Yesterday's Gun

Was way too zapped last night to post. Corel DVD Factory no longer works on Windows 7, despite two patches which were supposed to fix that, and Corel Video Studio 7 doesn't have a way to save when you're in the DVD creation part of the app, so I lost all the work I'd done making chapter marks (about 40 of them) TWICE when the program locked up when it was trying to choose a theme for the chapter menus. That was about 3 hours of my life I'll never get back.

But the night before I had made a blu-ray DVD successfully with chapter marks, but with only chapter numbers (they really need names, and if possible, thumbnails) and I had spelled the name of the leading man wrong, because it was wrong in the program's cast list (but right in the program bio). I should have caught that right away, because ( Theater drama TMI behind the cut )

So I gave that copy to my best buddy George. Former best buddy, actually. Still a friend, still holds the record for the most theater performances together with me. So, yesterday he had a day in San Jose en route to Hawaii with his wife & kids, I ducked out of work at my usual lunchtime to meet them and have lunch together at a Hawaiian restaurant with the unfortunate name of Wong Kok which has both Chinese "point at the tub of glop which nauseates you the least" and order-from-the-kitchen Hawaiian. Since they were heading to the islands George and the boys had Chinese but his wife had one of each. I had the Hawaiian special of the day. Excellent chicken katsu, rice, mayo-heavy macaroni salad and some kind of shredded meat with shredded leaf (cabbage?). The portion was big enough to take home half for dinner. Which I did.

There was a lot of work to do at work yesterday, finally the new machines are getting some functionality, and are being connected to the network. Home by way of Home Despot, which also did not have swivel brackets, but at least, unlike Lowe's, there was only one place in the store to look.

Home and DVD editing torture.

Plans for Thursday were:
Work
Evening Google hangout to hear a photographer share his lessons learned working with Photoshop. He is a self-proclaimed amateur but with some great results posted on the meetup group we both belong to.
Find a better DVD authoring tool

Almost, but not quite

Looking at my "Good Stuff" folder on the PC I was reminded that I had Nero DVD burning software. But it was the 2012 version (which means developed in 2011) and did not support Blu-Ray. Went online and for a mere $30 upgraded to this year's model, which supports six types of Blu-Ray.

Did not have time to install it before going to work.

Work was somewhat busier when I found the hidden test cases. I had written the first 200 tests, and Boss was still tweaking the database, and used a bunch of mine to verify that tests could be marked "suspended" and switched from one tester to another, and one of the anothers is "TBD".

Some sad news, the corporation is closing its St Petersburg (Russia) office. This used to be Motorola's office, and we brought at least 10 people in here from there over the years. Two of them were hired on full time. So they know a lot of those people. The economy being what it isn't in Russia, this is a body blow to those employees.

Lunch was Togo's. Two things - none of the eye candy works there anymore. They have gone from a singularly attractive staff to a singularly mundane staff. Most of these folks are new to Togo's and some of the training is happening on the job. The usual customer eye candy was not there, but someone filled that role for maybe 15 minutes. Tall, blue eyes, black hair, slender, no rings. If she had not been wearing a cheap dress she would have been elegant. She brought a laptop in, a Lenovo, but opened it only long enough to discovere there is no wi-fi.

Straight home after work, wanted to install Nero 2014, which has the world's slowest installer, before the 7:30 google hangout where we were supposed to learn how a fellow amateur photog tweaked his stuff in Photoshop. He was about 5 minutes late, started out okay, but when it came time for him to share his screen, it all went wrong. He had dual monitors, and it was trying to share them both at the same time, which meant enormous flicker and while we could hear what he was saying, the video was unwatchable. He was also recording it, and he kept asking us if we could see him, because his recording preview was flickering. All of us chimed in that it wasn't working, but he apparently could not see the chat window, and kept saying "I'll just keep going". After 20 minutes I joined the herd stampeding in the opposite direction. Closed the browser and chalked it up to a worthwhile experiment gone horribly wrong.

So, back to Nero.

Took a while to compile all the videos and make a video slide show to add to the DVD, but now I'm set. Just too late to do anything more than import the files, and save the project. Unlike Corel, Nero lets you save as often as you want.

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At about 4 am I woke up totally soaked in sweat. I shot up way too much insulin overnight, apparently. It's nasty because I have this syndrome where my blood sugar spikes as I am waking up. But like most people, it goes down while I sleep, because I'm not eating. I think most people also have a rise in Hgl as they wake up, which helps them wake up, but in my case its an order of magnitude higher. What I really need is a time-release insulin which only kicks in an hour before I wake. An insulin pump could do this, but it would be more dangerous than helpful.

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Worldcon's programme is insane. Even if you don't count the gaming and other continuous events, at any one time there can be as many as 17 things going on at once, and at least 3 of those are things I want to go to.  I have given up planning any further than major events. Will play it by ear.


Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Maybe finish this DVD project.