George M Cohan's Birthday

And Franz Kafka's too.

I was up and out early, work started as what should have been a simple integration between a GUI script suite I'd written and a tcl script the automation guy wrote, but it ended up taking all day. The most frustrating part is one of the Linux commands which was crucial to the test does not work the same way in the background as it does when it is run manually. I finally guessed a work-around. So now we have two high-priority tests automated, which apparently adds brownie points both to me and to automation guy.

Now he wants me to do more automation, but I don't know what to automate. Looking for likely victims could be the rest of the week's project.

We went to Sushi Blvd together for lunch. Big, generous, delicious bento boxes with your choice of two main dishes, plus miso soup, soy beans, tempura, salad with wasabi dressing, rice and gyoza. Cute waitresses too.

After work was a shopping run. Vitamins C and D, beta carotene, Immodium and small paper plates at Rite Aid. Cookie sheets and insect repellent towelettes at SavMart. Wallet and windows at Penny's. Home, a wallet I'd ordered online but was none too sure about arrived. Turns out fully loaded the Penny's wallet won't close without bending things, but the online wallet was okay. Neither was designed for the amount of $1's I have at the moment (20+) and it will only get moreso when I add the Thai bills.

Canceled the order on Amazon for an SD card wallet, because it changed from being scheduled for July 3 delivery to end of the month. Apparently it was from a shell company sourcing their stuff from Hong Kong.  I'll see if Fry's has something.

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Speaking ill of the dead department:
Andy Griffith, a cornerstone of my childhood, passed away today, and many people have posted clips of his works. I was never impressed by his acting, he always played a Southern yokel, which is what he was IRL as well. He did make sure his TV show was G-rated, and there was no foul language. Some folks have pointed me to his first movie, Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, as a masterpiece of acting. The studios at the time were plugging him as the next Brando. Not hardly. He played himself as a country singer who gets too famous, says crazy things and gets a huge ego. He shouts a lot. But even surrounded by a stellar cast (Tony Franciosa, Patricia Neal, Lee Remick, Walter Matthau) he didn't seem to pick up any real acting skills. It's a similar character to Ernest Borgnine's Oscar-winning Marty, but there's no comparison. Though he was married to his first wife for 23 years, and his third wife for 29, the one in the middle was shades of his character in "A Face" - a stunning younger actress marrying him for money and fame. That only lasted 8 years.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about him is he started Ron Howard's career off right, and gave a much-deserved boost to that of Jim Nabors. 

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Plans for tomorrow:
10:30 am downbeat for the Los Altos 4th celebration with Ye Olde Towne Band providing the patriotic music. We should be done by noon.
Then I think I'll go see Brave.
Not sure what I'll do for fireworks. If anything.

Going Fourth

I thought 10 would be early enough for the 10:30 band intro but I had to park 3 blocks away. 4th of July at Los Altos was very well attended, there were lots of activities for the kids, and the band was very well received. The PA system was a total fail, someone decided the speakers needed to be in the back of the park, facing backwards.

Our conductor has done a great job getting us to mind the dynamics in the pieces we play, but it backfired this time - people way in the back (about 200 yards away) said they could not hear us.

But it was a fun time for the band, at least.

Stopped off at Fry's, did not find an SD card wallet but did find one for USB drives which will work.

Home, changed out of my uniform and into jeans shorts and a flag T-shirt from last year, then to the cinema, bought a ticket for the 3 pm show, but it was only 2 so I went to Starbucks and finished the Outlook merge I had started last night. Or so I thought. Turns out the merge program does not remove duplicates from the inbox, and does not merge archive folders with current folders. Time to see the movie.

Brave was okay. As usual, the animation was pretty good, though they seem to have trouble making noses which are not layers of polygons. I thought the messages were way heavy-handed, and the reveal at the end was not justified by the actions leading up to it. It's natural for a mother to defend her daughter. It's not natural, IMHO, for a mother to do what this one did after engaging in a "to the death" battle to defend her daughter. I'd be less surprised to see ERII abdicate in favor of her eldest son tomorrow morning. There are some parallels there, but this is a spoiler-free review.

The 3D was understated, which was nice. Oddly enough, something which impressed me more than the movie was the closing credits. They were done in a beautiful gold Celtic-like font, with three levels of depth. Names, departments and main unit designations were top, bottom and middle as the 3D layers go. Every credit to the bitter end was done with this high quality workmanship. I wish Pixar woud get a clue and stop showing credits for all the myriad people who did not actually work on the film. I really don't need to know who all the caterers were, or all the lawyers, or all the folks who slopped the stables for the animated horses. There is a cute Easter egg at the end, but I was the only one in the theater who survived long enough to see it. The staff person cleaning up was in the second to last row by then.

After the show I went back to Starbucks to finish the Outlook merge. It worked better the second time, but still left dupes in the inbox.

Home by way of Sizzler. Skipped the ice cream there because there was still chocolate cream cake at home. Sat on the patio with Domino waiting for hummingbirds to find the feeder (one had done so this morning), but gave up when it started to get dark. As soon as I sat down in the recliner two hummers landed on the feeder. Nice to know they have found it. It'll probably be empty when I get back from vacation.

Doing laundry - waited till after the concert to do the whites, so I could toss in the white uniform shirt. Waited till it cooled off to throw them into the dryer.

Did a reality check on the bag of OTC stuff for the trip, and had to jettison the clothing insect repellent because it's an aerosol spray. Everything else is okay.

Watched some fireworks on TV, because I could hear the booms from someplace not too far. Great America said they were not doing any tonight, so this must have been Mountain View or Milpitas.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Pack
Put Domino's carrier in the livingroom.