For The Rest of You

Wednesday - did not feel like a second Monday because I worked Monday. I am regretting not finding a NYE party. I am not regretting the delicious NYE repast I made for myself, however.

Work was too busy. I took on a new feature which required hooking up a laptop in the lab to my test machine, going back to my desk to change settings in the machine, and back to the lab to look at the video quality via an analyzer program on the laptop. And repeat this for output then input on all 4 ports. And tomorrow I get to do it again on the 10-port machine if I can borrow it. The lab is too warm, and very noisy, and the less time I spend there the better.

 There was another feature I should have been able to test on another pair of machines at the same time, but those machines were not cooperating. I will ask their owner to spank them.

Had my 1-on-1 with the boss, who asked why I wasn't at the temple for New Year's Day. Too cold, and it would have meant putting on pants. And I explained about the OCD shopping trip.

The unlocked version of a previous post goes like this: lunchtime, I went to the apartment and picked up a couple of packages, then had chicken tenders at Carl's Jr. on the way back. One package was a Samsung Galaxy S3 phone which I'd bought on eBay, relatively cheap because the owner had broken the screen, and then botched the replacement. After work I took it to the local repair place, and though the price they quoted was about $80 more than I expected, the combined prices were still less than retail. And less than if I bought a used working one on eBay. Though I suppose I could have sold the broken one and made up some of that. Whatever. Tomorrow or Friday I'll have a working one.

Traffic in that area is impossible, so I punched the nearest Starbucks into the GPS hoping to park and wait it out till after 7, but the GPS took me to the Great Mall, which has a tiny Starbucks with only 5 or 6 tables, all of them taken, and a 15-minute wait to order. So I walked all the way around the mall, with a couple of stops for my sciatica, and then found the faux Thai place in the food court, which was attended by two Chinese-American girls who spoke no Thai. :-(   The food was basically Chinese fast food (think Mr Chau or Panda Express) versions of Thai dishes.

Home, traffic had gone from psychotic to merely insane. I am one of those annoying drivers who stays at the speed limit, and I expect people to pass me at about 5 mph more, but tonight it was 70 in a 45 zone for the maniacs, + they kept cutting back and forth, and the bigger the vehicle, the shorter the space between cars into which they wedged themselves, only to be stopped at the next light along with everyone else. They are long lights.

Somewhere in there my iPod stopped working. The in-dash display said something like "unauthorized device detected" but when I took the iPod out of its cubby hole, it was on, showing the main menu, but completely unresponsive. Disconnect/reconnect, turning off the car's power and back on, nothing helped. At home I plugged it into the PC, and got an "unable to install driver" message. It looks like I will need to wait for the battery to run out before I can get it cranking again.

Kaan is having a grand old time with his little pink pretzel-shaped toy. He's been all over the apartment tossing it around. When I got home, he did a couple of little rabbit hops toward Domino from behind, and tried to get her to play, but she just turned around and hissed at him. I will have to start using the spray bottle on her when she does that.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Pick up phone, bring to Verizon to transfer my number to it.