Hey y’all. So, I had a heart attack and bypass surgery. Here is the full story.

Friday (3/31) and Saturday (4/1) nights I had chest pain that I thought was acid reflux. On Sunday morning, the pain returned. I checked my blood pressure. It was 170/103. I took some anxiety meds, gas x, and aspirin. An hour later it was still high.

So we went to the ER. Blood work showed troponin in my blood. “When heart muscles become damaged, troponin is sent into the bloodstream. As heart damage increases, greater amounts of troponin are released in the blood.” I was then admitted for observation and further testing.

On Monday (4/3) morning they performed an echocardiogram. There were some abnormalities. They then performed a heart catheter. I had 90% blockage in at least one artery. And blockages in several others. I was immediately transferred to UAB hospital.

Later that day I met with a surgeon. After discussing it with him, we decided to do bypass surgery. The long term success rate with this surgery at my age is better than the alternatives. Surgery was booked for Thursday, April 6.

On Tuesday (4/4) and Wednesday (4/5) I just hung out at the hospital. I could have another heart attack at any moment. Going home was not an option. Friends and family visited. I had some hard conversations with family about what to do “just in case”. Those conversations don’t phase me. And the family I spoke to were very practical about it as well.

Early Thursday morning, before dawn, I broke down a little bit. The reality that I could not wake up was hitting me. I knew it was not likely. These procedures are done every day. My doctor would probably do several that day alone. Still, it could have happened. It’s normal for me to have these emotional outbursts alone. The first time I remember it happening was with my great grandmothers death when I was 15. It’s been the same with all my other grandparents’ deaths as well. It’s just how I deal with it.

Then it was time to go. The family that was there followed us down to the waiting room. Once I was in pre-op and settled they said I could have one person come back. They let two coke back. The nurse said we seemed like solid people. I don’t remember a lot about that time. I do remember Deedra deciding to read my chart. Haha. The staff walking by was confused. Then I was off. While still rolling me in, I started to feel woozy. And then black.

I wake up very confused with some voices I know and others I don’t know. I understand their instructions but don’t know how to follow them. I need to breath. Ok. There is something in my mouth. Oh it’s the ventilator of course. They can’t remove it until I breath. There are two people I know there. My ex wife, and mother of my six children, Robin, coaching me on what to do. Good I need that right now. And Amy, my platonic life partner, speaking to me softly and encouraging me to breath. Man, I really need that approach too. If you had asked me what two people I would want in that moment, I would probably not have chosen either of them. And yet, they were the perfect combination at that time. Some (I assume) nurse said “good job” and out came the ventilator. Based on when I knew I went into the OR and how long the surgery took, I would say this is around 2pm. People say they visited with me in recovery. I believe them. Still, I really don’t recall much until 5AM on Friday morning.

Friday was confusing. It’s like my mind was still trying to figure out what happened to my body.

Between Friday and Tuesday (4/11) I had good times and bad times. I eventually got to go home. That is where I am now. My strength has slowly been recovering. The last device attached to my body came off yesterday. It will be several weeks of very limited activity. Mostly I just can’t lift things or drive. Slowly that will be allowed more and more. Then once all restrictions are removed, I can start building up my strength again.

Recently, on Facebook, I was asked "Who are you to call anyone a racist?". To be clear, I did not call anyone a racist. But, really, let's say I did call someone a racist? Who am I to call anyone a racist? After all, I am a 47 year old, white, middle class man. I am, quite possibly, in the absolute sweet spot of my life for white privilege.

As a child, I heard older family members say racist things. Luckily, my parents made it clear to me that they were wrong and I should ignore them. So I have for 40+ years. Some of those racist things were said about my childhood best friend, who is black. Were they nasty, ugly, hateful remarks? No. They didn't use the "N" word. It was subtle things that made me question if I should have a best friend that is black. They found it confusing. They found it odd. It was clear they did not approve.

I was fortunate to have lived in a very diverse neighborhood in Huntsville, AL as a child. My next door neighbor was two years older than me. He was my best friend. I don't know if I was his best friend but he was definitely mine. And like I said, he is black. His father pulled the first tooth I lost. I spent so much time at his house as a child and he spent time at mine. We liked his house better because his parents had converted their two car garage into an awesome den/music hall. I was young and innocent as they say. I didn't know any different. I am so glad that was the case. I have not seen him in years as I moved away from Huntsville when I was eleven years old. A year or so ago, I did find his mother and sisters on Facebook and was able to reconnect with them online. He has a career in the Air Force. I am very proud to have called, and still consider, him my friend.

After living in Tuscumbia, AL for four years where racial topics were basically not discussed despite there being a neighborhood named Richman Hills where the road leading into it was named White City Drive, I moved to a suburb of Birmingham, AL. I have lived in the Birmingham area, including some years in the city proper, for all but two years of my life since I was 15 years old. This is the city where police turned fire hoses and dogs on protesters during the Civil Rights movement.

I found things in Birmingham different than they were in Huntsville. The Birmingham area was and still is highly segregated. It's not by law or force. It's mostly white flight which is itself a form of socioeconomic racism. It was a strange thing for me to realize as I grew older. I found the history of racial injustice to be just below the surface in Birmingham. I did not witness any overtly racist behavior in public. But, it was there, kind of like that subtle language my elders used when I was young. There was a lot of use of the words like "those people" or "they" when referring to black people. Again, I ignored the people saying these things and was silent.

Shortly after President Obama was elected, I was in a barber shop. It was not a local place. I travel for work between Birmingham and Huntsville very regularly. A small town between here and there had a barber shop. It was very convenient for me to stop in there on my way to Huntsville. I had been in there four or five times with little to no issues. Then one day, I am getting my haircut and a customer comes in. He and the barber seemed to know each other socially. They did not seem to be great friends, but they knew each other's names. At some point, the customer says, "You know what Lincoln, Kennedy, and Obama have in common?" I could think of nothing. The barber said "I don't know." The customer says "Nothing yet." I took a minute or so for it to sink in. He was saying that Obama would be assassinated. I was stunned. That was the most overt racism I had faced in years. The barber didn't seem too happy about it, but he didn't say anything about it either. I never went back to that barbershop. Now though, I regret that I ignored it and was silent.

During President Obama’s tenure, I saw posts on Facebook from friends and family, people I shared a meal with, that blamed him for all their problems. I unfollowed some of them. I ignored others. And, I was silent.

In the last three and a half years, I have seen many of those same people post things supporting President Trump and his agenda to divide this country. I unfollowed some of them. I ignored others. And, I was silent.

I have done my best to be a good example to my children the same way my parents were to me. The other day, I told my youngest child “I don’t think I need to say this, but I am going to.  Racism is wrong.” His response was “Of course Dad, I know that.” I wanted to be sure I said it out loud though.

I am done being silent. My silence has not helped the world.  Who am I to call anyone a racist? I am a 47 year old, white, middle class man. I will not ignore them and I will not be silent any longer.

I have always struggled understanding the use of masks in design tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and Sketch. I recently had to work on translating some creative from Sketch into a responsive design. I realized that a mask in these tools is like a containing element in HTML with overflow hidden and the contents being absolutely positioned.

This is not something you would want to do a lot of as there is a lot of the image being loaded that not being shown. But, it is useful in responsive designs.

See the Pen How masks in design tools translate to HTML by Brian Moon (@brianlmoon) on CodePen.

A color is a color isn’t a color……not to computers…and not to the human eye.

• Apple claims I have third party parts
• Apple claim iPhone 5 has 3rd party screen but I haven't had any work done on it?!
• apple lies to avoid repairing under Warranty
• My 27-Inch Nightmare: How Apple Refused to Fix My Dangerously Defective iMac

#7940: Default charset should be utf8mb4
------------------------------------------------------------------------
 The RFC for UTF-8 states, AND I QUOTE:

 > In UTF-8, characters from the U+0000..U+10FFFF range (the UTF-16
 accessible range) are encoded using sequences of 1 to 4 octets.

 What's that? You don't believe me?! Well, you can read it for yourself
 here!

 What is an octet, you ask? It's a unit of digital information in computing
 and telecommunications that consists of eight bits. (Hence, __oct__et.)

 "So what?", said the neck bearded MySQL developer dressed as Neo from the
 Matrix, as he smuggly quaffed a Surge and settled down to play Virtua
 Fighter 4 on his dusty PS2.

 So, if you recall from your Pre-Intro to Programming, 8 bits = 1 byte.
 Thus, the RFC states that the storage maximum storage requirements for a
 multibyte character must be 4 bytes, as required.

 I know that RFCs are more of GUIDELINE, right? It's not like they could be
 considered a standard or anything! It's not like there should be an
 implicit contract when an implementor decides to use a label like "UTF-8",
 right?

 Because of you, we have to strip our reader's carefully crafted emojii.
 Because of you, our search term data will never be exact. Because of you,
 we have to spend COUNTLESS HOURS altering every table that we have (which
 is a lot, by the way) to make sure that we can support a standard that was
 written in 2003!

 A cursory search shows that shortly after 2003, MySQL release quality
 started to tank. I can only assume that was because of you.

 Jerk.

 * The default charset should be utf8mb4.
 * Alter and test critical business processes.
 * Change OrderedFunctionSet to generate the appropriate tables.
 * Generate ptosc or propagator scripts to update everything else, as needed.
 * Curse the MySQL developer who caused this.

I have found myself using UNION in MySQL more and more lately. In this example, I am using it to speed up queries that are using IN clauses. MySQL handles the IN clause like a big OR operation. Recently, I created what looks like a very crazy query using UNION, that in fact helped our MySQL servers perform much better.

With any technology you use, you have to ask yourself, "What is this tech good at doing?" For me, MySQL has always been excelent at running lots of small queries that use primary, unique, or well defined covering indexes. I guess most databases are good at that. Perhaps that is the bare minimum for any database. MySQL seems to excel at doing this however. We had a query that looked like this:

select category_id, count(*) from some_table

where

    article_id in (1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9) and

    category_id in (11,22,33,44,55,66,77,88,99) and

    some_date_time > now() - interval 30 day

group by

    category_id

There were more things in the where clause. I am not including them all in these examples. MySQL does not have a lot it can do with that query. Maybe there is a key on the date field it can use. And if the date field limits the possible rows, a scan of those rows will be quick. That was not the case here. We were asking for a lot of data to be scanned. Depending on how many items were in the in clauses, this query could take as much as 800 milliseconds to return. Our goal at DealNews is to have all pages generate in under 300 milliseconds. So, this one query was 2.5x our total page time.

In case you were wondering what this query is used for, it is used to calculate the counts of items in sub categories on our category navigation pages. On this page it's the box on the left hand side labeled "Category". Those numbers next to each category are what we are asking this query to return to us.

Because I know how my data is stored and structured, I can fix this slow query. I happen to know that there are many fewer rows for each item for article_id than there is for category_id. There is also a key on this table on article_id and some_date_time. That means, for a single article_id, MySQL could find the rows it wants very quickly. Without using a union, the only solution would be to query all this data in a loop in code and get all the results back and reassemble them in code. That is a lot of wasted round trip work for the application however. You see this pattern a fair amount in PHP code. It is one of my pet peeves. I have written before about keeping the data on the server. The same idea applies here. I turned the above query into this:

select category_id, sum(count) as count from 

(

    (

        select category_id, count(*) as count from some_table

        where

            article_id=1 and

            category_id in (11,22,33,44,55,66,77,88,99) and

            some_date_time > now() - interval 30 day

        group by

            category_id

    )

    union all

    (

        select category_id, count(*) as count from some_table

        where

            article_id=2 and

            category_id in (11,22,33,44,55,66,77,88,99) and

            some_date_time > now() - interval 30 day

        group by

            category_id

    )

    union all

    (

        select category_id, count(*) as count from some_table

        where

            article_id=3 and

            category_id in (11,22,33,44,55,66,77,88,99) and

            some_date_time > now() - interval 30 day

        group by

            category_id

    )

    union all

    (

        select category_id, count(*) as count from some_table

        where

            article_id=4 and

            category_id in (11,22,33,44,55,66,77,88,99) and

            some_date_time > now() - interval 30 day

        group by

            category_id

    )

    union all

    (

        select category_id, count(*) as count from some_table

        where

            article_id=5 and

            category_id in (11,22,33,44,55,66,77,88,99) and

            some_date_time > now() - interval 30 day

        group by

            category_id

    )

    union all

    (

        select category_id, count(*) as count from some_table

        where

            article_id=6 and

            category_id in (11,22,33,44,55,66,77,88,99) and

            some_date_time > now() - interval 30 day

        group by

            category_id

    )

    union all

    (

        select category_id, count(*) as count from some_table

        where

            article_id=7 and

            category_id in (11,22,33,44,55,66,77,88,99) and

            some_date_time > now() - interval 30 day

        group by

            category_id

    )

    union all

    (

        select category_id, count(*) as count from some_table

        where

            article_id=8 and

            category_id in (11,22,33,44,55,66,77,88,99) and

            some_date_time > now() - interval 30 day

        group by

            category_id

    )

    union all

    (

        select category_id, count(*) as count from some_table

        where

            article_id=9 and

            category_id in (11,22,33,44,55,66,77,88,99) and

            some_date_time > now() - interval 30 day

        group by

            category_id

    )

) derived_table

group by

    category_id

Pretty gnarly looking huh? The run time of that query is 8ms. Yes, MySQL has to perform 9 subqueries and then the outer query. And because it can use good keys for the subqueries, the total execution time for this query is only 8ms. The data comes back from the database ready to use in one trip to the server. The page generation time for those pages went from a mean of 213ms with a standard deviation of 136ms to a mean of 196ms and standard deviation of 81ms. That may not sound like a lot. Take a look at how much less work the MySQL servers are doing now.

The arrow in the image is when I rolled the change out. Several other graphs show the change in server performance as well.

The UNION is a great way to keep your data on the server until it's ready to come back to your application. Do you think it can be of use to you in your application?