Writing Wrongs

Last things first. I went out after work and sat by the smaller pool, which still had some sun, and tried zyzyly's macro eye photography trick, but it was mostly a fail. My eyelashes are too long. And my eyes don't seem to open all the way. I did get a better idea of the ugliness which is the Pterygium in my right eye. I'll need to try again with the sun higher in the sky, I think.

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Work started with the usual team meeting, but there was not that much to talk about. Boss is getting geared up for his vacation, which starts a week from tomorrow. He told me after the meeting that his son's going into the monkhood may become a wedding. The date keeps changing. We have a 1-on-1 meeting Wednesday, and I'll get his Thailand phone number and some more clues about where his house is. And maybe when to visit.

Work was mostly proofreading the release notes for the two products going out the door this week. One of my team came over to have me try to reproduce a bug he found, and it was a very fun one. It was from one of those "make sure file names can contain any symbol on the keyboard" tests.

Lunchtime I went to the PO, shipped back the broken VCR, and sent a box each to my nephew and his mom. Chicon7 T-shirts. I won't be there but my photos will. Then Andy's BBQ for beef rib lunch. I must stop doing that. The ribs are low quality, not much meat on them, and they overcook them. And service is unpredictable. My waitress dropped off my check and went on break. :-(

Just at quitting time my tummy erupted, and I filled the restroom with loud noises. Decided this was not something I needed to do at BASFA.

Home after work, spent some time on the patio petting Domino, heated up the doggie bag of ribs and ate that while watching an old Star Trek episode on Amazon Prime. Also fired up the PC and downloaded the bit of Ghostbusters II I Tivoed the other night. After I write this I'll make a clip of the funny overlay. Waiting at the door for me was the box of 10 16GB Class 10 SDHC cards. Eventually I ought to number them and find a pouch for them.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Starbucks?
Some shopping. I'm out of ice cream. And rubber bands.

So sleepy last night, I went to bed at 11, right after transporting a load of cat poop from the bedroom to the litterbox on the other side of the apartment. Cat is now permanently banned from bedroom. No more Mr. Nice Guy. She has two litterboxes, there's no excuse. Serious thoughts of young people in the orient for her.

Could not get to sleep, despite serious sleep deprivation after a busy day.

Saturday started with a return of the gastrointestinal problem. Lactose intolerance is not the issue. I think what had cleared it up the last time was taking 4 Immodium the day before my doctor's appointment. It just took a day to kick in. LactAid did not help. That made me 5 minutes late for the photo shoot, and I was pissed that they were not at the designated meeting spot. Usually this group leader waits for up to 15 minutes for everyone who paid up to show up. Phoned him, they had gone over to Rengstorff House, which is a great shooting venue, and were waiting for the model to get dressed. Very photogenic model, not real good at posing without direction, but a killer body and gorgeous eyes & hair. I was using the $300 flash on the camera for fill, but when I got the photos uploaded to the PC it was clear this did not work. Good thing I have PhotoShop. There's a widget called "lighten shadows" and another called "midtones brighter" which fix that quickly and seamlessly.

Only 4 photogs, so lots of shooting time (I took about 215 pix). Beautiful weather just kept getting more beautiful. For shooting I would have preferred high cloud overcast, but sunshine is okay too.

Starving after, went to Lakeside Cafe for lunch. It was packed (lots of people there whose kids were taking boating/sailboarding lessons). Service was slow but that's okay, I had my Kindle and started reading Hugo nominee Jar Jar Biggs Must Die. It's basically a compilation of one reviewer's sci-fi film reviews, starting with an extremely defensive forward about how sci-fi is not crap, and how horrible it is that the makers of most classic sci-fi films feel they have to pretend it's another genre to not be labeled as crap.

They slightly carbonized the fish part of fish and chips, and the fries were undersized. The clam chowder was great, I should have ordered a bowl instead of a cup.

Home after a restroom stop, tried to take a nap but Domino decided to climb up on top my chest, lie down and go to sleep there. For an hour.

Up at 4 pm to meet Janice for coffee not far from where the photo shoot was. She had stories to tell about the Cruise From Heck. I thought she had been on a cruise before, but apparently not, and she discovered she hated cruises. Nothing to do. And more important, no single black men. And she made the mistake of sharing a cabin with her drop-dead-gorgeous nurse friend/neighbor/AA sponsee and friend's mother, which meant being on the couch. And I told her about auditions, and work and roller derby.

It was only a little after 7, and I was wanting goat and sheep cheeses, so I headed over to The Milk Pail, which stocks my favorites, but they were closed and hosing down the parking lot. On to Piazzi's market, where I spent $57 on cheeses and Scharffen-Berger dark chocolate.

Home, there was just enough light left to tie-wrap the part of the cat fence I had put up last week, and put up the other three sections enough to hold them in place. Will secure the new sections more today. Last night was I was using the 14" ties, which worked way better than trying to daisy chain a pair of 7" ones. Less visible from the outside, too. Today will be the 7" ties on the smaller vertical bars. And then I'll let Domino test it.

Went onto Kaiser's web site looking for travel vaccination info, and it took about 15 minutes to find it. Looking at the list of vaccination they have on file for me, everything is out of date, nothing since 1995 except 7-year Td in 2005.. I thought that was a mistake, since I'd been to Thailand in 2005 and 2008, but looking at my health card, the last item was just one shot - Td (tetanus & diphtheria) in 2005. I'll call the immunizations clinic tomorrow and make an appointment.

So far this morning I set up autopay on all my credit cards to pay the minimums, just to cover me from forgetting. I generally pay off the cards which have finance charges, and keep the balances of the 0% cards reasonable, but I'll be gone for almost a month. Also ordered a better GPS unit for the camera, the one I bought the new cable for would not stay connected - something wrong with the proprietary slot on the unit. They should have a standard USB slot, but they went one-off. I will send this one in for repair, but it won't get back to me before I go on vacation.

Moved my only surviving VCR into the computer room, only to find it does not have S-Video, and my capture card has only cable and S-video inputs. Silly me, I should be able to daisy chain the cable through the VCR. Problem solved.

Other plans for today are to process the photo shoot pictures and post the best ones, watermarked, on Flickr, make a modem ringtone, maybe re-capture some of my old theater clips and put higher resolution ones on the web site. Maybe enjoy the sunshine.

Yesterday's Gone by the Beatles always sounded like "Yesterday's Gun" to me and big sister. We made up lots of alternative lyrics, none of which can I remember mumble mumble years later.

So, work was productive once I finally got there. Next stop: Aaron's art & framing, chatted with the guy who does photo mounting and what I want to have done for Worldcon is amazingly affordable, and can be done in less than a week. The plan is 20 12x18 prints, which ought to fit on two 4'x6' panels in the art show. I have enough prints to do that right now, but really want to wait till I get back from Thailand, since I usually get good fantasy-friendly photos there (temple dragons & demons, etc.).  One less thing to worry about. Now I have to send in my application and $$.

Next door is Trader Joe's, and on the lactose-free shopping list was sardines. The Kaiser hint list said that without dairy products, calcium is an issue, which can be solved with the intelligent application of sardines (or any fish which have edible bones). Makes sense, and I love sardines, and so does Domino. TJ's layout is such that one person with a hand basket can block an aisle, so it took a long time to even find the nook where sardines were hidden. Before I found it I found corn, sourdough whole wheat bread, onion bagels, "this is not a tub of cream cheese" non-dairy spread (which I did not buy but was amused by), frozen ready-to-eat falafel and frozen egg rolls. In he sardine aisle was also canned kippers, so I got some of those too. Then it was my turn to block traffic, looking for milk-free chocolate which is in the kiosks next to the cash registers. It took a lot of reading at four kiosks before I found something which didn't look like it would taste like chalk.

On the way home the clock was seriously ticking because I wanted to get to Santa Clara to see The Nerd but needed to put away the frozen food first. Got to the theater with 15 minutes to spare, and it being Thursday and not a murder mystery, there were plenty of seats. My review is locked, so for the rest of you, it needs a lot of work. And it is not about a nerd, it is about an annoying person. There is nothing nerdy about the show. I'd say wait till closing weekend to see it, and don't be ashamed to go home at intermission. The final 3 minutes wrap things up well, but are also a big WTF. I did not stick around after to thank the cast.

Home, starving. Put on a pot of water, shucked two corn cobs, got out the cleaver and cut them in half, plopped them into the water and set the timer. Did some stuff on the PC, then dinner was the 4 pieces of corn with margarine, a can of sardines, and a huge spoonful of chunky peanut butter for dessert.

Work was mostly spent on the continuing saga of this week's pet bug. While showing the automation guy the steps to test it, we found it was not working as I thought it was, some video streams did and some didn't. Very puzzling. Spent some time with the engineer, doing the whole matrix grid thing. More later when two new builds are released to QA.

Lunch was at the Valley Plaza Cafe, which is the hotel restaurant for the Embassy Suites hotel. They have had a sign up for a couple of months with their hours, they are almost next door to Sizzler and next door to the old Peppermill (which is trying very hard to be Axis night club) so I pass by twice a day at least.

I had the braised beef rib (singular) which is served on a pile of lovely broad egg noodles. There was also a delicious very sour bread kind of like focacia but better. The beef and whatever they braised it with was excellent. The noodles looked great but were way too salty. I had the opera cake for dessert - $7 for $2 worth of cake. Iced tea was a little bitter, and they had no  sweeteners on the table. All in all a good place to try other items, but skip dessert and go with a not-tea beverage.

Home, took out the garbage, relaxed a bit, took my BP (it was actually a little low, yay!) then went to the local naked women place and enjoyed watching two of my favorite pole dancers. We're talking high quality routines similar to aerial dancing, not some sleazy bump and grind.

Home, smoked turkey leg and steamed veggies for dinner. Chocolate ice cream, sliced banana, macadamias and whipped cream for dessert.

A couple of days ago, a calendar I sent to a friend in Japan in November was returned marked "unknown number". Odd, because at the time it was the address of my friend's parents, well out of the tsunami area. I was surprised it took so long until I saw it was sent by slow boat, and probably returned by slower boat. I asked for her current address, and she replied with one in Tokyo, different from her pre-tsunami Tokyo address. I have the calendar ready to send again, this time it goes air mail.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Tempted to go to the SJ First Friday Art walk.

Had a low blood sugar episode at 3:30 am which was fixed with the intelligent application of two scoops of thin mint cookie ice cream and an episode of The Twilight Zone. These always drain me for hours, even though I get back to sleep. I was up at 9:30, and after taking drugs and shooting up I performed the annual
biting off of the head of the hollow chocolate easter bunny. It is truly awful milk chocolate (could not find dark except for solid bunnies), so the rest will find itself melted down for banana dipping or ice cream topping.

Put the halter on Domino again, and tried to lead her to the patio, but she refused to go anywhere except behind the recliner. I took the leash off but left the halter on, put my shoes on my feet and took my Kindle out to the pool and tried to relax in the sun and read. It worked fine until a mommy with a squealing child went into the pool. The kid was having fun, but at 10,000 Hz and rock star decibels.

I went back to my patio and read some more. When I went inside, Domino was curled into a little ball inside the top of her tree. She did not wish to come out.

Locked up the patio and grabbed the copy of Ghost I'd bought at Fry's and the too-small SSD and their respective receipts. IHOP was on the way, and it was lunchtime. Late lunchtime. It turned out to be a 20 minute wait for a table, but service was fast, and the food was okay. Next stop was going to be Microcenter, but they were closed,  so I parked and had a mocha at Starbucks, sitting outside until the sun started to burn my arm. Went inside thinking to use the bathroom, get an iced tea and sit inside and write this, but it was a long wait for the former, and while I was in line for the latter I started feeling woozy so I bailed and went home. Domino was still in her tree, but when I opened the fridge door she was there. I took off the halter, which she had half gotten out of by herself. Vegged in the recliner, after a lot of walking back and forth across my lap and the coffee table, Domino settled on the left arm of the recliner. I had finished Water For Elephants at Starbucks, so I read the two articles after the book. One was the author's afterword, and the other was an old interview by Powell's.

I don't really like to hear authors talk about how they wrote a book, the way I don't like to hear an athlete say how he/she won that race, scored that goal, caught that javelin; or how an actor researched that character, found that motivation, murdered seven women with a scalpel to really be "in the moment" for that part. For me the book, the sports contest, the theater/movie performance stands alone.

After reading the afterword, with Domino still parked on the recliner arm, I went back out onto the patio, leaving the screen door open enough so Domino could come out if she wanted to. Instead, a few minutes after I was on a patio chair, she got off the arm and curled up onto the seat of the recliner. Some cats...

Still not feeling 100% after finishing the Kindle book, I pulled three pieces of whole grain & nut bread out of the freezer and toasted them in the oven. Slathered them with margarine, and filled a glass with ice cubes and seltzer. Sat down at the PC and wrote this.

The toast & seltzer helped.

It's still early. The sun is shining but the wind has picked up again. Maybe I'll go out again, maybe not. Next up on the Kindle is Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work. 10 am team meeting, 11 am engineering meeting
Ophthalmology appt at 3:30 (leave by 2:30 to have my eyes dilated in time)
I won't be able to see well enough to read for a few hours, probably will go home and sit in the dark. Costco is on the way home, and I'm out of cheese.

Went to the local Irish pub (one of four, actually, on Murphy Ave) Fibber McGee's, since it was the only one with corned beef on the menu. Nice place, but it got stuffy when more warm bodies invaded. Their corned beef and cabbage was the opposite of Coco's. Instead of well-cooked beef with too much fat and gristle, it was corned beef jerky. Way too salty, hard, dry and took forever to chew.

I ordered:

Corned beef and cabbage
A side of salad
A side of garlic bread
Soda water

After 15 minutes some hard-toasted baguette with butter on it appeared. There was no discernible garlic.
Another 5 minutes and the main dish arrived
Another 5 and a huge salad was there
another 5 and the soda water came.

The serving of corned beef was three generous slices, with not an ounce of fat on them. I needed the point of the knife to cut it. It took forever to chew. They had no horseradish sauce.  I finished one piece after half an hour. There was 1/4 head of cabbage, about 3/4 of it was stem. Well boiled , but not well enough to eat the core. The "cooked vegetables" was raw carrots. The potatoes were three small red spuds, not a real Idaho baked potato.  The salad was just too daunting to even touch. The soda water they at least got right.

It was a good half hour from the time I was done till the time I was able to flag down my server, who was trying to cope with the three pushed-together tables in front of me which had a constantly changing cast of characters, and eventually spread to two more nearby tables.

This gave me time to look around the room and see what others were eating. The kitchen was serving more pizza than anything else. I am unfamiliar with the history of Irish pizza, but I suspect there is a tie-in with beer.

Took the last two slabs of beef home. They are soaking in hot jasmine tea. Perhaps that will help desalinize them, and maybe tenderize them enough to throw into the food processor and make chipped corned beef for omelets this weekend.

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Started the day going to Kaiser for the quarterly fasting blood/urine test. It was a half hour wait. Odd for a Thursday. Maybe the Ides of March draws out the blood lust. Or something. The phlebotomist let the needle slip out before she had drawn the third vial of blood, and it looked like another one would have to bleed me from the other arm, but other one just hijacked part of the previous sample.Apparently there was plenty. The results have come back for everything except the one I am concerned about - A1C. The liver test has me in a bit of a panic, it is well over the max number. Very disturbing to see what could be cirrhosis onset when I don't drink or do drugs. Diabetes side effect no doubt. But yikes.  

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Work was amusing. First thing in the morning the engineer whose feature request I had re-opened closed it again, saying the feature request actually had nothing to do with what I had been testing. Long story short, his definition of "gratuitous",  in the context of an internet protocol packet, is not what mine is. Mine comes from our packet capture software. Anyhow, I re-configured for what he said he had built, and everything worked the way he described. I wish this had been in the specifications. After I closed the request, including my step by step test procedure, the project manager suggested a change in the design of the feature. Sigh. He's 100% correct, but it means I will have to write at least two more test cases and test them. :-(

Ducked out to the denture clinic and had a little bit more shaved off the top. I think this time he got it all. Went for lunch close by at Crema Coffee, which makes the best mint iced tea and croissant sandwiches, fired up the netbook and installed the VPN software and tried to run a couple of tests, but could not figure out how to make our GUI fit in the 3/4-depth netbook display. Back at work I think I figured it out. But now I am thinking I may want to take the work laptop with me when I'm planning on working from a coffee shop. Or get a laptop. As convenient as the netboook is, the shortened display can be annoying.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
TBA

Up with the alarm, and on the computer in minutes, to phone Scottrade so they can unlock my account. It seems that after I had established my online accounts they changed the rules and implemented a "secret questions" scheme where you have to choose from a list of questions, and give answers to 5 of them. The first time you log in on a different computer, it is supposed to randomly pluck from these 5 q's and if you get it wrong twice, you're toast. On every effing computer you may use. Since I had never set up my questions, it threw the first two at me, which were:

Who was your first boss?
Who is your favorite athlete?

I have no idea who my first boss was. My first job was filling in for my high school photography teacher for the month between the start of high school and when I had to leave for college. I suppose the principal was my boss, but maybe not because I was actually paid by the school district under a special "paraprofessional" program.

I have no favorite athlete. A long time ago I would have said Warren Spahn, who was not only a great pitcher, but also had just about the best batting average (including 35 career homers) of any pitcher. But I'm not much of a baseball fan anymore. In college I may have picked Sonny Sixkiller, except he did some truly stupid things after his senior football season which kept him out of the NFL. , There are just too many great athletes in so many sports to have to choose between them.

Luckily, they had about 30 secret questions to choose from, and I found four which were easy to remember and none of my friends would know, plus one which was a little tricky to guess but some of my friends may know. And then I needed to do the same for my IRA account.

Lately I have been selling off loser stocks from my IRA and keeping them in the cash account. I'm old enough to pull from my IRA penalty-free, and I may decide to do that to help pay for Pumpkin's final bills.

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Work. Pretty light in the morning. Took a late lunch time because the gang decided to go to the mall, which is 45 minutes RT, and they chose a place which is meh. So I bailed. It was time to go to Kaiser and try to get a free sharps container (I have a prescription) and a drug which is sometimes special-order. And I needed enteric aspirin and multi-vitamins. Turns out they don't give away the sharps containers, they are OTC for about $3.50. And I waited 20 minutes for them to tell me they had to special order the drug, so I'll have to come back next week for that.

Hoped to go to Gombei for lunch, but all the restaurants in that shopping plaza close at 2. Plan B was Starbucks in the corner of the plaza, but there are only 4 tables and they had about 30 people around them.

Stopped in at Vesuvius instead, thinking I had not been there before. As soon as I walked in I remembered I had been, similar circumstances - late lunch - and I was the only customer. Paid too much for their baked rigatoni special, which had a single pale meatball on top. It was a big portion, tasted good enough to box up and take home.

Afternoon at work was a summer festival. I volunteered to verify that a bug was fixed which required doing what I like best, analyzing the actual video quality of a stream playing over the network. ( cut for geek )

Neither of us is sure this would not happen at a customer site. We decided to pursue it further next week, mostly because the people we needed to talk to about it were all busy and/or getting ready to go home.

 I hung around for another hour, did my weekly retort, and went straight home.

The Samsung 3D Blu-ray player was at the door. After petting the cat, getting the mail and taking my coat off, I set it up in the bedroom. Connected it to the network, looked at the internet content menu, and no Amazon video. Hulu, Netflix, Vudu and several others. So I went into the support menu and found there was an update ready. I ran that, and after it installed it also cranked a while in the content menu, deleting some things and adding others. Still no Amazon.

I had ordered this thing on Amazon, I could have sworn I ordered it from their Amazon streaming video products page. But looking again, I see they don't have any Samsung devices listed there.

So I filled out an RMA form, and it will go back tomorrow. In its place I ordered an LG, which was $20 less. Which is about what they will ding me for returning the Samsung.

Time for dinner.

Plans for tomorrow:
9 am-ish, if the weather is non-rainy, NASA Ames for the LUNAR model rocket launch.
8 pm Finain's Rainbow closing night at SBMT in Saratoga. Way too many friends are in or around this show.

Got to work before 9, did a couple of video captures but then couldn't do anything with them because the lab was full and someone from engineering had remote-desktopped to the machine I needed to use, which locked me out of it. I wasn't able to do any useful work till 5:30.

Went to lunch with next door neighbor, a place that serves soul food. Big portions, reasonable prices. Bad place to go on a Friday, some company decided to take a whole department there.  Their fried chicken was soggy.

Worked almost till 7, finally got onto the machine I needed but all the files I captured errored out. The last time the tests were run they were failed because of this, but the bug report said it had been fixed month ago.

Late in the afternoon the boss deleted the Monday meeting from our calendars. It would have been nice to know in advance that MLK day was a day off. No more days off until Memorial Day. I'd rather have President's Day. I thought about going to Ardenwood Farms on Monday to see the monarch butterflies, but they are closed Mondays.

Home after work, changed the litterboxes, fed the cats and myself. In the background I am copying some video files from a friend's antarctic trip so we can make a DVD. She also shot about 10 minutes on the camcorder, which I slurped up last week.

The cold is about 90% gone. I've put all the drugs away except the amoxillan.

Plans for tomorrow:
Manicure, drop off 2012 calendar
Pet club for cat food & litter refills.
Car wash
Football

I'm a notch better. Less coughing, less zombie-ness. Woke up every hour last night, did my morning stuff a little early and then went back to bed. I don't have to be at work till 10 which means 9:30 is a reasonable wake up time. Mind you, I like to get to work earlier so I can leave earlier.

Did a lot of complex testing, and actually found a bug in one of our test tools. Luckily we have several for double-checking. It looks like the rest of the week will be spent in the lab, since the tool I need most is licensed per machine, and all those machines are in the lab.

Denny's for lunch. Service was very slow. Making it through a lumberjack slam took a while also.

Home, the 2 qt Revere Ware pot and tea kettle were at the door. I was expecting the curtains too, but was not surprised they weren't there. Put on the kettle, fed the cats, and the door bell rang - it was Fedex with the curtains.

They are not quite the material I thought I was ordering, but they are close enough. The color is spot on. Blackout lining - check. The hardware they included was for a pleated curtain, which this is not, hung from a drawstring mount, which I won't be using. On second thought, it may work fine with the rings which are on the curtain rod. I just need another package of those. There's a Lowe's not far from work.

Everything stays in the box till I'm ready to do the deed. I'll also put up the door curtain at the same time.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
???

The new pain killer + narcotic cough medicine were way too strong in all the wrong ways. The pain killer dulled my thinking, but only lowered the pain in my side by about 25%. Which allowed the long-time arthritis pain in my knee to come to the fore again. The cough medicine did not stop me from coughing, but it also fogged my brain. My last dose of these was 6 am, it was 11 hours before my head was clear again.

The allergy and antibiotic pills seem to be doing their jobs, though.

Watched both playoff games, but somehow don't remember much. **

Was feeling well enough to meet Janice @ Starbucks at 6. The Starbucks app says it is open till 8 Sundays, but the sign on the door says 6:30. They kicked us all out at 6:20, rudely, claiming there was a district staff meeting.

Stopped at the store to get Ben Gay-like generic goop for my side. Also got a pizza and donut, which was dinner. 

**Denver won, thanks to Tim Tebow becoming a one-man offense, and badly injured Roeth???berger refusing to set his ego aside and let the backup QB win the game for the Steelers. Tebow seems to have learned the important lesson that it is not appropriate to praise Jesus every time he opens his mouth to answer a reporter's question. Maybe he has been reminded that there are Christians on the other teams too.

The cough syrup I took an hour ago is getting a grip on my brain, so I'll end here, feed the cats and go to bed.