It took me two evenings to bend Jenkins to my will. If you count them all, it took three evenings, but I’m not going to count that middle day where I went to bed right after dinner and had nightmares until I got up at 6AM.

The first day was fairly straightforward. I tried to blow away Jenkins on my machine to “Wash, Rinse, Repeat” and clear away the minimum that I had done in setting up the project. You know, the easy things: create the project, hook it to the source repo…not much, really. Jenkins uninstalled but it left a shadow of itself behind, which made setting it up all over again not at all instructive except to verify that my notes were correct. Yay?

So on that first day, I re-established the project, checked my notes, and then decided that, in the time left to me before bed, I wanted to get the pretty test coverage that I’d gotten with JaCoCo when I’d been playing with Java and Spring several months back.

My notes go something like this: “Add NUnit as Build Step -> “Execute Win Batch Cmd” “Blah\bin\nunit-console.exe” Okay, this was me telling Jenkins to roll in and execute NUnit on my code. Which took a weirdly long amount of time, mostly because I was tired and transcribing paths letter by letter between windows and most of the trouble was finding the right paths to things.

Turn the page and my notes are simply: “Aaargh.”

The next day, I came home, went to bed immediately after dinner and slept like the dead. If the dead had nightmares.

Today, I was determined to get the “pretty” test coverage–that gorgeous line-by-line report pointing to the exact spot you missed. My husband tried to encourage me to give up Jenkins for Team City (and yes, when I feel confident with Jenkins, I will abandon it and move on to Team City), because he said that what I was trying to do was too hard: there aren’t a lot of good free options in the .NET realm for code coverage.

The only real player that I found in the code coverage space that had a decent maintenance record was OpenCover. Don’t get me wrong. OpenCover works (once you get the right arguments–looking at you, “-register:user”) but it took a while staring at examples to realize exactly how to wrap OpenCover’s .exe around NUnit’s .exe and plug input A into output B and basically roll it up like a katamari. And, lo-and-behold, it worked (thank you, console output, for proving that I was making progress).

OpenCover generates an XML file and not anything a human would want to read, let alone look at or study. It’s data, not information. So, on to finding an additional tool that would allow me to get the line-by-line coverage. Welcome ReportGeneratorto the mix. We use the output from OpenCover as the input to ReportGenerator. And after rebuilding and refreshing, there it was: SUCCESS, line-by-line coverage in glorious pale green.

Now, I’m looking at my notes and thinking: these notes from today aren’t very good. I didn’t actually copy down the final batch commands. I just alluded to them, as I have here. But then I think that’s all for the best if my next nightly goal is to figure out how to both uninstall Jenkins and banish its ghost so I can truly work from scratch as I intend.

So, next goal: learn how to thoroughly murder Jenkins so it can be resurrected cleanly.

We have four “urban” chickens who, every spring and summer, lay more eggs than we can possibly eat without a steady diet of omelettes and French toast.

One of their passions (and chickens have few passions besides eating and henpecking each other), is dust bathing. My husband built the chickens a pretty nice chicken run where they have access to dirt to scratch for bugs and dust bathe in luxury.

As of this writing, the chickens have bathed so deeply into the run that when they lie down and flap their wings, you only see the drift of dust passing overhead.

At first, they dug up an inexplicable layer of lava rock. Then today I noticed that they’ve dug up two toy cars and what looks like a part of a Nerf dart. Also, a lonesome domino turned up in the dead grass just outside the run all on its own.

I know that the people who lived here before us were childless, but the house is sixty years old and has seen a lot of owners and I wonder who it was that lost an ambulance and a green sedan in the dirt out back under the cyprus trees and I wonder whether those items were ever missed, the way I miss the small treasures I lost as a child.

I’m looking forward to the chickens digging yet deeper, The Great Escape style, and seeing what else they find (besides a way out again).

My son begins 8th grade in a few weeks and over the course of the summer we’ve had a few “talks” about how this was the last year his grades wouldn’t be on the transcript he would send out to colleges. He took this news with the amount of alarm that you would expect out of a thirteen-year-old: zero. Or at least he pretended zero. Everything I’ve read (and I panicked after his 7th grade year and read multiple books over the summer) points to the notion that “bright but unmotivated” kids are often perfectionists who fear failure and therefore don’t even try, ending up with that facade of “couldn’t care less.”

Our son sailed through seventh grade, sunnily assuring us that he had no homework because they were allotted time in class for it and he’d done it already. I believed this because I know the school had a “low homework” attitude. It was possible that–given enough time in class–he was truly finishing things up.

How could I be so stupid, you wonder? Well, aside from his convincing smile, I was unconvinced. Essentially, we were running an experiment to find out what would happen if we kept our hands off. We assumed he’d be mature enough to at least crash-land his 7th grade year fairly well the same way he’d crash-landed 6th grade.

Then, at the end of the year, I got an email from one of his teachers saying that my son had failed to turn in a two-chapter take home test. She asked us to encourage him to return it ASAP. I looked her name up in the directory, since I never can remember which teacher is which (I’m just bad with names of people I’ve never met that way). It was his algebra teacher. Now, I knew my son was having a hard time in algebra, partly because he didn’t have a textbook–he was at the orthodontist the day they handed out books and they were short so (in short) he didn’t get one.

This, for the record, happened in Seattle Public Schools: there are not enough textbooks for each child to have one in some schools. His middle school is one of the wealthier schools (as supported by PTA dollars). It has a world class music program built by the parents, but the school district cannot be bothered to allot them enough textbooks per child.

So, I was cutting him some slack in algebra because of the no-textbook-thing, though I thought a native of the digital generation should take to his “online textbook” like a fish to water. There was a textbook available for him to use in the classroom, so I figured he just put a lot of effort into finishing (mostly) during class.

But the take-home test made me livid. The algebra teacher had a no-make-up policy and here she was practically begging me to make my son turn in this two-chapter test. Upon returning home that night, I interrogated my errant son, who replied that he hadn’t quite finished it and so hadn’t handed it in–knowing there were no make-ups and no late work allowed. Clearly, he wasn’t thinking clearly.

He finished the test, turned it in, squeaked by, and when his grades came his father looked at them and suggested that I not bother.

So now here’s the bad news: we just sat down with our son to explain to him that mother is going to be monitoring his schoolwork every damn day. Every day will be “planner bingo,” with something written in for each class, whether the topic they covered or the assignment due or what they plan to discuss the next day. Something–anything that mother happens to deem valid. Then, mother and son will organize all of the papers that came in that day, devise a study plan, and mother will sit at the dining table and work quietly on her own work while son and daughter do their assigned work for the day. I will be there from start to finish, no cut corners, no skeletons in the closet, nothing out of place, everything ready for the next day.

Here you may ask: why me and where is my husband in all of this?

I’m the study hall monitor because my husband is the chef and the dishwasher. If you think he’s getting the better end of the deal, you’re wrong; I hate to cook and touching cold, wet, slimy dishes turns my stomach. And I’m forever grateful to him for taking on the yucky stuff.

The good news then, is that even though we’ll fumble and stumble a bit, I have that secret love of planning things, so I’m sure we’ll get the hang of it pretty quickly. From there, I just have to make sure he stays on task and does his best. And everything I’ve read assures me that organization and staying on top of things are key to good self esteem and, more importantly, self-efficacy (the sense that you are capable and resilient in the face of what life throws at you). And from there, the grades just magically follow.

We hope. We’ll see. I’ll report back later on how this actually turns out.

If you’re interested, here are the highlights of my summer reading:

• That Crumpled Paper Was Due Last Week ~ which taught me that my son was not alone in his disorganization and inspired me to sit down with him to get him organized. We’re implementing some pieces of the author’s tactics in modified ways.
• The Price of Privilege ~ while we’re not one of the uber-wealthy, absentee-daddy, power families often referenced in the book, I found this one so compelling that I wrote fifteen pages of notes and went over them in two sessions with my husband and son as conversation starters
• Teach Your Children Well ~ by the same author as The Price of Privilege.
• Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be ~ a book about the bubble of madness surrounding college admissions, esp. the Ivies. The book contains a sweet collection of anecdotes about kids who had to go to their 2nd choice or even fall-back colleges and who found they actually got a great education. My blood pressure must’ve dropped a good ten points reading this book.

There is now a bucket on the lower shelf of my nightstand. It contains several balls of yarn, knitting needles, a crochet hook, and a round loom.

I sat and worked until my back ached.

Why?

Because the family White Elephant Gift Exchange theme is “hand-made” this year. And I was certainly using my hands, although it was my back that felt it the most.

What am I making? What will it look like? I have a bad history with yarn–will it even be something that can be readily identified by a noun in the English language? I don’t know yet. All I know is that the yarn is pretty colors and soft to work with. The theme is “hand-made,” not “useful.” God forbid anyone comes up with that as a theme some year.

However, my family should be afraid. They should be very afraid of this impending monstrosity. Someone will get stuck with it come Christmas day.

At least it’ll be small and easy to ship home.

Among the other bits and pieces of my life that I’m trying to pick up again (I sat for a while and knitted today), I’m reopening my Windows machine and trying to get a fresh start on my programming side project.

This meant not only 26 Windows Updates but also Visual Studio 2013 Update 5. You can tell I’ve been using just my Mac for a while. Shopping, mostly. I’m still trying to get my novel-writing back up to speed.

What is the point of programming all day and then coming home and coding again at night. Well, I’ll confess that sometimes I don’t really code at all during the day, for reasons ranging to an absurd amount of outside appointments to database cleanup. It is, after all, database cleanup season, didn’t you know?

The real point is to have a chance to program sideways from how I normally do. I have a very established set of patterns that I use at work and I would like to hone my brain against something outside that box, where I’m free to roam or dally and do more than just the swiftest thing possible, reusing the identical technologies. It’s like a short-order cook settling down on his or her off-time to slowly and methodically cook something complicated from Julia Child, savoring the whole thing.

And so here I am waiting in “grey bar land, “although the bars aren’t technically grey anymore–fashion is so fickle.

Oh, great. Now I need to restart.