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I am getting to the stage where I am almost frightened to see birds these days.  Every time something disastrous is about to happen to this project, birds come along and start pecking on the window.

D says I am going loopy.

‘It is spring’ he says ‘ we have a big picture window of glass, you just happen to be working on the computer when they see their reflection and peck at it’.  So I say OK D, you are probably right, but I now take notice of the birds.

This time it was long tailed tits, four of them, maybe five, beautiful little birds in soft pastel colours.  They flew at the window, flapping at me, they pecked on the window, they jumped up and down in front of the window, they sat on the tree outside the window and bobbed up and down to attract my attention and I started to get angry because I didn’t know why.

And I thought as best I could with my eyes closed and said ‘why, why, why’ to them.

But all I got was the warning.

And true to form, what happened?

I discovered the links in the database weren’t working.  P had made changes to the code in the linking program, and whilst it solved one problem, it produced thousands of others.  Potentially I had 7000 observations that all needed to be checked to see if the links had been broken by the changes.

I almost gave up the site at that point.  Each observation has about 5 links, often more, which means I was going to have to check 35,000 links.  It takes at least 10 minutes to check and change an observation, so this is 70,000 minutes of work, which if we round it up to 72,000 minutes [a not unreasonable thing to do in reality] this is 1200 hours or at 5 hours continuous work per day 240 days of solid correction.

Soul destroying work too, redoing what had already been done, so the birds were right, but like I said last time, how did they know?

They were right to warn me, the more observations I loaded the worse it was going to be and of course in the meantime the site was inconsistent and lacking in vast amounts of already loaded observations – a real off putter for anyone who visited the site or who was already using it.  At least two activities had lost all their observations as a result of the changes made, a great deal more had lost over half.

In the end I corrected the truly disastrously major ones myself and spent three weeks doing it, but then got P at last to recognise the problem he had caused and he is at this very moment attempting to write a routine which will identify the other broken links for me. 

So thank you birdies.  You’ve all gone now.  You went once I had found the problem.

D says they’ve found another place to nest.