Duck Days

While I was in Hawaii, the boss put out the usual "our company does not have formal holidays, so send a calendar item if you're going to be out of the office" message. The newest contractor, whom we shall call Linus (not his real name) emailed back saying his agency requires permission for him to work holidays, at holiday rate. Boss replied that not only does he give permission, he will buy us lunch for the two days. I was planning on working anyway, because last week was an expensive unpaid vacation, so Monday I let the boss know I would be here. Two other contractors also said they would be here.

Long story short, Linus was a no-show.

Thursday me and one of the other guys went out for Chinese food at the shopping plaza near my bank. I finished up a project from Wednesday and sent in the daily wrap-up. I'd been told to join my lunch buddy on his project, he dragged a TV set to my cube for me to start testing, and told me to take all the tests which could be done on the public servers, because it was old firmware not supported by our test servers. So I got to watch another episode of Lie To Me Season 2, and started watching Driving Miss Daisy. I have always admired Jessica Tandy ever since Soap. and she has apparently become one of Hollywood's stock old ladies. Unfortunately for my test purposes this was not a good film to use, because they did some fiddling with the picture to make it look grainy and 1960s-ish. I watched something else instead. A Thai take-off on Charlie's Angels called Chai Lai Angels. I didn't know it was Thai until I started playing it, saw the subtitles and put on the headphones. It is so very amateurishly scripted and acted, but the cinematography is pretty good, excellent in spots. Lots of action, lots of talking heads, a good test movie. Strange but true, the English subtitles are grammatically correct, spelled correctly, and synced well with the audio. However they took some liberties with the translations to make the bad guys sound more vulgar.  

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Before leaving work I ordered a roast duck and a dish called rainbow shredded duck from Kirin, one of the more popular Chinese places in Mountain View, and picked it up on the way home. I like duck a lot more than turkey. Put the rainbow in the fridge and had about 1/3 of the roast duck with rice and cole slaw for my holiday dinner, followed by chocolate chocolate chip ice cream, while watching the NFL game.

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Today when I walked into the office only the maintenance lights were on. Very strange, since people would be working. We had just enough light to work by, having the glow from a 46" TV set on my counter helped. Did some more playback tests, and managed to watch about an hour of Miss Daisy in 5-minute snippets while I ran tests like "play for 5 minutes, pull the plug" and "play for 5 minutes, pause for 5 minutes and play for 5 minutes". It did not click with me and many things about it rubbed me the wrong way. And it moves too slowly.

Once again Linus was a no-show, and the third guy was only in for half a day so the same two of us went to lunch, this time we walked to a new place a block from work, called The Garrett Station. Very noisy place, lots of children. Probably will be more sane on a regular work day. It's your basic grill & pizza place, has a bar too. I may go there next time there's nothing edible in the box lunches.

Set up the old test server on my desk, and it worked fine for the non-playback tests, but the people who are in charge of which movies we have available removed all our test clips, and all I was left with was a documentary on a band from Sierra Leone. There may be more, but it's a chore to find them. Will be mentioning this to the boss as a major blocker.

Home, via a quick stop at Safeway for zucchini for the plecosthemus and Q-tips for me. Watched some of the Boise State/Nevada game while vacuuming up the yummy rainbow shredded duck. Had a tough time finding the duck among the portabella mushroom chunks, but there was plenty there.

Got email on Flickr from a Polish Thailand web site asking if they could use some of my Thailand photos. I said yes, and they put a couple on their elephant festival page immediately. Here's the link.

Plans for tomorrow:
Change the litterboxes
Take out the garbage
Break down the cardboard boxes and haul them to the recycle dumpster
Laundry
Haircut (?)