At he morning group meeting

I finally figured out what it was about the new Russian programmer that was distracting me. He sounds exactly like Wladka. And he has the same shy mannerisms. I wonder if he's really Russian, or if he's a character actor who fixated on Taxi as a kid. Or maybe he's channeling Andy Kaufman.

Busybusybusy

Lots of work today, I had to take LJ breaks to keep from overloading. Didn't get to come up for air and check personal email till after lunch.

Started the day at Kaiser, routine lab tests and p/u a prescription. They had a very odd problem with the prescription, the system showed it was more than my 30-day allowance, where it was actually about 1/3 of a month's allowed allotment. It's non-formulary stuff which is very expensive, so I only buy a little at a time. Can't afford a month's worth at once. There was a line at both places, it took an hour to get bled.

I have four projects going at work. Five, if you want to get technical. They all involve copying movies and data about movies and setting up some video servers to play 1500 different movies to as many internet "cable" boxes as possible. One of the automation programs needed to do this was broken, we didn't have a copy of the source file, so I wrote a program in Perl to do the same job, just not as pretty as the original program. The boss said I need to document it and check it into the code base. But the way I wrote it was specific to my unique setup, and it needed to be redone so that anyone could use it. So I re-learned a lot of Perl I'd not used since mid-2004, and learned some new stuff too, and also found a couple of idiosyncrasies I either never knew about or had forgotten. Got the program finished and started writing the doc, and of course found a bug and a typo and a whole paragraph of code missing because I'd hacked the program up last night to do a subset of what it originally was designed to do, for a different set of movies.

All the while I'm running three other processes on two other machines, and trying to check the status of all of them. Maybe when I get in in the morning they will be done.

I think I'm done with the doc, just need to proofread it, and maybe have boss see if it makes sense to him. And then I need to read the doc on how to check in stuff to the code base, because I haven't done that since my first day on the job.