howeird: (Weird Dream)
Last night football was over and I was done online early, so went to bed at 11. Read for 10 minutes (finished a short story and my eyes were tired) and fell asleep. I had just washed the pillowcases that day because of all the night sweats. Woke up at 11:45, the pillows were soaked. Kept waking up, at about 2:30 am felt really strange, turned on the lights, made an egg cream, turned on CNN (in Atlanta it was already past 5, their morning program was on). Parked myself on the recliner in front of a fan, turned the aircon down to 74, cooled off.

Back to bed at 3:30 or so, woke up a couple of times to pee. Sweats were mostly gone.

The lights come on at 7:30, woke me up, but I played on the tablet in bed till almost 9.

At work by 9:30, made a conscious decision to get to the Monday morning meeting late and sit in the back. There is nothing of interest to me at all in these meetings now that they are three combined teams, all with different agendas. Or I should say now that Engineering is not giving us anything new to test.

There wasn't much to do, what with no new builds, but one of the engineers asked me to work with him to troubleshoot a hardware problem I was seeing on my machine. That involved running some scripts and finally pulling a network adapter off the machine, taking a picture of the label and posting that to the bug report. It's the same adapter we used on the last machine, and I think he's stumped. Or maybe just surprised that it is acting differently in the new machines.

Lunch at the Great America Blvd Togo's, because there was lots of parking (odd, I would have expected more business now that the stadium is open and college is in session). No eye candy. There rarely is at that one.

 Left at 5:30, decided I'm ditching BASFA for Monday Night Football for most of the season. They have outgrown the venue, and the annoyances have overtaken the fun.

Straight home and switched on the game. Watched it most of the way through, but things got bad toward the end with bad officiating changing the outcome. They really need to change the rule that penalties (and non-calls) cannot be challenged. I don't know who won, don't care because the refs made the final score irrelevant.

Dinner was an omelet, because I keep buying "best of the egg" and forgetting to use it. Cut up some frozen ham shards, defrosted them in the pan and put them aside. Added margarine, poured in half a cup of egg stuff mixed with some lactose free milk. Tossed on the ham, a slice of swiss cheese, two slies of string cheese and two of American Singles. Cut up a handful of olives and tossed them on, cooked for 3 minutes, added thyme, oregano and ground pepper. Raised the gas level and cooked on what electric would call low for about 5 minutes. Poured out onto a sliced English muffin.

Yummy, and Domino got random pieced of ham.

Ice cream with sprinkles for dessert.

Fedex delivered the beta test cable modem/wifi router, and I read the box, which is ugly and way too busy. Scanned the quick start guide which doesn't have nearly enough information. I can't hook it up until they get Comcast's ok. Fine, it will be a lot of work, especially setting up port forwarding for the webcams, since the new modem will mean a new Comcast IP.

In other news, there is another rash on my foot, doc blames my shoes not having enough air circulation, so I exercised the credit I had on Zappo's and ordered an ASIC gel pair which has lots of mesh.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Meetup meet-and-greet for a photo group which went on hiatus a couple of years ago, but always had the best models.

E Before I

Feb. 1st, 2014 01:24 am
howeird: (Inigo Montoya)
Doing my part to alleviate the California drought, I skipped taking a shower this morning. I did not skip the deodorant.

Just as I was totally out of anything to do at work, boss assigned me a bug to look into. It's one QA really should not be working on because it's a tech support/field engineering issue. Neither of them was able to replicate a customer's issue in our lab, and after many months they asked the customer to send a pair of machines, or more, so we can test in our lab using the equipment which is experiencing he problem. We have a feature in our device which lets you set up a backup unit identical to up to 10 production units. If a production unit has a serious problem, the backup will take over. Apparently the customer's backup has been taking over at the wrong times.

Boss say see one of the support guys for the customer's units, so I do. But (a) he only has one unit, (b) it is from a different customer site and (c) it's for a different issue and (d) there's only one and both issues need at least two to run the test.

So I continued to have almost nothing to do until it was time to write my weekly report.

Lunch was at Amarin Thai's hole in the wall place near Mission College, where the challenge is to arrive late enough to find parking but not late enough to be turned away because they close at 2 pm. I had the garlic rice with garlic spinach and duck. There did not appear to be any garlic in what they served, but it was still pretty good.

Back at the work parking lot I phoned Sassy Nails and made an appointment for 5:30. I didn't make it out the door till 5:25, which should have only made me 3 minutes late, but traffic was slow and more than the usual inconsiderate slobs were wedging their cars across two lanes, blocking intersections, not letting people through the commuter lane to make right turns. Whoever decided that commuter lanes in the bay area expressways should be the right-hand lane needs to meet a violent end at the hands of a sober driver.

Ms. Sassy (not her real name) waited for me, because she had made me an hour late last time, and I was her last client of the day since they were closing an hour early for Chinese/Vietnamese New Year, which technically was last night. It still took too long because she was interrupted every 3 minutes to answer the phone or greet a customer (to say they were closed). She needs to hire a receptionist.

Went from there next door to the massage place, only went in for a 1/2-hour session. Good masseuse, in her 40s, ended with a face massage which felt better than I thought it would.

Home, there was a package by the side door - a pack of 3 Jockey briefs.  And two in the mailbox - a peephole wide angle lens for the front door and  2014 America The Beautiful quarters proof sets, one for me and one for my little sister.

I was going to install the peephole, I knew it needed a 5/8-inch drill bit which I thought I had, but all I found was a super-long and a normal 1/2" and a 1". And a 2: hole saw.

During the day I did some research online on the latest wireless standards, which claim to be able to equal (or come close enough to not matter) 1Gb streaming. And ended up buying an ASUS router and a PCIE card for the big PC. Did not get a USB adapter for the laptop because USB can't keep up past 800Mbps at best, more like half that IRL.

Allstate sent me a note asking me to fill out a customer satisfaction survey. I was not satisfied at all with how they handled the insurance on the new home, but they did okay on auto. After about 5 pages, it was clear the survey was not set up to cope with anything so complicated. I gave up after 10, having become completely dissatisfied with the survey itself.

Dinner was a Safeway Select mac-n-cheese-n-bacon, followed by most of a wedge of soft French cheese spread on slices of steamed sourdough baguette. Took two Lactaid pills just in case.

Looked at the SJ Astronomical Society's web site for events where I might get some pointers on how to take photos through my telescope, and they seem to meet twice a week for informal stargazing and helping the unwashed. Membership was a mere $20 so I joined, and put the next two sessions on my calendar.

Finally got the invite to audition, but in a roundabout way. I did not renew my howierd.com domain, it is due to expire in April. It;s sole purpose is to send an auto-reply to tell people to spell "weird" correctly and try again. The email was sent to howeird@howierd.com. So he should get the auto-reply, and if he's paying attention will re-send the message to right address. Since it took him three days to get back to me I'll give him a day before replying.

Plans for tomorrow:
Buy a 5/8" drill bit
Install the peep hole lens
Photo shoot at 2 pm
Janice coffee klatch at 5:30
howeird: (Default)
Started the day as a total slacker. Woke up at 8, not feeling rested at all. Did not do anything on my to-do list in the morning. The recycle trip was nixed because it came to my notice that there was one more room to unpack, and it would be better to do that before making a recycle run.

Decided to attack the most difficult thing first. Found the right circuit breaker on the first try, uninstalled the ugly halogen spotlight 3-lamp fixture over the sink and replaced it with a much more attractive 3-normal-bulb fixture. It took a bit of doing because I needed to remove most of the old mounting hardware and use what came with the new light, but in retrospect it was all straightforward. It worked, nothing caught fire, nothing exploded.

Found college games to watch, found myself falling asleep in the recliner. Domino found a new place to perch - on my tummy. She is so skinny, I can feel the bones of her spine when I pet her. I'm chalking it up to old age, because she isn't hyper (which she would be if it was thyroid relapse). I finally took a nap in bed, had some weird dreams.

Back to the recliner, but remembered the baguette and brie, so I cut tiny bread slices and watched the Wazoo-CO State game while scarfing up cheesy bread. Between the cheese and the bread, there were several trips to the guest bathroom, and popped some anti-lactose pills & immodium. Tasty meal, though.

Was dilemmaed about the result of the WSU game. They had it sewn up, but made a series of stupid decisions and lost to a last minute field goal. Normally I root against the UW's nemesis, but I'm told that when playing outside the league one roots for one's state.

Also watched Tulane fail to grab victory from the jaws of defeat in about the same way. Maybe they will be demoted to Onelane.

It was fun to see San Diego State thoroughly mash Buffalo, and funny that it was the Idaho Famous Potato Bowl. They played on Boise's blue field.

Dinner was going to be TV, but it's a day when I have time to cook, so I boiled some water and heated up some ravioli. The gas range is not as good with the heavy pot as I expected it to be. But it cools down a lot quicker when you turn it off.

Bit the bullet, went into the 3rd BR and started unpacking. All the boxes were labeled by which bookcase/shelf/rack, and in what order. Unpacking is the reverse order from packing. There were some things that were out of order due to size, but for the most part it was load from the bottom up.

So now I have unpacked:

Shelves 1:
Photo and slide albums
Shelves 2:
Small electronics (mini-camcorder, GPS, mini shortwave radio)
Misc bookshelf things (tarot cards, NatGeo DNA kit, loose photos in a ziplock bag, jewelry holder shaped like a Chinese temple, HP 5-year pin, etc.)
Books
More books
String books
Thailand scrapbooks and journals and chotchka
Big rack:
Parental stuff:
- 78s
- LPs
- Framed family photos
- Dad's 8mm camera
- Parental diplomas
My calendars
Small racks 1&2:
CDs

Yet to be done:
Small rack 3, which will be DVDs and videotapes and beanie babies. And maybe large CD collections
There is a pile of clothes, towels, pillows, hats and fanny packs which were used for packing material. They will go into the closet.


Even more annoying than the seasonal ads on the radio are the PSAs. There are a total of three which are being played over and over, sometimes two times in a row, ad nauseum. Two are by young undocumented aliens claiming they deserve to be full citizens. One if from a boy who claims to be Thai, which is a hoot because he may be the only undocumented one in the country. The third is an annoying boy asking question after question (Why is the sky blue? How do you hit a baseball? - crap like that) and not soon enough a voice-over says you don't have to be a foster parent to help a foster child. If that's the foster child, the help would be strategically applied duct tape. We have programs in place for foster children, PSAs calling for additional help are out of line. As for undocumented children, their parents need to solve that problem.

Plans for tomorrow:
Finish unpacking
recycle
watch the Seahawks game it it's on local TV
see a movie? Frozen is on the list.


howeird: (Weird Dream)
Two days ago I noticed a blister on my left foot, just below the big toe. There were also tiny blood blisters on the side of foot parallel to the blister. All night I tossed and turned, dreaming about the USB implant in that side spot, and how I could not reach it to plug in my iPod.
Yesterday my trip to a Honda dealer was a FAIL when the rep did not know how to activate the voice command system. I went onto Youtube and found the answer later. All night I tossed and turned, dreaming about variations on voice commands. "I need Chinese food" and "Find me pizza" were the most over-use. Regardless of what I said, the nav system would find it, and then display a map with no street names on it. Just like IRL. :-( 
howeird: (Default)
The other day I was out of limes, and even though the ones at Lucky's were small, I bought 8. Today I was in SaveMart and theirs were just as small, and 1/3 more expensive. This is an issue for me because at home my favorite drink is a glass of seltzer with a couple of ice cubes and half a lime fresh-squeezed into it. With these small limes, it takes 2/3 of one or a whole one. I also have a bottle of commercial lime juice in the fridge, but it doesn't have the same bite.

Lots of talk at work about the acquisition, including a townhall meeting at 8 am PST held in the Pennsylvania HQ of the part of the company which was sold off. I watched the replay at about 9:30, and it was pretty good, for a change. The CEO of the company which is buying us was on conference call for about 10 minutes, he gave some useful details and said some very nice and encouraging things about us.

Spent most of the work day pounding on a complicated test script and missing the time when I mostly played with audio and video. I'll get to do more of that soon.

Lunch was with Automation Guy at Barn Thai. The waitresses recognized me and spoke Thai. :-)

Email said to come pick up the vocal score for Brigadoon between 6 and 8, I got there at 6:10 but no one was there. Traffic. Finally got it at 6:20 or so.

Petco, to buy more cat food, now that Domino has decided she likes the new guy's food better than her own, and hasn't barfed it up in a week. Bought a case of his "treat" canned food, which she likes far better than the whipped cream which she had been loving previously. Tonight she not only finished her canned food, she also finished what he left over. Totally cleaned both bowls.

I am still working on a new name. I thought maybe "copper" since he's kind of that color, but in Thai that's "red gold" "tong dang". That dang cat. No thanks. It's hard to pin down because he has multiple personalities. He can be very laid back, or hyper. He loves being held and petted and purrs up a storm, but a minute later he's hiding under the bar stools or the coffee table. Meanwhile Domino has started to adopt the cat bed I bought for him, which is fine because it's too small.

Tonight she has been snarling and spitting at him a lot. He wants to play, and can't figure out why she doesn't. Neither can I. She use to play with Pumpkin all the time. When she is rude to him, he just backs off and walks away, sometimes with a meow or three but usually not.

Neither of them seem to be interested in any of the new toys. I'll leave them on the livingroom floor and see if they move overnight.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Probably will be sent home early for the 4-day weekend
Maybe I'll get the slides put away
Calendars for the apartment office staff


howeird: (Default)
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.

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.  


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
howeird: (Weird Dream)
For the past three nights, I have gone to bed with either no cats or Domino way at the foot of the bed, and have awoken two or three hours later with Pumpkin curled up inside my arm, and Domino stretched out along my leg in a kind of tag team cat-snake. I get up to go to the loo and when I return they are both gone.

This may also happen again when I wake up for real, about 15 minutes after the alarm goes off and the lights turn on.
howeird: (Weird Dream)
I'm in the lobby where I work, except it is not anywhere I have worked IRL. As I head for the elevator, several other employees whom I do not know get into the elevator then come right back out again and walk away, maybe to the stairs, maybe to another elevator down the hall. I get into the elevator and there are no buttons for choosing a floor. I spend about 2 minutes looking for some way to make the elevator go to the 2nd floor, but find none. The door has stayed open all this time, and I get out and walk halfway around the building to another elevator. It too has no buttons. I take the stairs.

On the second floor, I have to walk back halfway around the building to get to my office. I am in a big room with no cubicles, my IRL boss is doing something with a CRT TV in a corner by the door, I go over to my desk at the other end of the room. I am the only one in the office besides the boss. On the computer screen is a survey. It is asking about my elevator experience. Did I find the elevator voice to be friendly, hostile, warm or mechanical? Did the elevator respond correctly to my commands? It is clear they have changed the elevator to being voice-activated. Now they tell me.

My boss sets up some cushions in his corner of the room, a comfortable nest from which to watch the TV. There are screams of panic coming from it, and also some expressions of WTF. He is taking notes on his laptop. It's a feed from the elevator.

After a while, he props the TV on a bed which is on wheels, the bed is neatly made with a sky blue blanket and white pillowcases. He tapes a piece of paper over the TV screen, goes out the door as he pulls the bed with the TV to block the door. I go over to the TV and read what is on the paper. "No data access December 24 and 31".  I was planning on working those days. I move the bed away from the door and go out into the hallway.

I am at a table in the hallway, sorting some paperwork.  Four or five Asian employees whom I do not know (they may have been the ones from the elevator) sit down around the table, ignoring me, chatting away as they clutter the table with their paperwork. It gets to the point where I can't do my work because their papers are all over mine. After not getting any cooperation from them by politely asking them, I put on my THEATER VOICE and they pick up their papers and scurry away.
howeird: (Weird Load)

I have been sent to a clinic to stop a doctor from performing an unnecessary surgery. He calls the procedure "manga", and it starts with the patient fully clothed, wearing a green apron, like a grocer's apron. When  I walk in he his spraying her with water from a plant mister, wetting the front of the apron completely. When he turns away to go to a counter with scalpels and other assorted small medical gear, I grab her hand and pull her out of the room, running with her down the hallway. As we run I ask her what she was going to be operated for,  she said she did not know, she felt perfectly healthy.   I watch her run out of the building, while I stand at the door. She is still running when I wake up.


I am sitting on a padded stool in the clinic's exam room. A doctor is spraying me with water from a plant mister. I am wearing a green grocer's apron, and he is soaking it completely. I must have been drugged, because I am just coming out of a stupor. I say something like "WTF"? and a nurse out of my field of vision  says "manga surgery". I wake up.

Profile

howeird: (Default)
howard stateman

September 2022

S M T W T F S
    123
45678910
111213141516 17
18192021222324
252627282930 

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Page generated Jun. 19th, 2025 05:45 pm
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios