A day of juggling

Morning was all out of sync, up at 6:30 to pee, then back to bed for an hour, had some stuff to do on the tablet before getting out of bed. AG called at 8 which is way early for him, and I let it go to voicemail.

Finally out of the house at 8:45, took a while to get to the commuter lane, but once there it was a fast trip except for the battle to get to my exit.

Grabbed breakfast from a busy room full of people grab-and-going, and half the tables with laptops deployed, the other half with cereal bowls in process. On my way out, ran into one of the engineers, and told him I'd filed a big bug. Soon after I got to the hole, B, who has become the James Bond unit engineer, came by and took a look, then took the machine to his desk to work on it.

That let me start work on a tiny STB, which just needed a simple smoke test. Which takes most of the day. B was back and forth twice with James Bond, but didn't have it working till I was ready to leave for the day. Smoke test will be done in the morning, then I will fire up James Bond's Sekrit Projekt tests. Hope it passes. If not, on to another larger STB.

Early in the day I heard the news that SF mayor Ed Lee had died. All the media were copying the wire story headline "died suddenly" which used to be journalism code for "committed suicide". He didn't. Looks like a heart attack. It wasn't all that sudden, his family was around him in the hospital at 1 am when he passed away.

Stand-in tech showed up at the front door with the replacement Linux server at about 11. He was surprised when I showed him the door he had not tried was open. It also didn't win any points with me that he didn't try both doors.

And he also was unprepared for the drive swap. The servers are modular, and the new server's drive bays are hot swappable while the old server's was not. It's pretty standard to just unmount the old drive from its bay and mount it in the new bay, but he didn't have that clue. And he didn't have a SATA cable to work around it. The original tech will be back tomorrow with a cable. The good news is the machine boots up, and I was able to use it, but most of my data is on the old machine, along with some apps which are a PIA to install.

And I don't have su access. It does not like my new password. I'll have to have tech fix that.

I thought I had SATA cables at home, but they were recycled a while ago, the ones I didn't need for the PC. Should have stopped off at Fry's just in case. Stand in was also puzzled by the old machine's SSD, which I'm sure is the boot drive. That's so standard it hurts. It's how I have my home PC set up. SSD to boot, big RPM drives for data.

Boss spaced out and missed sync, rescheduled for tomorrow.

Home, traffic was ugly. One driver wedged into my lane 2 cars ahead of me, blocking two lanes. My lane doesn't get the green light until a couple of minutes after the lane he was wedged in from, and that made a lot of drivers pretty mad, because the next lane over was bumper to bumper. That kind of crap happened all the way home.

Stopped off at Grocery Outlet and bought oranges for tonight and mushrooms for soon, and a small container of egg nog, and a can of whipped cream for Zoe.
 
Had some quality time with Zoe, she liked the whipped cream at first, then decided "no more".

Spook is being weird, spent a lot of the evening under the hallway runner, where she is now.

My home PC is making rude noises. The rear fan needs attention. To-do for the weekend. Also need to clear off a work space for the calendar project. Everything on order has shipped except the calendars. I can prep envelopes that I have now, for US friends.

Watched the Sunday night football game, the switch worked great. Chris Collinsworth's voice is so very annoying. There were so many cut-aways in between plays for stupid graphics and needless trivia, and a lot of crying about a player who is in the hospital. Audio from the booth would have made that unbearable.

For dinner I defrosted a whole salmon fillet, half a salmon full length. Sliced a couple of oranges, piled them on top and baked for 25 minutes. Hard to tell when salmon is done, it's pink regardless. I overcooked it a little, it was pretty dry, and very little of the orange flavor leaked in. Quinoa stew on the side, of course. Mandarins for dessert. Then walnuts with a drizzle of honey.

Bagged the rest of the salmon, it will make a nice puree, salmon salad similar to tuna salad. But for now it's in the freezer.

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PC magically turned off. I may have hit the switch, but I don't think so. Luckily my LJ editor auto-saves.

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Plans for tomorrow:
Work and all that it entails
Manicure

Neck Unbottled

I'm blaming the new med schedule - another 6 am wake-up, unable to get to sleep again quickly, surprised by the 7:30 alarm. Made a slight change in my morning routine for practical purposes. My fancy BT weight watcher's scale not only gives my weight, but also % of fat, water, bone, muscle and my BMI number. But there's a catch. First thing in the morning my feet are too dry to make good enough contact for anything except my weight. So this morning I took my shower first and got all the numbers. I'm below 260 again. so "soaking wet" was not an issue.

Got to work about the usual time, there were bananas and eggs and satsumas but no vitamin water so I got a caffeine free diet coke instead. And a Kind bar.

Over at the hole, wrapped up the test from yesterday, unpluged that little STB and re-connected James bond and re-ran the Sekrit Projekt tests on it. It still failed most of them. That meant I could set aside the Sekrit Projekt and get back to fulfilling the assignments on my task sheet. There are 5 of them at least.

Tech support came in with a SATA data cable (I had one too) and added the hard drive from my broken machine to the new one. Lots of corporate password juggling was involved, because drives are encrypted. I had to re-learn how to install Ubuntu software apps, and set the $PATH. It used to be command line, now it's in a text file.

Now that the linux server is up and running, after some copying files and re-installing Google's open sores adb program, I started running the GTS automation suite on James Bond. It takes almost 4 hours, and plays a lot of stupid video clips 10 or 20 times. To stay sane I mostly keep the sound muted. It's automated testing, I really don't have to pay attention until the end, but I do.

Lunch was tuna salad sandwich and satsumas, and 4 fudge mint cookies. Lots of visitors hanging out, mostly _ next door types.

Back to the hole, email passing from London to MV for me to test a unit I didn't have. It had been on my desk in 42 several months ago, but was adopted by one of the managers. Boss finally found one and brought it down when she came for sync. It has ancient firmware, the plan is to leave it on overnight and maybe it will magically update. Many of the London units work that way. Meanwhile, Boss had me run GTS again on James Bond to see if it failed more or fewer tests a second time around.
 
Manicure after work, re-silvered the nails. Then next door to Safeway, they did not have Satsumas, but they had lemonade-ish vitamin water, and turkey legs, and prawns.

Home, Spook decided she wanted to be wrapped under the hallway runner while I was watching TV. That's sick, so now there's a 10-lb weight on the end of the runner. She has moved to the office doggie bed where she belongs. Grudgingly. I spent some quality time with Zoe till I needed to leave to refill her kibble tower & wet food dish. Once those were in place she had no time for me.

Quick-defrosted about 1/3 of the shrimp, put a pot of water on to boil with several spices and some olive oil, dumped in macaroni for 6 minutes, peeled the shrimp and dumped them in for the last 5 minutes. The pasta could have used another minute but the shrimp was perfecto.

Watched PTI while it was cooking, and being eaten. Dessert was cut cantaloupe. Watched the news. Saving Graham Norton for later.

Delivered was the box of calendar envelopes. Cleared some space on the office table, but will need to relocate a lot of junk to under the table. Plan to make a start Saturday.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Home
Football
Maybe open the PC and check out the noisy fan.