Wacky test data
When developing a website — as I often find myself doing — one has to populate the various systems you create with “dummy data”. Some people like using random latin, some people use quotes from eccentric authors. Me? Well, sometimes I just make up odd little passages. This is one of my favorites (I came up with it yesterday while coding a “Careers” section of a clients website):
Well, i’ll have to tell you this, Bobby. It ain’t the most glorious profession on the face of God’s green, but there is a certain zen quality about it. Do you know what I mean? Well, maybe you do, I don’t know. I can never tell from that blank stare of yours. One day, you might be back there scraping some burnt gravy off the bottom of a stainless steel pot, and some song that you’ve heard for years comes on the radio. You’ve never really paid attention to it until now, because scraping the days remains off of a soon-again-to-be-spoiled pot is just not that interesting. Well, in the midst of all these dishes that will be dirty tomorrow, you realize what that song is saying. And you realize why you are washing dishes — not that you realize how you came to be there, but why you are being there. *Knock* knock*! Oh, yes, ahem — Bobby. Why don’t you come in and have a seat.
I tried finding example of test data that have gone embarassingly public. I received acclaim for naming my primary test persona for a site we did for Evenflo “Slapdash O’Halloran”, but that’s really my extent.
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Remember the guy who quoted Carroll and Twain when coding test data for the United Methodist site? I’m doing HTML/Javascript for dozens of these pages, mostly about Black Colleges and African ministries and test data from Huck Finn kept popping up (which the client had access to) and I shouldn’t need to remind anyone how un-PC that novel can be by today’s standards, especially taken out of context, ESPECIALLY taken out of context and placed in to THAT context. To this day I don’t know if he did that on purpose or was just that blind.
that was Tommy I think. Who knew he was a literary fan?
quote:
Those were hot days! Yes! Hot days when it all began! Dinah owned a fixer-upper in the center of town, only two blocks away from my house, only five blocks away from the methadone clinic!
Not necessarily “naughty”, but certainly weird. The photos he threw in there were certainly odd, too… Like that one of the woman with the disfigured face?
I think the disfigured face was actually client-supplied, no joke. It had to do with a third-world charity doctors-without-boarders kind of thing. It was on the front page of that project for too long. Bad enough that we had to work 60+ hours a week on it (without o.t. hehe) but that FACE…
Well, as I recall some of Tommy’s Twain excepts contained variations on the “N” word and that was just freaking bizare, especially considering the client. I about lost it, then immediately told him to cut that shiznit right-the-hell out.
nietzche?