Dinner is in the microwave

Stouffer's lasagna.  To which I will add two slices of swiss and two sticks of string cheese.

A very full day at work. Morning I volunteered to do some more audio testing, only to find that the tests were for features which were not in the product, and were not planned for it.

So I punted, and re-tested some of my favorite features. And found a bug. We allow the customer to upload their own short video files, like their logo with “ please stand by” and placards announcing other shows. It wasn’t working. Got an error message every time. I got two second opinions, then filed a bug.  Project manager asked if it did that on another version of the software, so I got my behind-me neighbor to check, and it crashed her machine. Added that to the bug.

My headphones were only playing the right earphone, and I traced it to a bad connector on the docking station. In the process the docking station kept losing track of everything plugged into it, so I placed an order for the IT folks to handle it. Ought to result in a new one in a week or so.

Lunch at Hometown Buffet because I needed to deposit a check at the CU, which was on the way, and with a 2pm meeting it had to be a quick meal. Quick as in not having to wait for poor service.

The meeting was almost fun, the mini-team shared bug reports and laughed sat my talent for having tests yanked from under me.

Later in the day, a solution arose, put me on a different mini-team which was behind in testing, mostly because their software was late in arriving, but also because one of their key members handed in his resignation. It’s not effective till the end of next week, but whatever. This fellow was an acquired taste, and it took me a while to stop h8ing.

He’s Vietnamese, and speaks with a very harsh tone, and comes with a big ego. But he also comes with a lot of technical knowledge and skill, and at meetings he would only speak when he had something important to add. The more I listened, the more I respected. The only things I still don’t like about him is he always shows up 10 minutes late for meetings, and his phone always takes priority over the meeting. It took him a while to remember to set it on vibrate, but he’s always checking it, and when it vibrates he runs outside and takes the call. Maybe those were all recruiter calls.

I have to say, though, he not only did his job, he wrote scripts and shared knowledge which helped us all do our jobs better.

Anyhow, it took me a while to put the new software on my machine and figure it out enough to set up the first test. So I’m ready for tomorrow.

Home by way of Home Despot, looking for an upright freezer in the 14³ft. range. They only had one upright, too large, and it was the display unit. Nobody in that end of the store at all, felt like a ghost town.

Next stop, Lowe’s. Walked in and the first thing I saw was appliances in all the aisles where they usually have the summer display, and the back area where appliances normally are was empty and looked like it was about to be remodeled. Lots of employees, but they were all grunts moving the fridges around. I saw no upright freezers, only 2 chest style. What lobotomized SOB invented those? The only practical use they have is for hiding bodies or storing a whole goat for the Eid feast.

Home, empty-handed. Spook met me at the door and immediately took off for points unseen. Later in the evening she brought me her mouse while I was on the PC, so I got up and played with her, and took a shot at brushing her. She liked it, sort of. She purred loudly, and aimed the side of her head at the brush, and she let me brush her tummy a little before going all claws out on me.

Tonight was “get album artwork” night in iTunes. I use an iPod in the car for my music, and something went wrong a couple of iTunes updates ago where it lost the cover art for the albums, so really weird non-art with incorrect genre labels shows up on 3/4 of the tunes. Took a long time, and lots of cover art did not make it – I blame copywrong laws. Did not feel like Plan B, which is looking the album up online and using Paint to make a file which iTunes can grab.

Somewhere around 10:30 when I did not see any Facebook entries about the Mets from my too-many Mets fan friends, I turned on the TV to see what was up, and the game was on Channel 702 (Fox) and was in the 14th inning. That would be 1:30 am Mets’ time.

The next inning the Royals loaded the bases, hit a long pop fly, and the winning run scored. All that took about half an hour in real time. Which is why I usually don’t watch baseball. 20 seconds of excitement in a 5-plus-hour game.

Dinner was eaten after that, apple bread pudding for dessert. This time I mixed 1/4 cup of powdered sugar with the Bacardi, and made a passable topping.

Plans for tomorrow:

• Work
• Manicure
• 1-on-1 with the boss

Interesting Times

Work started out with a dilemma. First test case for the new group and I find it is a miserable cut and paste from a different product line, requiring testing features which don’t exist. What was testable passed, so I just made a note in the case to rewrite these to be closer to reality. These were closed captioning tests, and I got to watch a lot of KQED’s offerings. We have one feed in the lab with three programs, High HD, standard HD and World, which is in SD. They do a really good job of closed captioning, but only in English. 

Next test case was a complex matrix of items, all having to do with taking the input video, and changing the output size and shape in various ways, and monitoring the changes on a video player. There’s a widget called AFD which appears on the analyzer which describes which change to apply, and I saw it on the source, but not on the output. Pow-wowed with new team leader and she said “file a bug”. Oddly, this did not cause the test to fail, it was just something found whilst testing something else.

Lunchtime I went for a manicure, and got a reuben sub at Mike’s, which I ate in the break room. There was a 3 pm welcome party for me & the woman who sits in the cube behind me, welcoming us to the team. We’re basically testing a version of the software which does some things most encoders don’t do, but our multiplexor does.

Meanwhile, old team leader is trying to do engineering’s work for them, won’t take my word for it that the last bug I filed was a bug regardless of the root cause. Root cause is Engineering’s job. Ours is simply to break the machine and report how we did it. Anyhow, there was an “I told you so” moment in there somewhere.

1-on-1 was scheduled for 4:30 but boss was nowhere in sight. Checked again in 5 and 10 minutes, then went back to writing the bug for new team. Did not hear from Boss, which is not like him.

Orchard Supply after work, got a hand-crank 25-foot snake, rubber gloves and a couple of non-toilet items. The place is 3/4 of the way through a complete remodel, and it is vastly better than the mess it had been.

Home, after putting stuff away and feeding Spook, I went at the clogged toilet with the snake, but it is too thin to push through the trap, and I was only able to hand feed it, and only enough to make a start. Switched to a standard plunger which I had not tried yet (had been using the water force one) and that cleared things up pretty quickly.

Next project was to open up the PC to see what kind of USB 3.0 adapter I had, because the driver I downloaded for the one I thought I had did not recognize the card. Turned out to be the one I thought it was, and it doesn’t appear to support anything above Windows 7. So I found another brand which does have a Win10 driver and ordered from Amazon.

Cut up some pita, got out hummus and whitefish, and made a dinner of it. Bread pudding for dessert. Egg nog with lots of nutmeg as a chaser.

Plans for tomorrow:

• Pack up Spook and take her to the vet for her first annual checkup & shots. There may be bloodshed.
• Work
• Football