All Quiet on the Western Back

Work was pretty quiet, weekly team meeting at 10, and I was assigned to check a bug fix on the older model which I'd checked last week on the newer model. Quick lunch at CJ's, a stop at the CU to depsit the check from Chicon7 for my photo sales, then a webcast from the Sunnyvale site, one of the pioneers of Google Chrome giving a talk. Boring, defensive, every step of the way his attitude was "we know what the customer wants better than the customer does, so we're not going to office option x, or we'll force-feed you feature Y. He claims Chrome is now the most popular browser, but somehow I don't buy that.

More bug checking for the rest of the day.

Home, watched MNF, the game was very sloppy and it looked like NOLA might blow it, so I left for BASFA getting there right at 8 as the pseudo-gavel came down, the latest I've ever arrived. Kinda boring meeting. The reviews for Convolution went on forever (I helped stretch them out), and 3/4 of the crowd bailed before auctions. I wanted to take my auction stuff home and bring it back some other time when the club would make some serious $$ from them, but someone railroaded the meeting into holding a fast and cheap auction. FAIL.

Home, Domino yowling at me, getting underfoot. Am thinking of borrowing a Very Large Carnivore.

An item I had on eBay sold for the starting price. :-( It is now boxed and ready to be mailed.

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Election day is tomorrow. I am going to the polls (which are at the park down the street) because:
A. The poll place volunteers deserve to be rewarded with actual voters.
B. I am dead set against early voting. I have a boatload of reasons for this, but primarily it's not over till it's over.
C. I believe absentee ballots should only be available to people who will actually be absent. This includes people who live too far from a polling place or cannot get to a polling place due to disability.  Another reason is the unreliability of the postal service, and the county auditors' temporary help. The law gives you 2 hours of work time off to vote.

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My vote for President and US Senator will not count. California is so overwhelmingly Obama Country that if I vote for him it's superfluous, if I vote for anyone else it will be ignored. Ditto, the dinosaur named Feinstein.
The same is probably true of my vote for US Representative. Mike Honda is in no danger of being defeated by the GOP candidate, who promises to "bring God back to Congress".
All the CA propositions and the local measures are going to be close, I think - those are worth casting a ballot. I won't be voting for any of the city candidates because I don't think anyone will make a difference. Ditto the hospital district candidates.

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Devoted

Poll Dancing

Awoke at my usual time, was out the door at a little after 8 and drove the half mile to the park where my polling place was. There was no line. It's only one precinct, so only three workers, one with the Big Log Book, one with the spreadsheet printout, and one to give ballots and then swap them for an "I Voted" sticker.
( image behind here )

Piece of cake? I had my election booklets which had my current address, and showed them to worker #1. Meanwhile worker #2 checked my name off on the spreadsheet. #1 finds my name, and instead of there being a blank space for me to sign and enter my address, there is this:
 


WTF? I have voted in every election, in this county, since 2000, including the summer primary. #1 looked on his cheat sheet, did not find anything about "Inactive Voter" and took the high road of sending #2 out to find the polling place manager who was in her car in the parking lot, while I filled out a Provisional Voter form.

Manager came in, she had an app or a doc on her smartphone,  said I get to vote like a real person,  tore up the provisional form, had me sign in on the big book, and worker #3 gave me  a pair of ballots (one for persons running for office, the other for propositions, measures and such) and the usual "tear off the top" instructions. I found a booth (there were 4. The space could have easily held 12). It was all paper, no electronics. Marked my ballot, and yes, I did write in Hillary & Bill instead of the other liars & thieves.

Slid my ballots into a zippered opening in a large rectangular orange ripstop bag, got my sticker and left.

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Next stop, the post office, where I was in line for 10 minutes with only one person in line ahead of me, and shipped off the car alarm I sold  on eBay for way less than it was worth, but enough to justify selling it.

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To work, by way of a gas station, the GPS took me on what normally is the slowest route, but the green light demons were pulling for me  most of the way.

Most mornings in the gaps between tests I build a list of today's birthdays on FB. Today's included both the inventor of the saxophone and the inventor of the sousaphone. Imagine that.

Work was almost as bad as Facebook, where I have been correcting my friends who post graphics with bogus inormation which they could easily have checked first. One told people to call the FBI (wrong!) to report voter intimidation or fraud. The number it gave was the hearing-impaired number for the DOJ's PR department. Another one gave the phone number of the Pittsburgh, PA local FBI office. It also had the right place to call with the right number, in small print at the bottom.

Anyhow, boss emails me that the code for the new feature I'm to work on is in the last build. The build itself crapped out but the code I need is not affected. So I install the build, download all the code files in question, load them into the tool used to analyze them, and do not see what is supposed to be there.

email boss.
He emails th program manager asking him to confirm that the code is in that release.
Program manager immediately replies "Confirmed"
I smell a rat, and visit the engineer whose code it is (a friendly fellow I have worked with before) and ask him what, exactly, I am missing. He checks, and oops, he did not submit those two little pieces of code.
After letting the boss know, I ask for, and receive email with the code from the engineer.

It would have been so much easier if program manager had actually checked first.

It's fun stuff to test, and I ran it through its paces, about half of it worked fine, another half was INOP. Stayed 15 minutes late playing with this.

Next stop, Starbucks. So far the best eye candy has been a pair of female police officers. Both taller than average, and in very good shape. One looked a lot like KD Lang.

Plans for tomorrow:
1-on-1 with boss
Gamer talk at CHM