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Catching Up
Mar. 27th, 2008 02:50 pmBeen in a class at another Moto building (on what used to be the south end of Moffet Field), dinner dates and doing stuff on the PC which did not allow multitasking.
Am entering test cases into the database - 140+ of them, at about 2 minutes each. I cut & paste (10 secs), hit enter and wait (2 mins) for the page to reload. Wish we had an automation script.
Tuesday, XML class. More on that later. Evening doings was a dinner meeting of NorCal Peace Corps alumni south bay chapter at Cuccini in San Pedro Square, San Jose. Middle Eastern food, good eats at a reasonable price and we had the lounge to ourselves. We were there for a presentation by Friends of African Village Libraries, a group which raises $$ and arranges to build, stock and staff libraries in rural locations in Berkino Faso, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda. In some cases they bring in Peace Corps Volunteers to help, in others they find NGOs to partner with, and some places they hire the staff themselves. Good stuff, but they demonstrated their lack of basic presentation skill by moving the screen from the stage (where everyone could see it) to the side of the room (where half the table had their backs to it). Feh. The libraries program is a good idea, but I didn't think enough of their implementation to throw money at it.
Wednesday was more XML class, the instructor "had a plane to catch" and rushed us to a 2:45 p.m. end time. Went home, where I had the PC set up to record the Suns-Celtics game at 4, which meant hands off the computer until the game was over. Used the laptop to try some of the XML stuff we didn't have time to dig very deep into during class. Also watched enough of the game to know it was recording correctly (also on Tivo in case something crashed on the PC). I'm not a basketball fan, but my cousin Renee is. Born in Boston, she is a die-hard Celtics fanatic. Last year they were in the toilet, but this year they are amazing. The only other NBA team which can come close, apparently, is the Suns, so Renee bought a ticket to the game, and flew out there from Santa Cruz to see it. She asked me to record it so she could see the game TV-style when she got back. After that I had a dinner date with![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
localinactivist, we had a couple of months of catching up to do. He's also a Sr. QA guy for a video-related company, we met working at Kasenna in 2000.
Got home, trimmed the extra hour of the recording off the end and set the PC to save that, then went to bed. This morning I chopped out the halftime show & commercials, added transitions and saved the project. I'll double check it and burn a DVD tonight.
The XML class was supposed to be an internal Moto course taught by "MotoU". Instead it was a generic class taught by a one-man (or possibly 2-man) training "company" on a contract to MotoU. There was nothing in the class to make it relevent to my job. The instructor is an excellent presenter, but he shortchaged us by about 2 hours, and wasted the last couple of hours on Java programs to parse XML into a database and back out. He had never heard of the CableLabs XML schema, which is all over Motorola (it's the standard format for shoving program data into a set top box).
Am entering test cases into the database - 140+ of them, at about 2 minutes each. I cut & paste (10 secs), hit enter and wait (2 mins) for the page to reload. Wish we had an automation script.
Tuesday, XML class. More on that later. Evening doings was a dinner meeting of NorCal Peace Corps alumni south bay chapter at Cuccini in San Pedro Square, San Jose. Middle Eastern food, good eats at a reasonable price and we had the lounge to ourselves. We were there for a presentation by Friends of African Village Libraries, a group which raises $$ and arranges to build, stock and staff libraries in rural locations in Berkino Faso, Ghana, Tanzania and Uganda. In some cases they bring in Peace Corps Volunteers to help, in others they find NGOs to partner with, and some places they hire the staff themselves. Good stuff, but they demonstrated their lack of basic presentation skill by moving the screen from the stage (where everyone could see it) to the side of the room (where half the table had their backs to it). Feh. The libraries program is a good idea, but I didn't think enough of their implementation to throw money at it.
Wednesday was more XML class, the instructor "had a plane to catch" and rushed us to a 2:45 p.m. end time. Went home, where I had the PC set up to record the Suns-Celtics game at 4, which meant hands off the computer until the game was over. Used the laptop to try some of the XML stuff we didn't have time to dig very deep into during class. Also watched enough of the game to know it was recording correctly (also on Tivo in case something crashed on the PC). I'm not a basketball fan, but my cousin Renee is. Born in Boston, she is a die-hard Celtics fanatic. Last year they were in the toilet, but this year they are amazing. The only other NBA team which can come close, apparently, is the Suns, so Renee bought a ticket to the game, and flew out there from Santa Cruz to see it. She asked me to record it so she could see the game TV-style when she got back. After that I had a dinner date with
localinactivist, we had a couple of months of catching up to do. He's also a Sr. QA guy for a video-related company, we met working at Kasenna in 2000. Got home, trimmed the extra hour of the recording off the end and set the PC to save that, then went to bed. This morning I chopped out the halftime show & commercials, added transitions and saved the project. I'll double check it and burn a DVD tonight.
The XML class was supposed to be an internal Moto course taught by "MotoU". Instead it was a generic class taught by a one-man (or possibly 2-man) training "company" on a contract to MotoU. There was nothing in the class to make it relevent to my job. The instructor is an excellent presenter, but he shortchaged us by about 2 hours, and wasted the last couple of hours on Java programs to parse XML into a database and back out. He had never heard of the CableLabs XML schema, which is all over Motorola (it's the standard format for shoving program data into a set top box).
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