Suppertime!

Very dicey sleep night. First there was insomnia, then the book I was reading, which had been hyped as a chef's journey into his roots by way of writing a cookbook turns out to be an insecure man's personal memoirs, no actual recipes so far, just a lot of moaning about how he had too entitled a childhood for an African-American to be able to find his roots. Now that I have a handle on what the book really is, it's fine. Except for his halting writing style and complete lack of focus.

It sounds like his grandmother was a lousy cook, and it cured him of soul food, and his mom was more of a French Chef, which distracted him from learning how to cook well what his grandmother wasn't good at.

11 pm last night I got email from the La Cage producer inviting me to look over the attached chorus book, and come to Sunday's rehearsals to audition. It was a pdf file, and it was upside down, so I sent it from my phone to the Canon wi-fi printer. It took about an hour. Turns out it was the entire vocal score for the show. Very poorly laid out - everything is in treble clef. It looks like we basses simply sing an octave lower than the melody line. Most of the time. I suspect the vocal director will not want a bass singing along most of the opening number. OCD set in, I 3-hole punched the pages and put them in a binder.

Finally got to sleep at about 2 am, woke up often. When the 7:30 alarm went off I wasn't alert enough to find the off button.

Somehow I managed to disconnect the Google Home unit in the bedroom from all the devices on the SmartThings hub, in an attempt to add the new laundry room lamps. Alexa still knew about those, but she's in the livingroom, and doesn't hear the bedroom very well. Awkward when I wanted to turn off the bedroom lights.

Traffic was a mess. 101 was bumper to bumper the whole way, took 40 minutes to go 7 miles.

There was no one in the break room, bananas were plentiful, as were eggs and baby cheese and the gold diet Coke I've switched to.

The door to the hole was unlatched, a nice surprise for a Monday. Construction has pretty much stopped along the trail, probably because all that's left is painting the wall, and that's not feasible in the rain.  It didn't rain today, but the cement is still wet from the weekend.

Just when I thought I had nothing to do, because of Friday's show-stopper, something was assigned to me. An interesting bug had been found on a local set top box, and the manager of one of the TV groups wanted me to see if it also occurred on his latest machine. First I wanted to see if I could duplicate it on the local box. It took about an hour, it involved playing a lot of video clips. And after trying it on both ethernet and wi-fi, I was not seeing the issue. The guy who wrote the bug thought the issue was from playing a lot of short video clips, but after some experimenting it turned out to be about a lot of FF/RW-ing.

Once I duplicated the bug on the original unit and corrected the steps to reproduce, I tried the TV. It worked fine. But then the local box manager pointed out the version of video playback on the TV was not the one needing testing.

Break time. Phoned Kaiser, they were no help at all. But looking online it appears all three prescriptions are on their way. I think the error was a web page glitch.

Lunchtime. Pot sticker steamer bowl. Horrible. What numnutz decided potstickers were served over rice? Gag me. And they were lousy snotlickers too.

Back to the hole, Boss sent the update for the video app the TV needed, so I re-tested, but it was not buggy. Monitoring the network sockets and memory, it did a great job of cleanup. Technical term is "garbage collection".  This is actually a feature of Java, one of the things which makes it popular - it frees up resources when it no longer needs it. Windows BSOD is usually caused by Windoze never releasing memory when it's no longer needed.

Meanwhile, much email was passed around about Friday's issue - lots of finger pointing amongst the engineers. Until they fixed it, I can't run those tests.

Slow traffic meant most of my car battery was drained, so instead of going straight home, or to BB&B or to Cupertino to see The Shape of Water (its trailer was one of the short video clips in the tests. After seeing it 6 times, I really want to see this movie. Even if it did win a lot of Oscars) I stayed till 6 then went to the Pear Ave building, plugged in the car and waited for the cafeteria to open. The line I wanted was long but moved quickly, the Yukon smashed potatoes were okay the pork slices were dry and devoid of taste, salad bar was basic but good, and the BBQ chicken drumstick was excellent. I got the last one. They replaced that station with Jalapeño sausages. Their chocolate soft serve was superb.

Not a lot of eye candy, but some.

Home, 7:30 traffic on 101 is almost speed limit. Spook met me at the door, as usual. Yelled for treats, but only ate a couple. She had spent much of the day on the top tier of the "new" piano room cat tree, but had moved to the doggie bed in the office later in the afternoon.

Morning - phone photo


Afternoon - webcam capture


After a lot of confusion, determined that my Samsung login was not the one to control the SmartThings hub. Found the right one, reset the password to one of my standard ones, and was able to re-sync it with the Google Home device. This now includes the laundry room lamps and the Sonos speakers. Sort of.

Lime soda and a popsicle to watch PTI. And a brownie. Not enough time to catch up on Graham Norton or X-Files.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Dentist (probably needs a filling and/or some work on one of the crowns)
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