Writing Wrongs

As planned Saturday was mostly about going through all the photos I had taken since the last Worldcon, and choosing 20 for the upcoming one. It took almost all day. There were patio breaks (lovely weather, not much of a view) with Domino, who has started to camp out there if I leave the door open. Now that it's cat-proofed I'm fine with that. In the mornings she finds a spot in the sun and splays out on the concrete, other times she either sits on her chair (it's a standard patio chair with a generic cushion) or on my chair (same kind of chair but the cushions are Chinese silk and there are 2 of them).

First pass was about 30 pix. I cut some good ones which I'd used before, and then a few which had no sci-fi appeal. That got me down to 20, but I remembered I wanted to have one of my Unwoman photos in the set, so I picked one and she gave me permission to use it, so it took the place of a not quite as good macabre make-up photo of one of my roller girl friends. Great make-up, less than great lighting job. And there was another tough decision to oust one of my model rocket favorites for a still life from Kanchanaburi. Thirteen of my best Thailand shots did not make the cut. They may not all make the 2013 calendar either.

That's one difference between hand-made art and photography. I can produce hundreds of gallery-worthy images a day.

Now I need to fill in the bid sheets and labels. Well, not now, but soon.

Next chore was to sign each photo using a macro I'd created in Photoshop last month. It's pretty nifty - I have a signature scan in cobalt blue which was sized to be like an artist's signature on my standard Nikon 12.3 megapixel JPGs, and the macro takes that, finds the right-hand margin and then the bottom margin and slaps the signature in the lower right, then merges it with the photo and saves the picture. It only takes about 15 minutes for 20 photos.

I had tried logging into Costco.com, but got a 500-level error which said the site was down for maintenance. It stayed that way all day and night, so uploading and printing would have to wait.

Part of the plan was to drink soda water with fresh-squeezed lime while I was doing this, but my soda siphon leaked all over the fridge, twice - the second time with a replacement tube - so that didn't happen.

After the photo project was as done as it could be without costco.com, I drove to Bevmo to buy a replacement siphon. They don't have any, they only have the cartridges. Boo. Hiss. There's a massage place next door which I had never tried, so I tried it. Very poor massage. She didn't know what she was doing. It didn't hurt so I didn't complain.

Home, ordered a siphon online (two, actually), watched some Olympics on Tivo. The only way to watch, because the commercials are repetitive and mostly stupid, and so are the announcers. Way too much intro crap, and they bundle events in the most bizarre way. They may show several hours of cycling in the same segment as a short burst of gymnastics. Swimming gets decent coverage, and there was some boxing which was contiguous, but last night one chunk was 11 hours, and Tivo can't FF that fast.

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Slept well, almost slept in this morning. I tried Costco on the cell phone, and Google showed it was working. It needed the www. They really need to change the system down message on the costco.com site to a redirect. Anyhow, that let me upload and order prints. They should be done tomorrow afternoon.

Also printed out the music & script for Anything Goes and put that in a folder.

Noon-ish, put the baritone in the car and drove to the park for the monthly YOTB concert. The new guy showed up, and so did our student, so we had a record 6 baritones. Also 4 tubas, and two more trumpets than ever before.  It was an easy concert for us, he chose music which was not lip-splitting.

From there to Fedex/Kinko's, where I bought a 3-ring binder and dividers and used their hole punch on the script & music. Then home for some Domino time and more Olympics.

6-ish, off to rehearsals. I was only half an hour early, but no one else showed up for 15 minutes. My friend David, another bass, who had performed in a matinee at Foothill that afternoon. People mostly arrived right on time or a few minutes late.  It was not very hard music, though some of the bass line is WTF. I hate it when it jumps all over the place, bass lines ought to stay toward the bottom of the staff. The final note in the show is kind of a WTF, almost everyone is singing the same note. Ought to end in thrilling mind-blowing 12-part harmony.

It was good to spend the day being musical.

Home, dinner, watched some Muay Thai instead of Olympics.

Voted for the Hugos. The only one I felt strongly about is the short story, and I'm 90% certain my choice will not win, due to the overwhelming popularity of one of the other entrants, whose entry IMHO was either the worst short story ever, or a brilliant "best related work" which probably would not have fared well against Jar Jar Binks Must Die.

As a fan of irony and recursive humor, I sincerely hope johnnyeponymous wins for the video of his 2011 Hugo acceptance speech melt-down. I also hope Drink Tank wins again because the sample submitted was one in which many of my photos were used as fillers, and I had an article in it too, which would make me something like 11/300th of a Hugo winner.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Costco: P/U prints, get gas, see if they can refill Epson inkjet cartridges. Otherwise buy a set.
Aaron's - leave the prints for mounting.

And Franz Kafka's too.

I was up and out early, work started as what should have been a simple integration between a GUI script suite I'd written and a tcl script the automation guy wrote, but it ended up taking all day. The most frustrating part is one of the Linux commands which was crucial to the test does not work the same way in the background as it does when it is run manually. I finally guessed a work-around. So now we have two high-priority tests automated, which apparently adds brownie points both to me and to automation guy.

Now he wants me to do more automation, but I don't know what to automate. Looking for likely victims could be the rest of the week's project.

We went to Sushi Blvd together for lunch. Big, generous, delicious bento boxes with your choice of two main dishes, plus miso soup, soy beans, tempura, salad with wasabi dressing, rice and gyoza. Cute waitresses too.

After work was a shopping run. Vitamins C and D, beta carotene, Immodium and small paper plates at Rite Aid. Cookie sheets and insect repellent towelettes at SavMart. Wallet and windows at Penny's. Home, a wallet I'd ordered online but was none too sure about arrived. Turns out fully loaded the Penny's wallet won't close without bending things, but the online wallet was okay. Neither was designed for the amount of $1's I have at the moment (20+) and it will only get moreso when I add the Thai bills.

Canceled the order on Amazon for an SD card wallet, because it changed from being scheduled for July 3 delivery to end of the month. Apparently it was from a shell company sourcing their stuff from Hong Kong.  I'll see if Fry's has something.

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Speaking ill of the dead department:
Andy Griffith, a cornerstone of my childhood, passed away today, and many people have posted clips of his works. I was never impressed by his acting, he always played a Southern yokel, which is what he was IRL as well. He did make sure his TV show was G-rated, and there was no foul language. Some folks have pointed me to his first movie, Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd, as a masterpiece of acting. The studios at the time were plugging him as the next Brando. Not hardly. He played himself as a country singer who gets too famous, says crazy things and gets a huge ego. He shouts a lot. But even surrounded by a stellar cast (Tony Franciosa, Patricia Neal, Lee Remick, Walter Matthau) he didn't seem to pick up any real acting skills. It's a similar character to Ernest Borgnine's Oscar-winning Marty, but there's no comparison. Though he was married to his first wife for 23 years, and his third wife for 29, the one in the middle was shades of his character in "A Face" - a stunning younger actress marrying him for money and fame. That only lasted 8 years.

Perhaps the best thing I can say about him is he started Ron Howard's career off right, and gave a much-deserved boost to that of Jim Nabors. 

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Plans for tomorrow:
10:30 am downbeat for the Los Altos 4th celebration with Ye Olde Towne Band providing the patriotic music. We should be done by noon.
Then I think I'll go see Brave.
Not sure what I'll do for fireworks. If anything.

Early this morning, long after I had told myself to go to bed, I did one last search through Seagate's forums and found someone asking exactly my question - how to have two of their Goflex-Home drives on one network. A tech support person answered that the drives were designed to be unique on the network, and support any number of computers. And then gave some instructions of how to fool two drives to each talk to a different computer on the network. Stupid support person didn't see that if one could set up two drives on one network, then his claim that one computer could not use both is bogus.

So I did the simple thing he suggested - after getting addresses assigned by the router, set the drives to no use DHCP anymore, and hard-code those addresses into the drive. Wasy, since each drive has a browser GUI which one gets to just by calling out the IP address. Piece. Of. Cake.

I copied my photos folder to the new drive, standard Windoze dragon drop, and it said at first it would take 21 hours, but when Win7 realize this was a 1GB connection, it change to 6 hours. That was at 2 am. When I checked at 7:30 am, it needed me to click something and after that it was done in 5 minutes. 500GB. Yay!  I think I'll also send it my old Howard directory, which has a lot of my old dox & spreadsheets.

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Work was almost solid writing automation for that new feature. It was a lot more unique procedures than I had expected, but it was done by about 5. Big boss' staff meeting at 3 helped pass the time. It was almost a total waste of time, he had nothing new to tell us.

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Home, picked up a package (I was expecting the VCR) which was the GPS for the camera, the top-of-the-line model, with a nice personal note from their saleslady thanking me for letting her send the still-in-beta (till Saturday) version, with just a quick reference sheet for documentation, and no wireless remote (both of which will come after I'm back from vacation). It's a lovely piece of gear, about the size as a bicycle's speedometer, with a readable LED display. I took it out onto the patio, and after about 20 minutes it got signal, which the camera had no trouble recognizing. I've had it charging, and will set up the few parameters after I write this. We're talking total win here.

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Then off to band rehearsals. Attendance was so surprising the conductor took a picture. Five tubas. We usually only have two, sometimes none. And 5 baritone horns, which is what we had most of last year until our youngest section member went off to school somewhere. New guy plays well, nice guy. My last rehearsal this year will probably be next Thursday, then a concert on the 24th and July 4th, then I'm on vacation and may play in the July 29 concert but will probably miss the July 26 rehearsal.

After that, it depends on Anything Goes. my part may be small enough to let me go to band rehearsals and the August concert. Maybe. But definitely not September.

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Plans for tomorrow:
Work
TGIF

Forgot that I have band practice tonight, which might mean no update till tomorrow unless I do it now. So I'm spending lunch hour at Starbucks ingesting alternative forms of calories.

Yesterday was busy at work, and got busier. Lunch was with automation guy and sales guy at Andy's BBQ. Made the mistake of ordering the Italian sausage. I keep forgetting that it's nasty stuff most places.

Managed to scratch my reading glasses. Good thing I buy them 5 at a time, and always have a spare in the car.

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Where did all these people come from? 1:25 pm on a school day doesn't strike me as coffee rush hour.

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After work hopped on the expressway and  went to the Computer History Museum for a panel discussion called "Univac to Web 2.0" with the theme allegedly being how political polling and campaigns have been/will be affected by Internet improvements. The panelists were two former Obama PR people and one PR guy who had headed Meg Whitman's campaign after being a Bush white house minion. The moderator was a Harvard historian.

None of them knew squat about technology.

Things started out promising, with the CHM CEO showing a clip from Walter Cronkite & crew on the first election night where CBS used Univac to predict an election. 1952, the machine predicted Eisenhower in a landslide but CBS went with all the other polls which predicted an almost tie race with Adlai Stevenson.  One of the panelists noted that the Univac had better data. He pointed out that the polls were done by telephone in a time when only the relatively affluent had phones.

The panel devolved quickly into discussions of past political campaigns, with almost no mention of technology. The moderator chose (written) questions from the audience which did not touch on technology. I was sitting in the back row and saw many people bail after the first 20 minutes. It just wasn't very interesting. One amusing item is two of those panelists now work for Facebook. In roles for which they have no apparent qualifications. Hmmmm.

Home, there was another note from Roxio support, it blamed Tivo for the problem, with no hints on why he thought this or what it may be. I replied that I want my $$ back.

I'd done some searches at work and found out two things: There is a freeware program which can convert Tivo to MPEG without the reduction in resolution which Roxio performs, and  the issue I was seeing was probably because I was using Tivo's fast transfer (which creates a transport stream file) instead of normal transfer (which builds a program stream file compatible with DVDs).

So, before I went to bed I started a slow transfer, and this morning I ran the file through both Roxio and the freeware program, and they both worked. I was able to import the converted freeware file into Corel's video editor, edit out the commercials, insert chapter marks and export an ISO file which I'll try to burn to a DVD later.

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work so far has been a bit wonky. A couple of new assignments will be challenging to write tests for, because they are about how other devices communicate with ours, and the results will only show on those other devices.

Someone on flickr.com has created a phony group called "flickr" which he/she/it claims is for newbies to see what all kinds of things are on the site. I received an invitation to post my SportsClock mockup on their group. Declined. But it did inspire me to put in a full description of the image, which was created in MSPaint and is not  a photograph.

YOTB rehearsals tonight
Plans for tomorrow:
work
pack for weekend trip
go to sleep early to make it to the train on time Saturday.

One good news bad news thing about work is on Thursdays they bring in fresh fruit (lately bananas and apples) which is placed in the break rooms in the morning. I got to work at 9:30, there was no trace of the stuff. They don't buy nearly enough to meet the demand.

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Spent most of the day running 2-hour tests, and I think most of them passed but I could not mark them as such because there is a series of bugs with the display which sometimes shows a program is recording when it isn't, or shows a program is not scheduled to record in the future when it is. Not a total waste of time, but close to it.

I left the cubicle a few times during the thumb-twiddling parts to hang out in my team's area and play movie title hangman, and eavesdrop on team members who were running real-time tests. And I also did some optical audio testing, and closed a few bugs.

Toward the end of the day the manager's manager came by the team area, and had another of a long series of management "whoops" moments. She forgot my exit interview is tomorrow, and she won't be in the office tomorrow. I can leave my badge in her desk drawer. I did get a chance to tell her how great the people have been. She already knows hjow sucky everything else is there.

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I wrote to the Moto HR admin asking why I had not heard anything from her when I sent my acceptance letter a week ago. She wrote back that she did recceive it, and my start date will be Aug 22 unless the security clearance doesn't come back by then. Not as helpful as it should have been. 

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Home, relaxed with Domino on head-butting me for petting - a new habit of hers. Picked up my baritone and headed off to Ye Olde Towne Band practice. We had three new pieces to try, the first was Louie, Louie I told my section about the unique place in Washington State history this song holds. The other pieces were a difficult circus march and a not particularly tuneful German waltz.

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Home from band, watched the Seahawks beat the Chargers in fast forward (recorded on my home Tivo). It was a squeaker, went down to the last minute.

Got some more shirts from KingSizeDirect, they are excellent.

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Plans for tomorrow:
Last day at contract job
Maybe have dinner in Alviso. Vahl's has a piano bar on Fridays, I think. No need to fight rush hour traffic.

Work progresses. Had a tutorial from one of the senior testers on the test and bug tracking software programs. Sat down with another senior person to regress some bugs. Installed the latest build on my two boxes. Had a 1-on-1 with my manager, who gave lots of helpful details on How Things Are Dun Around Here. Heartbroken to discover that one of my favorite cow-orkers smokes. Ran a bunch of tests. Thought I found a bug, asked around, read the spec and no, it's a feature. Good news, less typing.

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Yesterday the CPA's package (more than an inch thick) of the parental estate taxes arrived. With the wrong name for both me and for the living trust. Major WTF, they pulled both of those names out of thin air, when they had a TaxID doc with everything all spelled out for them. Dashed off email to the partner, he replied they would fix it. Best news is no one owes any $$ to the IRS.  I'm sure the CPA's bill will more than make up for that.

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Ye Olde Town Band rehearsal was bizarre. I was 15 minutes early, but we started 15 minutes late. Conductor is out of town (I don't think this was expected, but it may have been). The person he picked to fill in was a brave man, and he did okay. But he did not give any warning before starting a piece, so I was playing catch-up most of the evening. Usually it takes us an hour and a half to run through a concert's worth of numbers, he breezed through them in an hour, and took requests for the next half hour. And he was not slipshod about any of this, he did stop us and go over problem spots as needed, he just didn't insert any padding between numbers.

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My final unemployment check arrived, they did pay me for the whole first week. I was wondering, because the two days I worked the second week will bring in $200 more than a week's unemployment. But they did send the check on a different form, one which did not allow for another request.

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I don't think she reads this, but just in case, I hope britgeekgrrl had an enjoyable birthday, and sincerely hope the coming year will be many thousands of percents better than the last one. She deserves so much better than Life has dumped on her.

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Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Decide which 11 photos are going to Reno, make sure they are all framed, and if I have time make a map for yourbob to use for hanging them. 

I had this great idea for a nostalgic, tell-all kind of post as I was walking across the parking lot, but by the time I had my mocha frappuccino it had retreated to the tip of my tongue, the back of my mind. Or maybe one of its many ragged edges. If I keep staring into space maybe it will come back. Something about a person. A person of the male persuasion.

Frak.

Meanwhile, I have the new-ish bluetooth stereo headset on my neck, earbuds shoved firmly in place because there is a jerk at the table behind me, facing me, who has been blabbering non-stop into his cell phone as if he was in his livingroom. Half an hour now, one would think his battery would be drained. Sounds like his mind has been already. Marketing blather.

So I guess this will be my daily journal entry. Started at the clinic with a follow-up with my endocrinologist. Routine, suggested by my nephrologist. She is one hot number, knows how to dress too. She doesn't do white lab coats. Last time was a very sexy muted orange and black diagonally striped dress, this time a knit white top over a black dress. The knit was too tight to call net, but open enough to accent what she wanted accented. Nothing new except my A1C is much lower, but needs to go down one more notch. My BP was actually low, and I've lost another 3 lbs since last month.

From there to Custom Audio, to see if the talented Mr. T. Le could pair the car alarm remote I'd bought on the Clifford web site with my Clifford car alarm. Nope, he couldn't get it to work. Because it was the wrong one. Clifford's web site said the same unit worked with both the 10 and 12 series of this model, but they lied. He sold me (and paired successfully) the right version. Custom Audio charged me $120, Clifford soaked me for $240. Home, RMA applied for, lunch made & inhaled.

Then to OSH with my music stand. At rehearsals I discovered that what I thought was a permanent fix for the one stupid design item in an otherwise brilliant design was not. The stand has two screws on the main shaft, one has a handy soft plastic/rubberized handle, the other has to be adjusted with a hex tool. The nice man, whom I looked for for 10 minutes before finding him, helped me remove the hex screw and find a replacement hex head bolt and wing nut which can be adjusted without any tools.

Next stop, CVS, picked up my monthly insulin.

Home, dropped that off because it needs to go in the fridge, and then to Starbucks. Thought about Clocktower, but they are not air conditioned and it's a bit too warm today for that.

And now for the daily dose of recruiter stupidity:
( Read more... )

No plans for tonight, which is sad because I really wanted to go to the preview of a local community theater's Sound of Mucus, directed by one of my all-time favorite theater people and I know at least half the cast. But this particular group kicked me out of one of their shows for what I suspect was being the wrong religion, and as long as the asswipes who did that are still involved with the group, I'm not patronizing anything they do. What added insult to injury is the person they called to take my place was told I'd gotten sick, and he had no idea it was political. He is a long time good theater friend and continues to be. He just happens to teach Sunday school and is happy to spread the word of Jesus to anyone who asks. What I admire most about him is until you ask, you won't even suspect he is That Way.  When I told him years later I had been the person he replaced, and what the circumstances were, he said had he known he would have refused the part.

So no plans for tonight.

Plans for tomorrow:
Litterbox duty
NASA/Ames for a long-awaited model rocket launch
Possibly go to the Fremont Thai Temple's annual bash, which they hold at a much larger Zen Buddhist temple down the block.
Pick up a friend at SJC who has spent 2 weeks volunteering with Red Cross flood aid in Montana.

Someone was supposed to phone me for a job interview screening thing at 2, and I needed to pick up a rare prescription drug across town at about noon. Got to the drugstore and the idiot child said they were out of stock, looking at the computer rather than looking in the pile of recently filled prescriptions. After 10 minutes of waiting her boss gave her the package to give to me. On my way out I found waterproof pre-medicated Band Aids I've been looking for, but more importantly dark chocolate hollow bunnies for Sunday's head-biting ritual. Big WTF: they have lots of hollow milk chocolate bunnies and solid dark chocolate bunnies, but it's rare to find hollow dark chocolate.

Lunchtime, Round Table next door was having a pizza and salad buffet, so I did that, and walked to Smart & Final for some fudgesicles.

Home by 1:40, had a fudgesicle for dessert, plugged my earbuds into the iPhone, listened to some music and waited for the interviewer to call. Nothing. 2:30 I call the recruiter, he calls back later to let me know the boss of the interviewer will call me at 4 to do the phone screening himself. Fine.

Unpacked the new telescope, put it together, mounted it on my best photo tripod and took it on the balcony to see if it would work for ultra close-up hummingbird pix from across the balcony. Nope, it would not focus that close. It took a while to figure out which way to turn the focus knob (there's no indicator on the scope, the instructions don't say, and it's not intuitive). Finally pointed it at a tree about 100 feet away, and was amazed at how much magnification it gave me. Tried out the camera mount attachment with mixed results, mostly because my best tripod does not have the best quick-release gadget.

Put that all aside at 3:55 and plugged in to wait for the call. 4:05, the original interviewer phoned, not her boss. She turns out to be very new to her job, and a lot of her questions were based on the very bad guess that all audio/video transcoder devices have the same features and thus have the same set of tests performed on them. It was a bit awkward, but we finally reached some level of communications, but I really wish her boss had been the one calling.

It would be a good job to land, but a lot depends on what recommendation she makes to her boss, and I don't think she's qualified to make one. That doesn't mean she isn't excellent at her job.

Thursday nights are Ye Olde Towne Band rehearsals in Los Altos, I took the long way around because they are tearing up my usual route, apparently the town has $$ for beautifying downtown, but they have to make it really ugly first. We played some new music, and tried getting through the worst arrangement of music from Gigi I have ever seen. The conductor played a recording of the band's last public performance of the piece - 11 years ago - and I did not hear on it the part which was in front of me. Maybe they only had one Baritone Horn then. I'd say none, but I did hear short snippets of what sounded like a Baritone. We got through the first page and a half (out of 6) before he sent us home.

Have been obsessing over Elisabeth Sladen's untimely passing, ordered the 3rd series of the Sarah Jane Adventures which has been on my wish list since before it started shipping (I have seen the first two) and then looked her up on IMDB to find her first appearance on Doctor Who. 1973. Amazon has it available, part of the John Pertwee Years DVD set, so I ordered one of those too.

Plans for tomorrow:
P/U more drugs at CVS
More job hunting
maybe see Cabaret at Sunnyvale Community Players but maybe not. I just looked at the cast list and am not impressed.

Started the day as an impulse shopper. I had suggested a TV to a friend, she emailed that she'd ordered it. I decided I wanted one too, and also got a blu-ray player and 802.11 N wi-fi adapter.  The TV and player were basically half price, free shipping.

( Cut for boring )
There's more football to watch.