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My demo started out well, I said I would start with the demonstrations, and showed CNN video of the demonstration in Bangkok, which got a laugh. But it went south from there. Turns out the new in-house Wi-Fi blocks all the ports I needed to do the demo, which Automation Guy knew but didn't bother to tell me. Her also didn't tell me there was a hardwide cable in the room, which would have made the demo work. I told boss, we'll try again next week.
A younger me would have been very angry.
Back at my desk I did manage to verify the two bug fixes I'd volunteered to do. And for the next couple of days I'll flesh out the demo, which means writing more scripts with our magical GUI automater program.
Lunchtime was a trip to the PO to mail nephew the pair of pucks. They are from the SJ Sharks. He is not a fan of them. He's a fan of the Capitals, being from the DC suburbs.
I chose the PO with no nearby restaurants, and followed the road south, which I rarely do, until it turned west and intersected with El Camino. Hung a right and I was at KFC. Their original recipe is becoming very soggy. The mashed potatoes were like soup. And I keep forgetting they are a Pepsi house. :-(
Home after work, though I am running low on ice cream after two early mornings in a row with low blood sugar for no apparent reason.
Someone had wheeled my garbage & recycling cans back from the street to where they belong on the end of the driveway. I suspect it's one of the two or three LPNs who rotate giving care to the elderly woman next door.
Took care of some business - in the mail was a new Discover card, they replaced everyone's who had used it at The French Store. All they changes was a series number, the expiration date and the code number. The date change meant I had to go online to Amazon and change that. Also need to do Paypal and Allstate. Tried Allstate but their site was crawling. Need to check Quicken for others which have Discover for auto-pay.
BASFA meeting was louder than usual tonight because some of the new folks were more inconsiderate than usual, and some of the veterans had business which they felt they had to discuss while there was a meeting in progress. Add to that the two tables by outside the folding door to the meeting room being occupied by VERY LOUD PEOPLE...
There were some laughs, but I didn't hear a lot of them because of the cross-talk.
Home, Domino is so enthralled in her seat on top of the guest chair that she didn't see me come in, and was startled when I petted her. Checking the cams today, she mostly parked in the new bed in the office, but also had some time at the food & water, on the arm of the sofa looking into the kitchen, and curled up on the kitchen side of the sofa. Spoiled kitty.
Plans for tomorrow:
work
Safeway
Not One of My Better Days
Nov. 21st, 2013 11:34 pmOnce again I worked from home till afternoon, once again the apartment inspector never showed up.
My big sister's husband turned 76 on November 10. Four days later he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer which had already spread to other organs. Ben was the kind of guy who didn't let a little debilitating pain get in his way, so I'm not surprised he didn't see a doctor as soon as he had symptoms. When Ben was growing up, everyone who had cancer died, and as soon as he was diagnosed he gave up.
Yesterday my sister emailed that cannabis and hospital rest had helped, but this morning she wrote that they had overdone the morphine last night and he was not doing well. Email forwarded from a niece (there are three of them) said her dad said he "was done".
This afternoon sister emailed saying he passed away, the funeral would be Friday. In Israel, it's almost 8 am Friday as I write this.
It is a shock, but not a surprise.
Ben was an American, had been a master sgt in the Air Force for 15 years before moving to Seattle. He met my sister at a Jewish religion class at Hillel while she was in college, courted her that summer when she was cook at a camp for Jewish kids, and they were married a year after she graduated. Unlike my sister, he was not very religious, but he loved her, and agreed to her dream to move to Israel and make babies until most of the population was made up of their peace-loving children. Unfortunately, they took after their mother, and are your basic religious fanatics, most of them living in the Occupied Territories.
He was an electronics genius, he built the world's first operational Doppler radar by hand, from scratch. During his career with the Israeli water service (they are Israel's NOAA) he consulted with the University of Colorado, and meteorology departments in Italy, Russia and Israel on radar tracking for cloud seeding. He taught electronics and programming at universities in Ber Sheva and Haifa. All male Israeli residents are required to serve in the army until age 55, and he was drafted to be an ambulance driver (typical army stupidity) during the war in Lebanon. Eventually they made him the Israeli navy's main radar repairman.
He leaves behind two sons, three daughters and 27 grandchildren.
After the no-show inspection, I went for lunch at Togo's, it's on the way. At work we wrapped up the laser testing, apparently they nailed down the bug, but I'm not sure if the fix was implemented. The system works better than before, which is good. But data through the air can never be as reliable as data over a wire, so I'm not sold on this scheme.
At home I used the limitations of VPN to take two required health & safety classes which Corp HR insists are required by OSHA. The second class starts by saying OSHA only requires it for people who handle chemicals as part of their job, which is hardly anyone at this company. No one at my site. I passed both classes easily, but it was a total waste of time.
Had my 1-on-1 with the boss, he moved it from yesterday because stuff is piling up for the coming release and new products. I told him about the needlessly complex path to home ownership, and he shared his. Same deal, surprises being sprung which should have been handled up front, and way too many documents. He also built a house in Thailand, there was none of this crap over there.
Home by way of Lucky's because they have a Jewish food section. I had falafel in the freezer, but needed humus and tehina and pita. It took forever to find pita, and the only types they had were whole wheat and 8-grain. Compared to several hundred types of taco and tortilla wrappers.
Watched the Saints and Falcons flail around for the final half while enjoying my Ben Memorial dinner. He was fond of a shot of schnapps now and then, maybe I'll have a sip in his memory.
Two packages picked up from UPS, one was a rotary nose & ear hair trimmer. The kind which looks like a miniature hedge trimmer is useless. And 4 6-packs of Nike crew socks. Had to throw away a 2-week supply of Dickies brand, holes in the toes after the first wear on too many of them.
Two weeks from moving. Two more packing projects before the crunch:
- Pack up the camping equipment which is on shelves in the storage room
- Box everything in the office closet which is not in drawers
- Box up the blank CDs/DVDs and ink cartridges in the office credenza
(those last to really are just one project)
This weekend I'll also do a full backup of my RAID array. It has all the big stuff, photos, videos, docs.
Plans for tomorrow:
Call the apartment office and yell at them for the no-show.
With luck, escrow will close. If it does, celebrate.
Uke class #2
Thursday, April 29, 1965, 8:30 am I was sitting in German class at Rainier Beach high school, daydreaming, looking out the window across the lawn to Lake Washington when the teacher screamed and ran out of the room. Several students got up and walked to the doorway and parked themselves under the arch. The desks were not built for duck-and-cover. I just sat there and watched the waves on the lawn and got a little seasick from the school building gently rocking - it was built on a concrete slab on fill. It took about 15 minutes for it to settle down. I'm pretty sure it was business as usual after the German teacher calmed down.
We had just moved to Seattle in January, so I asked the kid next to me how often they had these things. "How long have you lived here?" he asked. "Almost five months" I answered. He told me they had them about every 6 months.
We went home in the afternoon to watch TV, especially the broadcast from the Space Needle, which was still swinging too much for the elevators to run, stranding the morning show crew.
Sunday, May 18, 1980, also about 8:30 am, Mt. St. Helens erupted while I was in Seattle, and though there was no direct effect in the city, I worked for a company which maintained and repaired electronic gear (cash registers, ATMs, etc.) around the state, and for the next week we were sent to places a little out of our area to blow the mica-laden granite dust out of some machines. I got a chance to repair my first ATM, one in which ash ground off the magnetic stripes from the credit cards.
At the weekend I drove to Omak to see some friends, and on Sunday the 25th at 2:30 am the mountain blew again, and my boss called at about 9 to ask me to stop in Yakima on my way home to work on some other machines. As I was heading to I-90 back to Seattle, the nice man on the radio said the interstate was closed at the pass, due to volcanic ash, so I took the great circle route down 97 to 84 to Portland, and up I-5. I stopped at the Toutle River bridge an collected a few sackfuls of ash. The mud line on the trees (from the flood) was about 30 feet above the freeway.
So on October 17, 1989, when I was in the HP Response Center in Mountain View and the building started shaking, I was already a veteran. It was a brand new building which had been razed and totally rebuilt to be earthquake-proof. Hah! I ducked under my desk, and when the shaking stopped the whole floor in a cubicle farm as big as a Walmart was covered with manuals which had fallen off the shelves - even the covered shelves. They had told us the big 20-foot-tall plate glass windows were designed to fall outward so people inside the building would not be hurt by them, but that also meant smashing cars in the rooftop parking lot and crunching people on the sidewalk below. Fortunately the windows stayed in place. Our back-up generator failed, a water main broke, flooding the server room, and one of the columns of the earthquake-poof underground garage cracked. No one in our building was hurt. Traffic lights were out, and it took 2 hours to drive home about 3 miles. We spent the next three days putting books back on shelves.
We had just moved to Seattle in January, so I asked the kid next to me how often they had these things. "How long have you lived here?" he asked. "Almost five months" I answered. He told me they had them about every 6 months.
We went home in the afternoon to watch TV, especially the broadcast from the Space Needle, which was still swinging too much for the elevators to run, stranding the morning show crew.
Sunday, May 18, 1980, also about 8:30 am, Mt. St. Helens erupted while I was in Seattle, and though there was no direct effect in the city, I worked for a company which maintained and repaired electronic gear (cash registers, ATMs, etc.) around the state, and for the next week we were sent to places a little out of our area to blow the mica-laden granite dust out of some machines. I got a chance to repair my first ATM, one in which ash ground off the magnetic stripes from the credit cards.
At the weekend I drove to Omak to see some friends, and on Sunday the 25th at 2:30 am the mountain blew again, and my boss called at about 9 to ask me to stop in Yakima on my way home to work on some other machines. As I was heading to I-90 back to Seattle, the nice man on the radio said the interstate was closed at the pass, due to volcanic ash, so I took the great circle route down 97 to 84 to Portland, and up I-5. I stopped at the Toutle River bridge an collected a few sackfuls of ash. The mud line on the trees (from the flood) was about 30 feet above the freeway.
So on October 17, 1989, when I was in the HP Response Center in Mountain View and the building started shaking, I was already a veteran. It was a brand new building which had been razed and totally rebuilt to be earthquake-proof. Hah! I ducked under my desk, and when the shaking stopped the whole floor in a cubicle farm as big as a Walmart was covered with manuals which had fallen off the shelves - even the covered shelves. They had told us the big 20-foot-tall plate glass windows were designed to fall outward so people inside the building would not be hurt by them, but that also meant smashing cars in the rooftop parking lot and crunching people on the sidewalk below. Fortunately the windows stayed in place. Our back-up generator failed, a water main broke, flooding the server room, and one of the columns of the earthquake-poof underground garage cracked. No one in our building was hurt. Traffic lights were out, and it took 2 hours to drive home about 3 miles. We spent the next three days putting books back on shelves.
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