Interesting Times

[howeird]

Work started out with a dilemma. First test case for the new group and I find it is a miserable cut and paste from a different product line, requiring testing features which don’t exist. What was testable passed, so I just made a note in the case to rewrite these to be closer to reality. These were closed captioning tests, and I got to watch a lot of KQED’s offerings. We have one feed in the lab with three programs, High HD, standard HD and World, which is in SD. They do a really good job of closed captioning, but only in English. 

Next test case was a complex matrix of items, all having to do with taking the input video, and changing the output size and shape in various ways, and monitoring the changes on a video player. There’s a widget called AFD which appears on the analyzer which describes which change to apply, and I saw it on the source, but not on the output. Pow-wowed with new team leader and she said “file a bug”. Oddly, this did not cause the test to fail, it was just something found whilst testing something else.

Lunchtime I went for a manicure, and got a reuben sub at Mike’s, which I ate in the break room. There was a 3 pm welcome party for me & the woman who sits in the cube behind me, welcoming us to the team. We’re basically testing a version of the software which does some things most encoders don’t do, but our multiplexor does.

Meanwhile, old team leader is trying to do engineering’s work for them, won’t take my word for it that the last bug I filed was a bug regardless of the root cause. Root cause is Engineering’s job. Ours is simply to break the machine and report how we did it. Anyhow, there was an “I told you so” moment in there somewhere.

1-on-1 was scheduled for 4:30 but boss was nowhere in sight. Checked again in 5 and 10 minutes, then went back to writing the bug for new team. Did not hear from Boss, which is not like him.

Orchard Supply after work, got a hand-crank 25-foot snake, rubber gloves and a couple of non-toilet items. The place is 3/4 of the way through a complete remodel, and it is vastly better than the mess it had been.

Home, after putting stuff away and feeding Spook, I went at the clogged toilet with the snake, but it is too thin to push through the trap, and I was only able to hand feed it, and only enough to make a start. Switched to a standard plunger which I had not tried yet (had been using the water force one) and that cleared things up pretty quickly.

Next project was to open up the PC to see what kind of USB 3.0 adapter I had, because the driver I downloaded for the one I thought I had did not recognize the card. Turned out to be the one I thought it was, and it doesn’t appear to support anything above Windows 7. So I found another brand which does have a Win10 driver and ordered from Amazon.

Cut up some pita, got out hummus and whitefish, and made a dinner of it. Bread pudding for dessert. Egg nog with lots of nutmeg as a chaser.

Plans for tomorrow:

• Pack up Spook and take her to the vet for her first annual checkup & shots. There may be bloodshed.
• Work
• Football