Category: Humor

Do you remember that feeling when you had a performance at school? The dread and nervousness would vanish the second you’d see your mom cheering you on, making you feel like a superstar. A mother’s love is actual proof that magic exists and Oksana Masters is the perfect example, showing people everywhere that you can achieve the impossible with the support of a loving mom.

More info: Instagram

Oksana Masters, a Paralympic champion, is inspiring thousands of people all over the world. However, she had a tough start in life

Image credits: oksanamasters

Oksana’s life story had a challenging beginning. She was born in Ukraine in 1989, just three years after the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster. Sadly, the radiation severely affected little Oksana, causing birth defects such as tibial hemimelia, webbed fingers with no thumbs, and six toes on each foot. Her birth parents abandoned her, leaving the scared little girl alone in an orphanage.

Fortunately, across the ocean lived a woman named Gay Masters who was looking to become a mother. She recalled the first time she saw a picture of little Oksana in a Courier journal: “I had intended to adopt an infant because I know through my line of work how important the first year is for development.”

“But then I was given a black and white photograph of this little girl, there was a sparkle in her eyes and I knew, even though this child was not who I had set out to find, this was my daughter.”

Sometimes a mom doesn’t give birth to her child, but she knows it’s her baby who she will love with all her heart, and that’s exactly what Gay intended to do.

Born three years after the Chernobyl disaster, she was severely affected by radiation, causing multiple birth defects

Image credits: oksanamasters

Abandoned by her birth parents, she spent her days in an orphanage where she endured persistent abuse

Image credits: oksanamasters

As soon as Gay found her daughter, she began a lengthy adoption process. The mother-to-be faced many challenges and was advised against the adoption by a speech pathologist at the University of Louisville. But how could she give up on her little girl who was waiting for her?

When Oksana’s orphanage learned about Gay’s intentions to adopt her, they showed Oksana a picture of her mom and said she would come for her. For the first time in her life, she was hopeful as the biggest and most sacred wish of any child was about to come true: a safe home and a loving parent.

For 24 long months, Gay was working through the paperwork while her child waited patiently for the day she would walk through the door and take her away from the cold and horror.

“If I did something wrong, the orphanage would tell me the American woman didn’t want a bad child and she wasn’t coming,” Oksana recalled the early days.

Gay Masters saw a picture of little Oksana and in her heart she knew that she had found her child and vowed to do anything to be with her

Image credits: oksanamasters

“I was given a black and white photograph of this little girl, there was a sparkle in her eyes and I knew, even though this child was not who I had set out to find, this was my daughter”

Image credits: oksanamasters

Image credits: oksanamasters

Finally, after two years, Gay was able to come and take Oksana home. The moment they met, the little girl recognized her. “I know who you are; you are my mother,” she said as she pulled out a picture of Gay she kept safe on the bedside table. Mom and daughter were finally together.

Upon their return to America, Oksana began to blossom under Gay’s care. She was a rambunctious child, always on the move despite her disabilities. Oksana eventually lost both of her legs – at the age of nine and 14. She had multiple reconstructive surgeries and quickly learned to walk and even run with her prosthetics. Gay noticed her daughter’s knack for sports and encouraged her.

“I had figured out by that point that sports were a kind of therapy for her and I signed her up for horseback riding lessons,” she said. “I told her it was a state law in Kentucky that everyone learned how to ride a horse,” joked Gay.

Sports proved to be the right therapy for Oksana, a perfect escape from everything. “I didn’t like the idea of a sport that was geared towards people with disabilities,” she shared. “I wanted to feel like everyone else.”

The adoption process was lengthy and tedious, dragging over 24 months. Oksana patiently waited for her mum

Image credits: oksanamasters

“If I did something wrong, the orphanage would tell me the American woman didn’t want a bad child and she wasn’t coming”

Image credits: oksanamasters

Image credits: oksanamasters

Oksana is a fan of many sports and not just a fan – she won multiple gold medals at various sports such as rowing, cross-country skiing and cycling. In the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games, she snagged two gold medals and is looking forward to Paris 2024. From a little abandoned girl to an inspiring Olympic champion, Oksana’s story is worth of a movie.

Did she get her love for sports from Gay? Not really: “Oh yeah, my mom and I were very different; she loves books and I loved to climb trees.” But the differences do not matter when there is love, and bookish Gay gladly attends all the sporting events to support her darling daughter.

Gay’s love and support were able to help Oksana heal from the persistent physical, mental, and sexual abuse she underwent in an orphanage. Now, as a grown woman, she hopes to help others.

“I just thought I would be able to help other girls, other kids who live in orphanages who went through this and didn’t know how to heal. And the power of sport – that’s what sports gave me, it gave me my way to heal and let everything out and find myself and rediscover myself in a positive way. And change the narrative of my story.”

She recently published a book “The Hard Parts: A Story of Courage and Triumph” detailing her story.

But Gay did come for her and the little girl instantly recognized her: “I know who you are; you are my mother”

Image credits: oksanamasters

Image credits: oksanamasters

In America, Oksana had many reconstructive surgeries, which allowed her to have a better life. The little girl was active and playful, so Gay signed her up for sports

Image credits: oksanamasters

Image credits: oksanamasters

Now, Oksana is a multiple gold medalist in rowing, skiing and cycling

Image credits: oksanamasters

“That’s what sports gave me, it gave me my way to heal and let everything out and find myself and rediscover myself in a positive way. And change the narrative of my story”

Image credits: oksanamasters

Oksana hopes to help other kids and hopefully change their lives for the better: “I can’t even put into words how much that would mean to me”

Image credits: oksanamasters

It can be difficult to share trauma – it’s easier to bury it deep inside and never speak of it again. Brave Oksana chose to talk about it, shedding light on the problem. No child should suffer the way she did and her biggest dream is to help kids like her.

“If my story could help in some way to shine a light into one specific orphanage or a system and change those kids’ lives forever, then, I can’t even put into words how much that would mean to me.”

The story of the Masters family once again proves that love can do seemingly impossible things. Thanks to Gay’s love, she found her child and raised her to be a champion not only in the sports arena but also in life; a champion who campaigns tirelessly for others.

What do you think of this story?

People in the comments were sharing their admiration for Oksana and her wonderful mother

SQL is hard, but it’s a lot harder when you’re “clever”. This tale highlights an… interesting solution to code reuse. —Remy

Many years ago, Valts and his spouse both worked for the same company. The company had an ERP system that started its life as a product back when ERP systems were novel and new. It was written in Delphi, and it was huge– so huge that the company needed to hack the Delphi linker to handle its size.

Well, their company got swallowed up by Initech, and after the buyout, things changed. Valts left, and a few years later so did his spouse. But they kept in touch with their colleagues, so it was over dinner that former co-worker Viktorija related the recent disaster she had stumbled across.

Viktorija’s day started when she needed to modify one of the “Business Objects”. This product started its life well before ORMs were a common tool, and someone had taken to inventing it in house, wrapping around Delphi’s TDataSet object and plenty of hard-coded SQL strings. What she needed to modify was just a minor validation rule, which she quickly changed and tested, and was quite happy with.

While making the change, she also spotted a hard-coded SQL string that was just… badly formatted. Since it made the query harder to read, and since she was right there, Viktorija added some spaces and breaks and generally made the formatting readable. She committed her changes and went on to the next task for the day.

The CI jobs failed on her commit. But they failed in a completely unrelated module, which nothing she had changed should impact. Nothing about a changed validation rule even applied to that module, and the errors were about database access- nothing in Viktorija’s change should impact database access…

… well, aside from modifying a query.

Viktorija revisited her changes, and noticed that there was a “getter” function to retrieve the value of the query string. She had assumed that was just for debugging purposes, but when she CTRL+Fed through the broken module, she saw that it was fetching that string. And then it was mangling that string.

At some point, someone said, “Code reuse is always good, and since SQL queries are code, I’ll reuse it!” So they fetched the query string from the Business Object Viktorija had changed, and then did a series of operations like “delete the substring from character 160-173” and “insert this substring at position 57.”

By altering the whitespace and formatting, Viktorija had broken that code. It was easy enough to make the tests pass- all Viktorija had to do was revert that part of the change. Unpicking the string mangling and trying to make the system not a disaster was a much larger challenge.

Upon learning of this story, Valts and his partner were quite happy to have left- and felt that Viktorija should go home with an extra bottle of wine after dinner.

John and Melody Hennessee opted for an exciting and cost-effective permanent cruise lifestyle, currently sailing worldwide and planning to reside on a unique residential cruise ship.

76-year-old John and 64-year-old Melody, both from Florida, sold nearly all of their belongings three years ago, including their main business and their home, swapping it all for a motorhome instead to travel around the United States.

One day, John got tired of driving. That’s when the couple discovered an advert on Facebook for a 274-day cruise with Royal Caribbean. Thus began their journey to a permanent life on the ocean.

John and Melody Hennessee sold everything they owned to spend the rest of their lives on cruise ships

Image credits: Melody Thor Hennessee

Image credits: Melody Thor Hennessee

The lovebirds are reportedly now cruising around the Dominican Republic as part of the latest in a series of long-term sailings, which have taken them to places including Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, Sky News reported.

And as much as their new life at sea has been all the more exciting, it’s the cheaper cost of living that has made it all worth it.

John said: “We now have a telephone bill, a ship bill, and a few credit card bills for when we go ashore, but that’s it.

76-year-old John and 64-year-old Melody, both from Florida, sold nearly all of their belongings three years ago

Image credits: Melody Thor Hennessee

“We no longer have a mortgage or the expense of homes. We no longer have vehicle insurance, property insurance, or utility bills. The list goes on. We are certain cruising is cheaper.

“Right now it is probably close to half of what it was when we lived on land.”

John and Melody’s life has been planned month by month, hopping from ship to ship. Moreover, they are reportedly booked up to December 2024.

The adventurous pair’s next stop will land them on Villa Vie’s residential cruise ship, becoming permanent residents on the unique vessel where as many as 30% of those on board will be permanent residents.

Villa Vie will circumnavigate the world every three years, largely following the warm weather, Sky News reported.

An inside cabin reportedly starts at $99,000, but a balcony villa with views of the ocean costs $249,000. Cruisers also have to pay a nearly $8,000 monthly fee.

The couple’s adventure began when they stumbled across a Facebook advert for a 274-day cruise with Royal Caribbean

Image credits: Melody Thor Hennessee

Despite the huge vessel still being under construction, John and Melody have already set their eyes on their future home through digital renderings.

Melody said: “We wanted to buy a cabin so we can design it how we want. It’s going to be home for us, for probably a minimum of 15 years on the ship.”

The cabin will be larger than a traditional cruise ship room, equipped with a kitchenette and pull-down bed in the living room for guests.

“We now have a telephone bill, a ship bill, and a few credit card bills for when we go ashore, but that’s it,” John said

Image credits: Melody Thor Hennessee

So far, around 85% of cruisers are American. Villa Vie have just reportedly signed their first British couple.

Those living on board will be able to bring their families onto the ship for free – once they’ve paid the port fees – and a set number of cabins will be reserved for them, as per the British broadcaster.

Additionally, there will be a business center and private offices, allowing digital nomads to work from anywhere in the world.

The Villa Vie Odyssey is currently undergoing a multi-million-pound transformation and will enter service in May 2024, launching from Southampton, New York.

“We are certain cruising is cheaper. Right now it is probably close to half of what it was when we lived on land,” John explained

Image credits: Melody Thor Hennessee

Mikael Petterson, the Odyssey’s CEO and founder, said: “Every operator has its own world cruise. And they just get longer and longer and longer. So why not push the envelope and create the ultimate world cruise where you don’t stop and you just keep going?”

Mikael revealed nearly half of cabins are singles, with a third being business owners and those who can work from anywhere in the world.

The adventurous pair’s next stop will land them on Villa Vie’s residential cruise ship, where they plan to spend “a minimum of 15 years”

Image credits: villavieresidences

With the ship averaging an age of almost 60, residents have a dentist and doctor on board for routine procedures. For more serious health scares, there is a hospital – and a two-person morgue for the worst-case scenario, as per Sky News.

“Best of luck to them,” a person who met the couple commented

Poor Sandra, this article is but one bad day in a slew of bad days dealing with geographic data and WTFs. —Remy

Sandra has ongoing issues. When we last checked in, we had some problems with geography, and those problems haven’t been solved.

Now, one truth of geographic points is that they’re bounded. We know, for example, that longitudes cover the range (-180,180), and latitudes are always (-90,90). Even if we change the coordinate system, it will still have bounds, as the Earth is a closed shape with finite boundaries.

Sandra maintains an application that lets users annotate the map with their own data points, drawing shapes on the map and recording the coordinates of the shape. The code which manages the map layer allows the user to pan around the map, and transparently update its internal coordinates to remain within those boundaries. The code which manages the annotation layer, however, does not. It will happily let you draw a shape on New Zealand, and the coordinates might be 177 degrees, -183 degrees, or even -543 degrees. It doesn’t care.

Now, when exporting this data, this turns out not to be a problem. Other mapping tools will receive a wildly out of bounds coordinate and shift it into the valid range- a safe and non-destructive operation.

But when rendering the data, it turns out, it’s a problem. The annotation layer isn’t smart enough to do that shifting, so if you scroll around the map a few times, and draw a shape on New Zealand at, say, -543 degrees, the next time you load the data and scroll to New Zealand- your annotations aren’t there. But if you rotate around the Earth a few times, like Superman reversing time, the annotations will pop up.

The end result is a lot of very confused users, and a lot of support tickets that basically amount to “you rotated the Earth wrong, try again”.

The fix would be some relatively simple math, but as is frequently with the case with these things, the annotation layer code is a mass of ugly spaghetti and every change is fraught with risk. There are also a million other things on fire, which means, “users get confused but their data still exists” places it on the absolute lowest priority. So the tickets keep coming, the users keep getting unsatisfactory workarounds, the world keeps spinning, and nothing ever changes.

The Rock says… It’s electrifying! Dwayne Johnson, who was once known as The Rock while professionally wrestling for World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), brought back some serious nostalgia for this Christmas season.

Dressing as a meme of himself, the 51-year-old actor commemorated a picture that went viral a few years back of him wearing a particularly nifty 1990s outfit, complete with silver chain worn over his black polo neck and a chic fanny bag.

Taking to his Instagram page, Dwayne posted a clip of himself reviving the iconic picture, as he wrote: “Merry Christmas, from your keepin’ it [100 emoji] friend. ’90s Rock.”

Dwayne Johnson dressed as a meme of himself wearing an iconic 1990s look for Christmas Day

Image credits: therock

Image credits: therock

The former WWE star also included the hashtag #TappinFannys, a reference which was funnily highlighted on British news outlets, as in the UK, it means a very different naughty thing.

In the clip, the Baywatch actor showed off the retro outfit in full while singing the festive hit The Christmas Song by Nat King Cole.

The video was very popular amongst his 395 million followers on Instagram, as it was viewed 39 million times. Naturally, fans rushed to the comment section as a person wrote: “The Rock cosplaying The Rock.”

“Merry Christmas, from your keepin’ it [100 emoji] friend. 90’s Rock,” Dwayne wrote

Image credits: therock

Watch the hilarious video below

“Can’t believe your PR team approved this,” another individual quipped.

A separate Instagram user penned: “How massive of a star do you have to be to successfully wear a costume of yourself?”

In October, the Grevin Museum in Paris, France, revealed a figure of Dwayne as its newest addition to its waxwork collection.

The former WWE star recreated his infamous 1994 look, consisting of a black turtleneck, silver chain, and jeans styled with a fanny pack

Image credits: therock

The wax figure captures an uncanny resemblance to the ex-professional wrestler, actor, and reigning Hollywood superstar, complete with detailed placement of each and every one of Johnson’s many, many muscles.

However, fans were certain that the wax figure resembling him lacked a certain element and promptly shared their thoughts on the figure, which stands 1.96 meters tall.

Dwayne also included the hashtag #TappinFannys

Image credits: therock

“It’s very…. white. The face isn’t very unifying either!” one person wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter).

“Will I allow myself to be the first to say… ‘Mr Clean’,” another added.

The video was very popular amongst his 395 million followers on Instagram, as it was viewed  39 million times

Image credits: therock

Prior to the recent addition at the Grevin Museum, visitors could encounter lifelike replicas of The Rock at Madame Tussauds locations in London, New York, Hollywood, Las Vegas, and Orlando.

The Grevin Museum later admitted that the actor’s figure wasn’t one of its best.

The museum explained to Deadline: “Dwayne Johnson is right and we noticed it and will obviously remedy it as quickly as possible and send him new photos once completed.”

Dwayne’s funny revival of the 1990s meme-able look sparked hilarious reactions from fans

ADVERTISEMENT

“Why aren’t we using microservices?”

It was an odd way to start a meeting, but it got Mr. TA‘s attention. TA was contracting with a client, and sitting in a meeting with their senior architects. TA and one of his peers exchanged a glance and a small eye-roll. They knew exactly what had happened: Alvin, the senior architect, had learned about a new fad.

The application that TA’s team was working on, and the core product which the client offered, was a pretty simple data-driven application. It was, at its core, one SQL Server database, a simple front-end, and could easily run reliably off of a moderately powerful server. With co-location and rackspace costs, it could cost them a few thousand a month to operate.

But the senior engineers heard about the cloud. And they wanted everything in the cloud. And they wanted all the latest features that Azure had to offer. Which meant they were spending hundreds of thousands a month to host the application.

“It doesn’t matter why we aren’t using microservices,” the senior architect went on. “What matters is that we’re getting left behind. If we want to operate at webscale and provide maximum advantage to our users, with always-on reliability, we need to be using microservices. And don’t worry: I have a plan for the transition.”

Alvin pulled up a PowerPoint slide entitled “Initech’s Microservice Migration”.

Alvin’s microservice plan called for dividing the application up into 13 modules. The boundaries were arbitrary, with only the vaguest sense of putting common functionality into the same microservice. Most of the proposed microservices weren’t single purpose- they each contained multiple unrelated pieces of functionality, making them not exactly micro.

But that wasn’t the biggest issue. Alvin had a vision of 13 different microservices, and each microservice needed to have its own database. After all, each microservice was supposed to be independently deployable from any other. So their single SQL Server database got split into 13 different databases.

Of course, this created all sorts of new problems. The “Admin” “micro”service (which contained a few hundred endpoints, once again, stretching the definition of “micro”) had all the admin tables siloed off into its own database. But every other “micro”service needed to access the data in those admin tables.

Now, if this all stayed in one database, it’d be easy to do joins. Heck, even if this were just an on-prem SQL Server deployment, cross-database queries are completely doable. But in Azure, your only option is to use the “Linked Tables” feature, which means creating an object for each remote table you want to access. Since you have 13 databases, all needing several tables from every other, you can see how this quickly spirals out of control in terms of complexity.

“But that’s not a problem,” Alvin explained, when TA pointed out this problem. “We’re using microservices, which means we scale horizontally.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“We just add more resources to the cloud, and let our microservices collaborate,” Alvin said.

“I’m not clear how that solves the problem.”

“That’s why I’m the architect.”

It took several weeks of back-and-forth to get Alvin to explain his brillant architecture. What Alvin intended was to have every microservice fetch the related data by talking to other microservices. All the joins would just be done in the application layer, and any performance problems could be solved by going “webscale”, which is to say: throwing money into a pit and setting it on fire to please the great god Azure.

Despite Mr. TA’s protests, that was the direction everyone marched off in. When it rapidly became clear that this was non-viable, Alvin adapted.

“So, to boost performance, we’ll replicate a few tables between databases.”

Replication was an initial bulk copy, and then updating the “micro”service responsible for those tables to do its update multiple times in multiple databases. Unfortunately, due to the mess Alvin had made of things, the databases had lost referential integrity, which meant they couldn’t leverage foreign key constraints to protect the data.

The worst “replicated” table was the one for tracking shipments. In the original, “source of truth” location, it was designed with a slew of NVARCHAR columns named UserDefinedField01, and UserDefinedField27 and UserDefinedField112. There was an additional lookup table that applications could use to map those fields to UI elements, but that didn’t exactly help all the other “micro”services that wanted that data. So Alvin set up a replication process that normalized that data into a more traditional database schema in the other 12 databases that wanted the data. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the same normalization of the data in each of those remote databases, making the maintenance of replication a gigantic pain.

At this point, it should surprise no one to learn that Alvin also just used NVARCHAR fields for basically everything, even things that absolutely have no reason to be. For example, the Users table, quite reasonably, had an autonumbered UserId field. It also had a UserName field. Every table that related (or “related”, in the databases that didn’t contain user information), used UserName as the foreign key.

Eventually, Alvin’s microservice migration limped across the arbitrarily defined finish line. Alvin presented management with a self-congratulatory project retrospective that highlighted his leadership, his technical vision, and how their were now well positioned for the future, by using the latest techniques.

Interestingly, this retrospective completely ignored the costs of the migration, or the fact that to maintain the same level of performance as the old architecture, they had to spent almost 75% more on cloud services.