I Was Afraid That Would Happen

• So, another very late night, another good sleep, awakened by the alarm at 7:30, went back to sleep till the phone rang just before 8. Pushed it to voicemail. Twice. Same number. Then again at 8:30, different number. First number left voicemail, American accent, Chinese name. Back to sleep till 9:30.
  
  Found one job to apply for, a bit out of my comfort zone, but interesting, and it looked like they were hiring three levels of QA engineer, maybe one of them will be a match. Checked the email from the guy who left voicemail, he had a job for me at Logitech, which is a company I'd love to work for except they don't make anything all that interesting for me as a tester. He left two messages, one original and one replying to my auto-reply. The auto-reply clearly bsays I'm looking for streaming media, which his job is not. What it is, is a manufacturing QA job, mostly testing components, and with occasional trips to Asia (Taiwan, I'm guessing) because it says Mandarin would be a plus. I do speak about 20 words of Mandarin, but not "where's the bathroom" so I'm not fluent.
  
  I did not reply. If he contacts me again, I may. Just to find out if there are non-leadership roles. And if Asia means Thailand.
  
  Today's highlight was supposed to be a job fair, but when I got there, at the check-in desk they had no list of people who had signed up, and were asking if I was in education. Inside, there were 5 not 15 employers, 4 were school systems, one a very Peace-Corps-ish concern called Seneca, a group of agencies promoting mental health services statewide. I took a flyer to pass along to some Peace Corps alum.
  
  Other than that it was a total waste of time & electricity.
  
  It was at the Embassy Suites, which has this "we are allergic to conventions" sign in the elevator:
  
  
  Plan A¹ was to park myself at Specialty's around the corner after the job fair, Plan B was to do the same if the job fair was a bust (there was a strong indication it would be from the lack of details on the notices & web site). So I drove around the corner and was reminded by a barrage of yellow Tyvek that the Specialty's had been bulldozed back in February, to make way for a Whole Foods.
  
  So I drove home. But first, a stop at Fry's to buy a Windows 10 compatible keyboard. The typing problems all pointed to the USB gadget which takes the wireless signal from the keyboard and mouse. Windows 10 has some USB compatibility issues, so...
  
  Home, hooked up the new keyboard/mouse, and so far it seems the problem is solved. It has all the bells & whistles of the previous one except the Thai support, but frankly most of my Thai writing is cut and paste. And there is no sleep key. There are five programmable keys, but it looks like those can only be programmed to launch a program or a URL. I like the placement of the DEL key better. Do not like the Insert key being right above it, though.
  
  Watched a Tivo episode of PTI, and when I switched back to live video, was happily surprised to see The Bold and the Beautiful has reinstated the black cast, including my heart throb, Felisha Cooper, who seems to have lost 20 lbs, much of it up top, since we last saw her. The script and directing for today's segment were lame. Shot in a closet, almost.
  
  In the mail were two more ads for Marc Berman, so I pulled the other five out of the recycle bin, put them all in an envelope with a short note telling him his PACs have lost him my vote. Have to look up his address to mail it to him.
  
  While printing the note, my main printer said it was out of black ink. I put in a replacement I'd bought online from a third party manufacturer, and the printer refused to accept it. Knew it was a forgery. So I hopped in the car and went back to Fry's. After spending 5 minutes looking for it in their somewhat random display of 7,248 different kinds of Epson cartridges, I looked at the printers, found one which uses that type, and asked at the desk. They don't carry the cartridge. The manager wasn't even ashamed that they don't carry ink for one of the dozen Epson printers on the show floor.
  
  When I got home, I ordered express delivery of just the black ink, and did some online shopping. For the same price as a full set of Epson refills, I found a comparable Canon printer. So that's been ordered. I thought it would be harder to find, but Canon's web site has a much better search engine than Epson's or Amazon's. The features I needed:
  
• CD/DVD direct printing
• Two-sided color printing on plain paper
• Wireless
• Scanner

UPS tracking says the lens will be delivered tomorrow. Yay! I should take it somewhere for a test. The $$ has been slurped from my Visa card.

Dinner was again two small frozen dinners, probably could have survived on one. Dessert was grapes and cantaloupe pieces.

Back to the PC, did the Python homework. The basic coding is easy, but formatting the output is a PIA.

( Here's what I wrote )

Run the program, type in CalculateArea(shape,size): where shape is "circle" or "square" and size is radius of a circle or one side of a square, and it tells you the area. And because the teacher said so, if the area of a circle is greater than 100, complain that it's too big, if the square is less than 10 say it's too small, and if something besides "circle" or "square" is entered, complain.

I'm not sure, but I think he wants us to upload our work to yahoo groups.

Plans for tomorrow:
Wish Baltimore sister a happy birthday
The usual job search
Baylands? Take the bike to Shoreline Park if the lens arrives early enough.

Little Known Fact: Muhammad Ali Helped Promote Intercropping In Southern Thailand

Sad to hear the artist formerly known as Cassius Clay lost his final fight today. He changed boxing and sports by being a rare articulate black athlete. Howard Cosell, a lawyer turned sports gadfly, made his fortune by promoting Clay and keeping him in the public eye. Something which still puzzles me is how he served time for being a conscientious objector but on his release he continued to beat the crap out of people for a living. His conversion to Islam was puzzling too, since his ancestors were probably animists.

But I am telling you a story. My second year in Thailand, my unit, the Rubber Research Center, had a huge long-term project to convince the rubber plantation owners to pull out their trees, and replace them with a new strain which produced 10x the rubber. It takes 7 years for a sapling to grow to be a producing tree, so we had two projects - show the farmers how to divide their field into 8 parts, pulling up 1/8 every year. And then how to grow other cash crops (pineapples and chili peppers were the most profitable) in between the saplings.

My job was to produce slide shows illustrating all of that, plus how to treat various rubber tree diseases and parasites. And I would go out with our A/V unit to all the provincial fairs.

My boss was a genius. He knew that nobody would sit still for three hours of agricultural extension slides, so as soon as we parked the truck and mounted the TV on top, he would pop in a videotape of the Thrilla in Manila and play one round. That would attract a crowd, and between rounds we showed a short slide show. The fight went 14 rounds, and by the end of the fight maybe 100 people had seen our slides.

That was 1976. In 1989 I returned to southern Thailand for the first time, and my bus trip across the peninsula looked like our slide show.


The A/V truck and some of my co-workers. Some of the provincial fairs were a long trip through the jungle, so we carried extra fuel.


Me & co-workers


And more co-workers

Not Much To Report

I had nothing on the calendar. It was in the mid-90s outside, in the 70s inside, so I stayed inside except to collect the mail and to check for the Nikon lens.

Slept well, until 6:30 am. Got up and fired up the PC and looked for ways to cancel the very expensive Epson ink order. Couldn't do it online, so at 7 I phoned and they entered a request to cancel, but no guarantees. They said if it ships, just go online for an RMA and ship it back. I had paid for same-day shipping, but the Fedex info said it would not get here till Monday. About noon I was able to do th RMA thing.

Facebook and LJ got a lot more attention than usual. I touched up the Python code after I noticed the assignment wanted a specific error message if the user wanted the area of a rectangle. That took 3 minutes.

Did a little more job hunting than usual, and applied for a couple of jobs I may not be qualified for.

Got a LinkedIn message that one of my ex-co-workers got one of the jobs I had rejected (it has a rotating 24x7 requirement).

Gave Midsommer Murders another chance, a 2-part story with 10 minutes of begging in between, as well as ads for an exterminator. So much for commercial-free. I was am still not impressed with the show.

My new keyboard doesn't have a sleep key. The Windows 10 command which is supposed to put the machine to sleep either restarted it or turned it off. Some browsing pointed me at a suite of free applets, one of which worked. I was able to program it into one of the 5 macro keys at the top (above the function keys).

Lunch was ad hoc cold stuff again, dinner was beef pot pie, dessert was blueberries in chocolate pudding. Yummy, but my 10 pm Hgl was 250, so I had to shoot up extra high test insulin.

The lens did not get delivered till 8pm, the very last minute. Boo, hiss. The paperwork says they cleaned all the elements, and all the connections, tested focus & zoom & exposure. I'll try it out tomorrow, probably.

Plans for tomorrow:
Call Baltimore sister and sing happy birthday to her off key. Family tradition. Me and older sister have legit singing voices, the other sisters not at all. I know I put this as a plan yesterday, but I was writing after midnight.
Pick up the quilt.
I think I'll go out to Shoreline Park with the camera. More to take pictures of.