Better than nothing
So, even though I was in bed by 10:30, I didn't finish the book chapter till 11:30, and it was another hour before I put the tablet and its video feeds away and turned off the lights by shouting "Okay Google, turn off the bedroom". Because one neat feature of the Google Home device is once you assign controllable devices to a room, it will turn on/off everything in the room. If I tell it to "turn off all the lights", it will find everything in the house which might be a light (even if I named it "lamp") and act on them, leaving the fan and the car charger untouched.
On the road on time, though it seemed early. At work 10 minutes early. Kind of pissed because the car decided to use the gas engine (it does that from time to time if it thinks the gas engine has not been exercised enough - and won't let you override it). Two things about the gas engine:
1. It wastes gas
2. The engine makes a 50Hz hum in the audio system, even when I'm playing off the digital USB drive. Speaker wires act like antennae.
Grabbed a banana and HB egg to go with the diet Coke, and opened my email. Two things, one annoying - a notice of a new video from Hot Thai Kitchen on Youtube, because my alternate work email address is subscribed to it. And an update on a bug I filed long ago re-assigning it to the manufacturer in response to a reply I made that it was almost - but not quite - fixed.
Around 10, Boss messaged that she was coming over with a new STB. And she also had me update a spreadsheet which shows the latest version of each Android app, and what the TV actually has on it.
She came over, we had a nice chat. Turns out the company the STB is from is a place Sony sent me to for a month 20 years ago. Deja vu-ish. Boss was amused by that.
Turned out to be a short test, for reasons the NDA won't let me describe. So I watched Thai Masked Singer on YouTube on another TV instead. Remember the Korean Masked Singer? Well, this is the Thai copycat, starting its 2nd season, and since I actually understand some Thai, it's a lot more fun for me than the Korean, which I don't. Basically, it's a celebrity version of The Voice, done the way a truly blind audition should be, with the contestants disguised so well that the only thing you can judge them on is voice and a little bit of movement. Unfortunately, it is over-produced, with a lot of needless flashbacks to what we saw 3 minutes ago, way too long taken to unmask the loser, and inane CGI-ed introductions of the fictitious characters done in the style, sort of, of the needless biographical segments in The Voice.
Here it is:
<iframe width="490" height="370" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/hrwD4QTNJ9I" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" data-link="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrwD4QTNJ9I"></iframe>
I love the second singer the best. Obviously a professional trained singer, unlike his challenger and most of the other contestants, who are usually movie or TV soap opera stars. If you are puzzled by why the 4th singer won her bout, she totally nailed a traditional NE Thailand song old school style. Kind of like if The Andrews Sisters showed up at a modern song contest with a perfect rendition of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B. It wouldn't matter how good Ariana Grande had been before them. And in this case, Butterfly girl was kind of meh with her number.
Lunch was Lean Cuisine chicken with noodles and pesto, I added some cheddar. Thin mints for dessert. No eye candy, no tours. Break was the same, except there was some antidote to eye candy, a trio of grunts who were there to re-arrange furniture in one of the meeting rooms, but the meeting was running late.
Boss had me email the STB issues to an overseas program manager, and I added screen shots.
On the road at 5:40, went to the nearest Safeway and bought all the items in the freezer case. 2-fer deal on Breyers ice cream, they had lactose-free chocolate. Huge limes - 50 cents each, I bought 4. It will only take 1/4 of one to make a lime soda, the small ones take a whole lime.
It took a while to put everything in the freezer, and after an hour the "too warm" light was flashing. It should be okay by now.
Dinner was beef pot pie, chocolate ice cream with walnuts and honey for dessert, while watching another episode of Stranger Things. Overacting Mom has reached balance now, she is finally believable, when the writers let her be. Sometimes they stab her in the back with truly inane lines. But they are getting better. Ditto their writing for the police chief, who was originally written to be dumb as a rock. They still have him in the wrong uniform. He's in a brown Sheriff's suit while his underlings are in blue police uniforms. FAIL, costume designer. He's a police chief, he should be in blue. Other things are coming together as well. I'll see where it goes.
Doctor asked me to shoot up all my insulin before dinner, instead of 150 units of regular at bedtime, on the theory it will prevent early morning low blood sugar. So I have 50 units of high test and 150 of regular in me. Keep your fingers crossed.
The new phone is excellent. Faster than the Samsung, and it eats less battery than expected, now that all the installations are done - downloads eat a lot of juice. It paired with the car easily. AG didn't call, so it is untested there. It pinged rather loudly to let me know the songwriter meetup for tomorrow is canceled. The fellow whose studio we have it in is Jewish, and it's Passover. Which means this weekend I get to bite the heads off the dark chocolate bunnies.
In other fake news, this morning the sensationalist media ran a story about a San Bernardino shooting as if it was another terrorist with automatic weapons. Turned out to just be a domestic argument between a teacher and her husband, who followed her to school and started shooting at her. Unfortunately he was a bad shot, and also killed a child in the classroom, and injured one or three others before he shot himself. Sad, but not terror. And once again, having the strongest gun control laws in the country fails to stop stupid.
Livejournal friends are once again panicking and moving to Dreamwidth. Not me. Not unless they pull the plug. Dreamwidth is an amateur operation, and would cost $$ where LJ is a lifetime subscription which appears to still be honored. If I want a bigger audience, I have Facebook.
Plans for tomorrow:
Work. If I'm lucky, overseas rep will already have a fix in my email box. Or Boss will have something else for me to test.
Maybe I'll go to the VTA community forum at 6.
On the road on time, though it seemed early. At work 10 minutes early. Kind of pissed because the car decided to use the gas engine (it does that from time to time if it thinks the gas engine has not been exercised enough - and won't let you override it). Two things about the gas engine:
1. It wastes gas
2. The engine makes a 50Hz hum in the audio system, even when I'm playing off the digital USB drive. Speaker wires act like antennae.
Grabbed a banana and HB egg to go with the diet Coke, and opened my email. Two things, one annoying - a notice of a new video from Hot Thai Kitchen on Youtube, because my alternate work email address is subscribed to it. And an update on a bug I filed long ago re-assigning it to the manufacturer in response to a reply I made that it was almost - but not quite - fixed.
Around 10, Boss messaged that she was coming over with a new STB. And she also had me update a spreadsheet which shows the latest version of each Android app, and what the TV actually has on it.
She came over, we had a nice chat. Turns out the company the STB is from is a place Sony sent me to for a month 20 years ago. Deja vu-ish. Boss was amused by that.
Turned out to be a short test, for reasons the NDA won't let me describe. So I watched Thai Masked Singer on YouTube on another TV instead. Remember the Korean Masked Singer? Well, this is the Thai copycat, starting its 2nd season, and since I actually understand some Thai, it's a lot more fun for me than the Korean, which I don't. Basically, it's a celebrity version of The Voice, done the way a truly blind audition should be, with the contestants disguised so well that the only thing you can judge them on is voice and a little bit of movement. Unfortunately, it is over-produced, with a lot of needless flashbacks to what we saw 3 minutes ago, way too long taken to unmask the loser, and inane CGI-ed introductions of the fictitious characters done in the style, sort of, of the needless biographical segments in The Voice.
Here it is:
<iframe width="490" height="370" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/hrwD4QTNJ9I" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen" data-link="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrwD4QTNJ9I"></iframe>
I love the second singer the best. Obviously a professional trained singer, unlike his challenger and most of the other contestants, who are usually movie or TV soap opera stars. If you are puzzled by why the 4th singer won her bout, she totally nailed a traditional NE Thailand song old school style. Kind of like if The Andrews Sisters showed up at a modern song contest with a perfect rendition of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy of Company B. It wouldn't matter how good Ariana Grande had been before them. And in this case, Butterfly girl was kind of meh with her number.
Lunch was Lean Cuisine chicken with noodles and pesto, I added some cheddar. Thin mints for dessert. No eye candy, no tours. Break was the same, except there was some antidote to eye candy, a trio of grunts who were there to re-arrange furniture in one of the meeting rooms, but the meeting was running late.
Boss had me email the STB issues to an overseas program manager, and I added screen shots.
On the road at 5:40, went to the nearest Safeway and bought all the items in the freezer case. 2-fer deal on Breyers ice cream, they had lactose-free chocolate. Huge limes - 50 cents each, I bought 4. It will only take 1/4 of one to make a lime soda, the small ones take a whole lime.
It took a while to put everything in the freezer, and after an hour the "too warm" light was flashing. It should be okay by now.
Dinner was beef pot pie, chocolate ice cream with walnuts and honey for dessert, while watching another episode of Stranger Things. Overacting Mom has reached balance now, she is finally believable, when the writers let her be. Sometimes they stab her in the back with truly inane lines. But they are getting better. Ditto their writing for the police chief, who was originally written to be dumb as a rock. They still have him in the wrong uniform. He's in a brown Sheriff's suit while his underlings are in blue police uniforms. FAIL, costume designer. He's a police chief, he should be in blue. Other things are coming together as well. I'll see where it goes.
Doctor asked me to shoot up all my insulin before dinner, instead of 150 units of regular at bedtime, on the theory it will prevent early morning low blood sugar. So I have 50 units of high test and 150 of regular in me. Keep your fingers crossed.
The new phone is excellent. Faster than the Samsung, and it eats less battery than expected, now that all the installations are done - downloads eat a lot of juice. It paired with the car easily. AG didn't call, so it is untested there. It pinged rather loudly to let me know the songwriter meetup for tomorrow is canceled. The fellow whose studio we have it in is Jewish, and it's Passover. Which means this weekend I get to bite the heads off the dark chocolate bunnies.
In other fake news, this morning the sensationalist media ran a story about a San Bernardino shooting as if it was another terrorist with automatic weapons. Turned out to just be a domestic argument between a teacher and her husband, who followed her to school and started shooting at her. Unfortunately he was a bad shot, and also killed a child in the classroom, and injured one or three others before he shot himself. Sad, but not terror. And once again, having the strongest gun control laws in the country fails to stop stupid.
Livejournal friends are once again panicking and moving to Dreamwidth. Not me. Not unless they pull the plug. Dreamwidth is an amateur operation, and would cost $$ where LJ is a lifetime subscription which appears to still be honored. If I want a bigger audience, I have Facebook.
Plans for tomorrow:
Work. If I'm lucky, overseas rep will already have a fix in my email box. Or Boss will have something else for me to test.
Maybe I'll go to the VTA community forum at 6.