New job began yesterday, then gym and coma.  Quiet night tonight.  Nick Cave tomorrow (anyone else going tomorrow, or is everyone going on Thurs/Fri?).  Parents Thursday.  B-Movie Friday.  Haircut, then Andrew’s birthday do of some stripe Saturday, possibly followed by ill-advised clubbing, given that I’ve got a game to run Sunday.  (I had decided that I wouldn’t go out late Saturday night, but I caught myself idly wondering about maybe going clubbing during a quiet moment this afternoon, which is a bad sign.  I know what I’m like.  I write this in a hope to double-bluff myself out of going.  I think.  Maybe.  Now I’m just rambling.  Ahem.)

Now I think of it, next week looks reasonably quiet until Friday, when it’s Flogging Molly, likely followed by Synthetic Culture.  I am slightly concerned about the amount I’m out clubbing of late.  I have this terrible suspicion that I ought to be doing something more grown up and responsible, but I have no idea what.  Still, I refuse to even slightly contemplate Saturday-night clubbing that weekend – I have gigs on both the Monday and the Tuesday of the following week, and I’m buggered if I’m going to be less that perfectly-rested for either of them.

Oh, and one of the techies among you: the New Job has one feature in common with several places I’ve worked before – it attempts to drive just about the entire website admin system through one controlling script (and a swathe of included functions), with various action and sub-action flags to tell it what bits of code it should be executing.

What the hell is the argument in favour of doing this?  I’m not advocating separate scripts for every tiny task, but my general reflex is to write (if dealing with news articles, say) an add_news.script, and edit_news.script and a news_index.script to navigate between the two.  Possibly a delete_news.script as well, although I usually build that in as a sub function of edit.  All of these would of course, use the news.class for their functions, and would only have y’know that actual logic that’s required to work out what to display based on the news.class functions.  And then, if I were to expand the system to have functionality to support products, they’d have their own add/edit/index/delete/class stuff as well.

But the new job, as in several other places I’ve worked runs almost everything through one, 3000 line index.script (and hell, even their SQL stored procs do about three different things each, but at least their focused on a datatype)  what the hell is the argument in favour of that?  It seems like a god-awful way of doing things to me.  Yeah, everything is in one place, but it takes five minutes to find the bit you need every time.  But I’ve run across it (to one extent or another – some places, would instead of having one massive index.script have one news.script and one products.script, for example) in so many places that I really have to wonder if I’m not missing some obvious advantage to doing it this way?  Anyone?