Intensive purposes
Jan. 7th, 2012 12:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
howeirdSo, last night I slept in reasonable sized chunks, put a towel over the top pillow because (a) it feels good and (b) I've been soaking the pillows lately.
Up at 6:30, could not get back to sleep for that last extra hour. Did my usual morning things. My head was clear, but chest is still rumbling a little.
Work was educational. There was a series of tests on my plate which involved testing a piece of the European video standard called DVB, which is basically digital video for broadcast/cable/satellite. The piece is this amusing feature which lets you write some parameters into a configuration file, import it into the output config file, and what it will do is send a table to the receiving device which says what the current time is on my test unit, and some other things like what region it is in (GBR for Great Britain, FRA for France, etc.), which side of Daylight Savings time it is, what date and time to implement the change to the other side, and by how many hours:minutes:seconds. Or at least I think that's what it's doing. Out of the 6 tests, I had to look through them all to find out how to do this - what the syntax was, and what valid entries were. It only took about a dozen tries to get it to work, mostly because I had made a typo and left out a quote mark. But that was fortuitous, because the error message it displayed was all in HTML ampersand codes, which took up so much space that the whole message would not fit into the box. For example, instead of it saying "time A" must be > than "time B" it said "time A" must be>than" and so I got me a bug for free. Very low severity bug because it won't happen without a major typo and customers generally set up this feature once and forget about it.
But it was fun to see the new table pop up on my video analyzer with all the stuff I'd entered. Less fun when I had to repeat the test for every country in Europe and several other permutations.
Lunchtime I made the long drive to Stevens Creek Blvd & Lawrence BB&B and I'm glad they have shopping carts because I needed a crutch. It took a long time to find the pillow I wanted (to match one I bought 2 weeks ago, only sold by BB&B) because instead of displaying them face out, they filled a whole wall with them, narrow edge to the customer. And they placed the sign about 7 feet up. And then another challenge to find a low thread count pair of pillowcases. High thread counts are less absorbent and dry too slowly. I wanted 200, but the lowest they had was 300. If I had time I would have gotten them at Walmart.
That took most of my lunch hour, but I had brought breakfast with me which did not get touched because Friday is Bagels-or-Donuts day, and today I was there early, plus a lot of people are still on vacation, and they had both. So breakfast was a bagel & a donut, lunch was a PBJ sandwich, a banana , a sliced up apple, and some devil's food chocolate dipped donettes. I also had a cup 'o' noodles in there somewhere to help with the cold.
Talking is still a crap shoot. Sometimes I can say a few sentences, sometimes my lungs will trigger the cough reflex and I'll be almost doubled up after a word or three. My next door neighbor is sad because he likes to chat with me, but I can't. Can't have lunch with the gang either until this blows over.
Went home at 5, refilled the vaporizer, fed the cats, put the pillowcases on the pillows, watched some of the Cotton Bowl over a bowl of chicken soup, scanned a bunch of photos from two Menlo Players events and posted them on FB. Coughed too much.
Plans for tomorrow:
Depends on how my cough is. It's manicure day, and I want to give her a calendar. But I may need to go to Kaiser urgent care instead.
Lots of football to watch all weekend.
Up at 6:30, could not get back to sleep for that last extra hour. Did my usual morning things. My head was clear, but chest is still rumbling a little.
Work was educational. There was a series of tests on my plate which involved testing a piece of the European video standard called DVB, which is basically digital video for broadcast/cable/satellite. The piece is this amusing feature which lets you write some parameters into a configuration file, import it into the output config file, and what it will do is send a table to the receiving device which says what the current time is on my test unit, and some other things like what region it is in (GBR for Great Britain, FRA for France, etc.), which side of Daylight Savings time it is, what date and time to implement the change to the other side, and by how many hours:minutes:seconds. Or at least I think that's what it's doing. Out of the 6 tests, I had to look through them all to find out how to do this - what the syntax was, and what valid entries were. It only took about a dozen tries to get it to work, mostly because I had made a typo and left out a quote mark. But that was fortuitous, because the error message it displayed was all in HTML ampersand codes, which took up so much space that the whole message would not fit into the box. For example, instead of it saying "time A" must be > than "time B" it said "time A" must be>than" and so I got me a bug for free. Very low severity bug because it won't happen without a major typo and customers generally set up this feature once and forget about it.
But it was fun to see the new table pop up on my video analyzer with all the stuff I'd entered. Less fun when I had to repeat the test for every country in Europe and several other permutations.
Lunchtime I made the long drive to Stevens Creek Blvd & Lawrence BB&B and I'm glad they have shopping carts because I needed a crutch. It took a long time to find the pillow I wanted (to match one I bought 2 weeks ago, only sold by BB&B) because instead of displaying them face out, they filled a whole wall with them, narrow edge to the customer. And they placed the sign about 7 feet up. And then another challenge to find a low thread count pair of pillowcases. High thread counts are less absorbent and dry too slowly. I wanted 200, but the lowest they had was 300. If I had time I would have gotten them at Walmart.
That took most of my lunch hour, but I had brought breakfast with me which did not get touched because Friday is Bagels-or-Donuts day, and today I was there early, plus a lot of people are still on vacation, and they had both. So breakfast was a bagel & a donut, lunch was a PBJ sandwich, a banana , a sliced up apple, and some devil's food chocolate dipped donettes. I also had a cup 'o' noodles in there somewhere to help with the cold.
Talking is still a crap shoot. Sometimes I can say a few sentences, sometimes my lungs will trigger the cough reflex and I'll be almost doubled up after a word or three. My next door neighbor is sad because he likes to chat with me, but I can't. Can't have lunch with the gang either until this blows over.
Went home at 5, refilled the vaporizer, fed the cats, put the pillowcases on the pillows, watched some of the Cotton Bowl over a bowl of chicken soup, scanned a bunch of photos from two Menlo Players events and posted them on FB. Coughed too much.
Plans for tomorrow:
Depends on how my cough is. It's manicure day, and I want to give her a calendar. But I may need to go to Kaiser urgent care instead.
Lots of football to watch all weekend.
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