Monday Meetings

Weekly team meeting was only 20 minutes (we can use up to an hour), and most of that was congratulating the team for busting butts and being flexible enough to test all the big issues on the product. Boss is on vacation, Boss' boss ran the meeting. He is taking suggestions on celebrations off-site for the team, to be held after boss is back. I felt a bit guilty because I have not had a machine through most of this, and my biggest contribution was in breaking my machine in ways which were already known as issues. And the one bug I thought was a showstopper was punted to the next release.

Forgot my new tablet, so had to have lunch without anything but the phone to keep me company. At the bad Chinese fast food place. Not a lot of eye candy, which is not the norm since Jamba Juice and Starbucks are next door.

Home after work, just enough time to update FB, pet Spook, and drive to a new (to me) photo meetup. I brought my laptop in case it was one of those where we showed our work individually. Thanks to GPS taking me on the heavy traffic route, I was 10 minutes late, but the group uploads photos to the moderator, who shows them on a central screen, and this stared just as I was finding a seat.

I'd say the photos were mostly what happens when you give a snapshot shooter a good camera. Technically very good, kind of mundane. There was one of a tandem hang glider in flight, just after it took off, which was probably the most difficult one to get, but there was no background, no way to tell how high the glider was or where it was heading. To his credit, the moderator had made title labels for them all, and didn't comment on them, he let the gathering of about 30 people do the ooh and ahh and an occasional question about lens type and such.

And then there was a slide show talk by someone who bills himself as an astrolandscape photographer. He's a fine photographer, but his main deal is in the processing. He may take hundreds of frames of stars behind an attractive background, using an automated shutter release, and then run them through a script which layers them so what we see is many circles of streaking light as the stars move. But it's fake, because stars don't just move in a concentric circle around Polaris, they also shift across the sky from east to west. His images look like they don't shift.

He had some helpful info about lenses - focal lengths and f stops, and all his slides showed the duration the lens was open for each layer.

And he was a good speaker, and had his talk well organized.

I'll probably go again, but I'll upload three or 4 of my own images. Hearing the reactions should be fun.

Home, dinner was lunch leftovers, chow mein and sweet & sour chicken. And some of my half-burned caramel walnuts.

Kept the TV on long enough to see the Warriors MVP on Jimmy Kimmel, and came away with some thoughts. One is SO MUCH NOISE!!!! Another is how Kimmel kind of gave the guy the bum's rush when the timer hit zero. Whatever happened to the old way where all the guests got to interact? And also SO MUCH NOISE!!!!

While I was watching, I tried soaking my nails in acetone to remove them so I could get them redone the old fashioned way again, but I ran out of acetone, and only got the top layer off. Tomorrow I'll get more, and instead of soaking ion a dish, I'll try the cotton balls soaked in acetone, wrapped onto the fingernails for 10 minutes in aluminum foil. Which is how the SNS spa did it the first time.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work - need to check the machine for the overnight test I'm running
Lunchtime - beauty supply place for acetone & maybe they have pre-cut foil. I suspect my baker's foil is not the right stuff
Home, do the nails thing again

No Nuwes

Removing the flag won't help.

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Shut Spook out of the bedroom last night. Got fed up with her still reacting to my attempts at a hug as if I was some dread Animal Control officer about to put her into a cage and set it on fire. She whined a lot and clawed at the door for about an hour. Also chased her away and shut the door behind me when I went to work.

Traffic report said something was on fire at my 101 exit, so I stayed on Tasman all the way to Great America. On the overpass, I looked back toward that exit, and there was nothing going on.

But it did give me a look at Augustine Drive. which has been closed for almost a year as two huge office buildings are being built, and the left turn lane is changed to a double left turn lane in anticipation. The Specialty's shop right on the corner has probably lost more than half its business because access is very limited and involves dodging giant bulldozers, cranes, tractors and nuclear powered assault vehicles. We are talking vehicles with tires taller than I am. Very daunting.

The good news is the project looks very nearly ready to open the road up again.

Work was a day long attempt to duplicate a bug which I had filed a week ago, which is kind of impossible because the source streams I was using are no longer streaming, and on top of that our network was hosed so badly that I couldn't listen to any of the videos for more and a couple of minutes before they all broke up. I saw the same garbage in the lab (my cube faces the lab window).

Lunchtime started with a trip to the new beauty supply place across from Target, to buy more acetone nail polish remover. The nice lady said I could use regular baker's aluminum foil, it's the same stuff as the expensive pre-cut foil used at the spa. Then to Panera next door, where I had dessert for lunch because their food menu looks like it was created by vegan hippies on acid whose veganism did not accept birds as being meat, so they have chicken. In the most unappetizing recipes.

And even though I clearly said I was eating there, the elf behind the counter gave me the goodies in a bakery box. :-(

One reason I went there was the possibility of eye candy, however, that was not a feature of the place. One young woman in stretch pants who looked great from the back, but it turned out to be her best side. But out in the courtyard were a lot of college aged kids who were pretty hot.

Straight home after work, after sending my PTO message. It took three sessions with the foil-wrapped acetone-soaked cotton balls, but now all the SNS nail goop is off and I can go get my acrylic put back on. Contrary to SNS' claims, my natural nails are still thin and vulnerable.

Plans for tomorrow:
Taking the day off from work. Somehow I seem to have almost 30 vacation days accumulated.
Dentures at 9:30
Kaiser end-of-life class at 3
In between get the nails done and the car washed
Urinetown at Los Altos Stage at 8 pm. At least one friend is in this production.