Writing Wrongs

Team meeting at 9, mostly a replay of last week.

Did some more research on something wrong with our automation database, automation guy fixed it as I was looking into it.

Picked a bug to verify as fixed which turned out to be an incompatibility with our app and MSIE 6.0. Nobody in our plant should have anything earlier than 8.0, but someone did, filed a bug, and it was fixed. Thanks to the molasses network we have in the building, the installer for 6.0 timed out trying to reach the MSFT server for the files. After work I took my laptop home, put it on my much faster proxy-free weirdnet, and it only took two hours of beating up XP and the registry to get it installed.

Lunch was at Sizzler. Love the chicken wings they have in the taco cart by the soup bar. Reading Water For Elephants, which is fascinating.

Made my annual ophthalmology appointment. The only opening they had happened to be perfect - next Monday late afternoon. The less of the work day with my eyes dilated the better. I recover very slowly from that.

After work went to Safeway and Rite Aide for a handful of sundries. One of them was a sprayer attachment for the kitchen faucet. Last night I was cutting up some celery and throwing the base parts into the disposal, when the spray attachment fell off into it. Chomped up the screw part pretty good. Got the replacement out of its package, and discovered there are not enough threads on the faucet to hold it. What I thought was a solid connection was not. Will have to get one which slides over the faucet neck.

Dinner was leftover shredded corned beef boiled with elbow macaroni, strained and then topped with goat brie. Delicious.

The Steve Goodman DVD arrived, and I watched it over dinner, which was not such a good idea because some his stuff and the interviews made me cry. Arlo Guthrie, John Prine, Kris Kristopherson, one of Johnny Cash's band members, Steve's agent. They missed getting Jimmy Buffet and Bobby Bare somehow.  I loved the section where he and an unseen interviewer go out to a spot overlooking Wrigley Field, which ends with Steve singing This:

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A Dying Cubs Fan's Last Request

The man was a genius, but oddly enough, I like the other singers' covers of his songs better. Probably because other singers sing from the music, Steve sings from his head, and his head keeps changing the lyrics and tunes a little. A good example is City of New Orleans, which Arlo Guthrie made famous with a steady rhythm and smoothed out melody line. Goodman throws some different inflections into it, and sometimes words find their way into it which were not there last time.

There's a lot to be said for first impressions, I guess.

One thing which brought tears to my eyes is he invited Jethro of Homer & Jethro up to the stage, and after a totally misleading 16 bars of introduction, played City of New Orleans. And Steve was just beaming to be on the same stage as Jethro, and Jethro was just beaming to be picking this tune with the man who wrote it. Magic.

The DVD is a compilation of at least two Austin City Limits appearances an a couple of tracks from other places, including one early amateur recording session. Worth full price.

Just finished a project of ripping several CDs from some of my favorite Thai singers to the iPod. The iPod is my car's music player, it plugs right into the in-dash system. Today I was listening to Ploy's  Worm Eye's View album, and could not find a track I was sure was on it. It's a very sweet tune called Special Song, in which she gives her boyfriend a tape or CD and tells him she wrote the song for him, he should play it and think of her, and she will think of him thinking of her. Or something like that. I thought maybe I had not copied all the songs from the CD, but looking at the CD track list, I had copied them all. I found the tune on her third album, The Girl in the Window. So I grabbed all her CDs, and the ones from Ann and Bua Chompu and the one from New & Jew and slurped them into iTunes and synced them to the iPod.

All four artists have lots of sings I like. But it is time to go on eThaiCD.com and buy some more compilation new artist CDs and find some fresh talent.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
After work - who knows?

Another day at work playing with the automation program. Automation guy was back from the land of the dead, but he had two days of very busy work to catch up on, and was still pretty sick & stayed in the lab all day. Except at about 5:30 he came up for air and showed me two magic reveals which gave me enough info to finish the projects tomorrow. The bad news is I have to completely rewrite them. In a nutshell, stupid automation software thinks a check mark in a check box is text. I was thinking of it as an image.

Lunchtime was LONG, I took the box to Office Depot where they very reluctantly accepted it, after I showed them email from corporate saying to take it to them. The manager said they have a package someone else dropped off which corporate has not picked up after 2 weeks. When I got home I emailed the person I talked to at corp asking that she make sure there was a pickup order. She had not done that when we talked.

GPS said there was a Sizzler across the street. I looked, and no, that place has not been a Sizzler in about 15 years. Next on the list was a Greek place down the block. Got there, it was gutted, workers were in the process of making it the other half of a Peet's. There was a small by-the-slice pizza place at the other end of the parking lot, I had a small Greek salad and a slice of the 2nd worst pizza ever. Note to pizza makers: sausage should not look like rabbit droppings. Cheese should be completely melted.

Checked email, and there was a package to pick up, so I detoured to the apartment office, but then thought it might be the laptop, so I re-detoured to Fry's and bought a notebook sized bluetooth mouse. The package was the FuReal cat. That saved me a trip to my apartment, I just tossed it into the trunk and went back to work.

FB was exploding with friends saying which parts they got in How To Succeed and I was surprised by some of the choices. Not the people, but the parts they landed. It's a great cast, though, what I saw of it - they have not posted it on the official web site yet. Ethel Merman's grand-nephew is in it. He's an SPF 1 billion redhead.

Home, unwrapped the FuReal cat, which does walk a little and meow a little and purr a little, but only when you pet its back. Not the automagical machine I expected. Nice fur, looks very much like Domino. She took a few close looks at it, each time walking away a foot or so to use her head-scratcher. Finally she got bored and went to her water dish. I put the toy next to the cat bed on the couch, Domino thinks it is guarding the bed, and has parked herself on the cat perch on the other end of the couch, which is one of the places where she spends a lot of the day.

The jury is still out. I hope Domino bats it around a bit so it makes some noise/motion. First she has to convince herself it is harmless.

Dinner was the last of the yummy corned beef, with wheat nut bread, brown mustard and a pickle. Domino attacked every piece of beef I moved in the direction of her face.

Watched enough of CNN to get the gist of the Florida child murder stupidity, and Whitney's coroner's report. Under the circumstances, it seems odd that they ruled out foul play. In her condition, all it would have taken was a gentle push. Face it, the last thing the Grammies needed was a WUI.

8 pm, hauled my butt to the Mercado Starbux, but there was not a single seat available, and it was about 50 degrees out, wind chill factor of below Arctic. I saw two long lines at the theater, people camped out with blankets, card games, video games, etc. Both lines for the midnight opening of Hunger Games, one line for 3D the other for 3D IMAX. I figured the folks at *$$ were keeping warm before getting in line, so I braved the cold and wind and went to MicroCenter and asked about SSDs (which are on sale for a very good price) and tried out a Toshiba ultrabook. Much lighter than the Asus, not as fast but it had the i3 processor. It had bluetooth, which is strange because according to the Toshiba site they don't have a BT antenna in that model. I may end up sending the i7 back unopened and going for the i3 if that's the case. Save muchos dinero. Or not. They want the same for the i5 as Toshiba sells the i7 for. More research is in order.

Back at SBUX 8:45, plenty of seats. 9 pm theater doors opened, no more lines by 9:10. Meanwhile this place has been eye candy central.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Toshiba machine should be at the apartment office by lunchtime
Howeird's night in, I think.

Didn't do much today. Picked up some prints from Costco, where I shot this amusing photo:
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watched an episode of The Shark Tank, which is my latest Tivo season pass. It is a bit over-dramatized, but interesting to see the inventions and business proposals which make it to the program, and how much personality has to do with who gets funded, and how.

Then to Starbucks to snag a table and meet Janice, who had some computer/phone/Kindle questions. At 2:30 there was not a single seat inside or out. I went back to my car for 20 minutes, and when I came back the place was half empty. When Janice arrived 10 minutes later, it was full again. Very odd.

What we decided was her half-ton HP netbook did not do anything her Android phone did not do. I demonstrated Skype, pointed her to K-9 email, the Kindle app, and a couple of other goodies, and the HP became redundant. She just needed something which would let her read and manage email when she traveled, without loading her down. She'll keep the Kindle for reading and audio books, and use the phone for what little browsing she does.

She was having so much fun she forgot to tell me about her latest boyfriends.

Home, dinner was 99 chicken and baked beans. Domino loves chicken, but it's hard to eat dinner with a cat sitting up on the arm of your chair.

Watched another episode of The Mentalist. Guest star was Serenity & V heart throb Morena Baccarin. Yum.

Channel surfed between the news and the Oscars. Was disgusted with the talking heads interviews and waited until the memorial segment to tune in for real. Which also gave me the 4 top "bests". My thoughts on those are emblazoned in an earlier post.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work (10 am team meeting)
BASFA with auction items.

Tuesday was another day in the paradise known as Alviso. They were supposed to put new carpet on the back stairs Monday, but someone did not get the memo. This is the stairway I use to get to my cube, and it is horribly depressing - I don't think they have cleaned it since the building was built 10 years ago. Some of the plastic edge strips have come off completely, two repaired with gaffer's tape at least five years ago. Not very facile facilities sent email today that they would do the work Friday. Big whoop.

I brought a DAC to work, but did not bring an optical audio cable to go with it. Of course nobody at work had one - I have learned to never expect routine equipment to be available without a lengthy ordering process. You would think this was some mega-company, not a peewee outfit of <900. My tech lead was okay with waiting till I could bring one from home the next day.

Was assigned a new suite of tests, the kind which takes hours of thumb twiddling to do. Got maybe half a dozen done Tuesday.

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After work I did remember to go to City Lights, and saw a reader's theater version of a locally-written new play called Pastoral Paranoia. It's a story about the dumb younger brother who grows up to be a drug lord in his parents' farmhouse. Parents are still there, Dad is seriously senile, Mom is a total twit, thinks the boys are still children and that soaps are real life. Drug king has his two very large cousins as henchmen. The plot thickens when his older sister shows up, fleeing her scumbag husband. And then again when his big brother the jock-turned-MBA brings home his very pregnant ditzy new very young not-white wife, expecting to live there. Big sister and big brother definitely have the hots for each other. One big dysfunctional family reunited.

The cast was well suited to their roles, except maybe the ditzy pregnant wife, but I'm not sure if it was because she didn't fit the part or the part was not fleshed out enough to get a handle on. Ruth E. Stein, whom I admired as the mother in Nine, which is also playing at City Lights, was amazing, and could not be more different from her other Mom role. After the show, the playwright and director joined the cast onstage for an audience participation discussion session. I hope they take this to a staged reading - I don't think it is ready for a full production yet, it needs a run with costumes and action to really get a feel.

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Stayed up too late again, mostly trying to get the renovationsf pocket guide to load on my android phone. They need more server resources. So far I have found at least 5 things of interest in every time slot, and I'm only up to noon on Thursday.

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Today I brought the optical cable and started the day using it to test. Found one surprise, which became a bug. And then I was asked to put together a test matrix for testing optical audio because we don't have one.

Spent most of the day fighting with the latest update - the machine kept timing out. My lead had forgotten to give me the changes to the update script.

Tried to do the first of the time-sucking tests, but instead found a bug which prevented finishing. Got out of there at 6, knowing it will be there in the morning.

While I was in the thumb-twiddling part, I did some research which had been in the back of my mind. Whatever happened to Dave, the attorney in Omak who had been in the Peace Corps in Thailand, and when he heard I was about to go do that, invited me to his home for dinner and a slide show of his Thailand PC days. At the time he was married to a French woman with the delicious name of Mignon. My research popped up a few things, the best was his retirement party last January. After being public defender for the Colville indian tribe (a big chunk of Omak is on the reservation) he became superior court judge, and stayed in that post for 32 years. I knew years ago he had got that job, but figured he was too good to settle for being a rural county justice. Also found out he and Mignon had a daughter who recently graduated from that ivy legue school in RI. And that he is now married to someone named Vicky, and Mignon teaches art in and around Omak. He was in Thai PC group 21, I was in group 51.

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I wanted to make going-away cards for the team (all 8 of them) and since I won't have time tomorrow what with YOTB rehearsals, I did those tonight. Making greeting cards is always a challenge for me. I am a spacial moron. You know that SAT test section where they fold a piece of paper, poke a hole in it, and ask where the holes will be when they unfold the paper? It's multiple choice. I got fewer right than if I had just chosen answers at random.

But after a lot of fiddling, I got all eight cards and envelopes printed, folded and stuffed. Even m ore amazing is I did not waste any card stock or envelopes. Yay me.

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Plans for tomorrow:
Work
YOTB
 

The weather was glorious all day, but I did not get to see much of it from 1 till 4:30. Not that I would have enjoyed it much with a Dayquil buzz on and a stuffed up head.

I spent the afternoon at the home of a couple of friends, both of them lovely people and fairly tech savvy from a user's perspective, setting up their new wireless router (they did not have one before), installing a wireless card in their downstairs PC and helping set up their new PC so it could "easy transfer" data from their old PC.

It was a mitigated success.
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Rewarded myself with a mocha frapp at Starbucks, and met Janice there for a chat. Janice introduced me to the friends with the new PC.

Home, Tom Ka Gai and dim sum for dinner. Fudgesickle for dessert.

Not feeling up to making pickles. Will hit the sack early, maybe make pickles tomorrow afternoon. BASFA will depend on how this cold goes, and whether Moto really calls me for an 8 am Tuesday interview.

Spent most of today with food. Yesterday I bought way too much of it, and as a part of being in denial about that set out a glass baking pan, dumped in most of a bottle of sherry and slid in the eight steaks to marinate overnight on the kitchen counter. This morning I peeked into the freezer and saw I was wasting a lot of space thanks to where I usually put the ice trays, and after some stunning feats of Pythagorean prestidigitation, aided by the intelligent application of zip-lock freezer bags, I was able to fit half the marinated steaks into the freezer.

One of the other steaks I pan fried for lunch, and the rest were cut up into bite-sized pieces and thrown into the crock pot along with coconut milk, straw mushrooms, bamboo shoots, water chestnuts, baby corn and a tablespoon of Thai green curry paste. Some of that will be dinner when I am done writing this.

Watched some of the BC-Maryland football game, mostly because my nephew is an Terps alum and his parental units are fans. Unfortunately they snatched defeat from the very jaws of victory by running it up the middle on their final 4th down of the game. May as well just wave the white flag if you're going to do that against anyone except the Detroit Lions.

During the curry prep my electric can opener let out a painful-sounding shriek and refused to open any more cans, electric or otherwise. So I hopped into the car and went to BB&B for a replacement, but got sidetracked for about an hour at Best Buy next door. They had a bunch of netbooks on sale, all for around $350-400, all with more oomph than either my old Asus Eee PC or my laptop, both of which cost significantly more. There was a really sweet Nokia "Booklet" which AT&T was selling - it has 3G built in, and for a mere $299.999999 plus a 2-year contract for data service, it could have been mine. List price on this puppy is $600. The data plan is $60/month so by the end of the year the data plan alone would be $120 more than the value of the netbook., No thanks. They had a Gateway and an HP which were almost comparable (no 3G) for $350 each.

Finally left and bought the can opener next door, came home and did some research, found Verizon had a similar deal on an HP netbook, $199 instead of $299, but the same $60 data plan locked in for two years. After some searching I found the HP which I saw at Best Buy, but with a better wireless card and bigger hard drive for the same price, and ordered it.

In other news, Domino is not responding to the hyperthyroid meds, and for what a year's supply costs she can get "cured" by irradiated iodine therapy, so I got a reference from Dr. farmount for a clinic called Radiocat (love it!) which has a branch in San Mateo. They don't work weekends, so I left a message on their machine somewhere in EST land. Will try to remember to try then early Monday morning. The goal is to have her back home well before the Xmas break so I don't have to worry about her when I'm gone.

Now I'm hungry. Dinner calls.