do feel like it is the doctor’s job also to treat a 3 year old as his patient and as human and thus talk to him through the exam and not me.
Leo laughed through his entire exam. He thought it was all hysterical—except the ear check, but even that was kinda funny.
Anyway, after that I guiltily took them to school, and I went to work. I refactored more and refactored my main function to no longer parse the args since my HttpServer already did that for me. Got that working, and then refactored too far and had to back track a little, but all in all everything is working and the app runs.
Then I looked into cookies. Thought about making some snickerdoodles, but then refocused on the cookies at hand—brower cookies! Have you seen Storybots on Netflix? If not, you should. There is a great one about how computers work (featuring Snoop Dog coming out from behind a processor in a puff of smoke). It’s a great show!
It’s funny, because when cookies were mentioned to me, I thought “oh no! Cookies are an impossible, magical thing that happen behind the scenes that are super abstract and no one understands! How will i ever do this?!” And while, my thought was not false—the majority do not understand cookies: “Oh this website uses cookies and is asking me for permission, well I love cookies, so sure you can have my cookies…”, it was also not true in that they are not abstract, magical, impossibilities. And in fact, I should learn (again) from this that while things get harder and more complicated on this endeavor, everything comes back to the basics and everything is created by some one.
Cookies must be written, and just like with all code, can be reduced to bytes. Would it be fair to say that bytes are to atoms as byte arrays are to molecules? No it would not. This is incorrect. But bytes are to atoms. Byte arrays, however, are more like to a solution or an organism—DNA? DNA, that sounds appropriate. But so if a byte is to an atom, what is a molecule? Or perhaps as I once stated, maybe I should leave chemistry out of this…
Anyway, cookies must be written, and thus they can be read, and thus they can be used.
Now to write one…. A cookie saves to the hard drive, so it’s not a map thing. It’s more in depth. I still need to figure out this part—though there are a lot of languages that do this for you, but I need to know how they work and where they are stored—the StoryBots know: “Please do not eat the browser cookies!”