Never did, maybe.

Frequency: Unique

HP: 100,000

AC: -10

Str: 25

Int: 5

Wis: 3

Dex: 5

Con: 25

Chr: 25

Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Attacks: 3 – 50-500/10-100/10-100 or Special

Godzilla can bite for 50 d 10 damage. If he opts to bite, he will also get two claw attacks. Godzilla’s bite is as a +6 Vorpal weapon. His claw attacks are as +4 Swords of Sharpness.

Once per round Godzilla can breath radioactive fire.  If he chooses to employ his breath weapon, that is his only attack that round. When Godzilla elects to breath, the scales on his back glow, warning his enemy. Agile opponents can use this warning to attempt to dodge the weapon.

Godzilla’s breath weapon does 100 d 20 points of damage.  Giant-sized opponents must roll their dexterity or less on D20 or take full damage. Smaller opponents who roll their dexterity must roll a second saving throw, versus death, or be struck by splash damage for 10 d 10.

Godzilla is vulnerable to the scales of giant moths, and massive attacks by silly string.

Etta James: maybe the best blues singer you’ve barely heard of.

The prize is sweet! Go enter.

What I was really getting at was the bit at the end. It is only in the last two or three years that I have really used (I mean REALLY used) the notion of test driven development, in which one starts development by deciding what a successful test looks like.

I’ve always done that to a certain extent, but now I do it automatically.

You write a 300 line stored procedure without compiling. It compiles first time. You then take the compiled proc and test it against your four pre-defined tests. You fix the logic flaw exposed by test three, recompile, retest, and notify the front end guys that the procedure is ready to be coded against and tested.

The giveaway? The predefined tests.

I don’t know whether this is a good thing or a bad thing.

“Better give you a bit extra. You have a thick jaw, a lot of bone,” he said. He poked me with the needle again. And again. And again.

So I had my answer: for this procedure, Irish bar fighters needed more anaesthesia, and therefore possessing a mandible capable of withstanding the pounding of drunken Hibernian fists was a bad thing.

Once I was numbed such that he could have removed flesh with an acetylene torch if he’d had one handy, he started cutting. And then scraping. Then there was grinding. More scraping. I tried not to think about what the inside of my mouth looked like. In the little glimpses I caught in his mirror, there was an awful lot of carmine.

Once all the scraping was done, he spent a good long time pressing a series of sponges against the area.

“Almost done. It’s going fine,” he said. I wasn’t totally convinced. His gloves, as they moved past my face, were spattered with something red.

He took a curved needle and what looked like 30 feet of line and passed it through my gums ten or twelve times. Then he applied some pink plastic over top.

So now it’s very soft food (yogourt, soup) for the next couple of days, and nothing big or chewy for another 10 days after that.

And there’s still the crown to go on!

“I was going to do something, but then my mother phoned,” she said.

“Oh, I should phone my moth…” I said.

…

I woke this morning from a dream. My mother and I were considering buying a condo in Abbotsford. We were walking to see it, I think, and we walked through the garden of one that she told me was like the one in Abbotsford, admiring the trees.

She was as she had been perhaps fifteen years ago before the disease took her. There were no signs of disability. It was sunny and warm, late afternoon I would guess. I remember her hands brushing back the branches of a tree with close-set rust coloured leaves.

…

I have to see the periodontist this afternoon. He is going to do some sort of gum surgery on me. So I packed my toothbrush and floss in my bag (I am not one of those people who brushes after lunch) and as I did so I thought that I had to remember to tell my mother about this. My father, you see, lost most of his teeth when he was young, and he had full dentures. My mother, on the other hand, had all of hers and she was quite interested in dental health. Almost a fanatic, really.

Mysterious and beautiful all at once.

We have a little pod of database related people up front, and I’m right up in the corner, which means that I’m the guy that delivery people and job supplicants come to¹. We’ve been bitching about this for some time now, wanting the door locked so that the various supplicants have to go across the hall to where the actual office manager is.

Nothing has been done.

Until today. You see, yesterday, we had a fire drill and someone walked in and stole the boss’s laptop. So now the fargin door will be locked. The office manager chick is running around right now gathering card numbers.

1. It doesn’t make much sense to me that they have one of their senior technical people (who don’t exactly make peanuts) answering the door, but hey, it’s their money.