I took a picture of myself with my digital camera… Notice the sexy pose (oh yeah, you might as well notice the new glasses too).
During the (first) power outage, Adam, Rory, and I headed over to The Good Life for a few drinks and some air conditioning… The power stayed out from 10pm until around 12am… It was still on at 2:15a when I went to bed, but around 4:30am my UPS started beeping and the power once again went out for another 45 minutes to an hour..
I am working from home today so I have a chance to do the laundry and packing that I couldn’t do during the power outage…
My headphones have filters to keep nastiness out of them… These filters eventually need replacement over time, and when I sat down at my desk after lunch I noticed that it seemed that the right phone was muted… I initially blamed my head, I mean, I have had to lay out a grand or so fixing my eyes and teeth, why not my ears next… But after switching ears with the phones it was evident that it wasn’t me… So I changed the filters and now everything sounds great! I am always amazed that how over time you don’t notice slow degradations like this until you hit some magical point where it is just “shitty”. I am sure it has been sounding bad for a little while now….
I am leaving work a bit early today to pick up my new glasses in Harvard Square… I will try and get a picture up sooner or later… :)
Once upon a time someone shoehorned a mini IP stack into a Commodore 64 and used the serial port for comm. I was in awe… Then they shoehorned a ethernet adapter into a C=64’s cartridge (named “The Final Ethernet"1)…. I was slapping my own face in awe… Next thing you know someone creates a hardware-based VNC server and shoehorns THAT into a C=64… What the hell is going on?!?!?
I have been kicking ass and taking names today… First, I got a revised spec (well, honestly, a spec for a part of the product that was heretofore undocumented, so there was no real spec) document regarding one aspect of my product… I really thought it was going to be a killer 3-day type dealie but it ended up being more like a 2-3 hour dealie to whip it all together… My opinion of Outlook still remains, however.. =)
Then I recieved a few more spec tweaks for things that were ill-defined in the spec, and my interpretations of them were different from the original intent… I can’t complain too much, because a hair of ambiguity in the spec is a ton better than no spec at all… =) Anyway, these tweaks were mostly just visual stuff, usability type things that took no time flat to fix…
Amy took off this morning and I rolled into work a few minutes ago… To elaborate on this weekends events:
Dentist’s office informed me that my OLD dental insurance wouldn’t cover the porcelain on the two crowns, so I am out another 600 bucks.. Suck.
Dentist’s office also informed me that the lab that makes the crowns suspected that the mold taken last time wasn’t correct so they didn’t put porcelain on either crown so the dentist could verify if they were correct. One was, one wasnt, so a new set of molds had to be taken and both crowns sent off for finishing. So I have to wait another 3 weeks… re-suck
Picked up the following CDs:
Big Black - Songs About Fucking (to replace the copy that disappeared while living at CSH)
Ween - The Pod
Ween - 12 Golden Country Greats
Múm - finally we are no one
Spent another \$400 on the eye exam and new glasses… Went with a different look… I hope I don’t look like an ass…. ( Update: I have to wait until mid-week for the new glasses to be finished)
Saw Blue Velvet and Lost Highway at the Brattle. Blue Velvet is one of my favorite films, but I was never able to make it thru Lost Highway awake… This time I made it, though, and it wasn’t that bad…. Definately not one of David Lynch’s finest films, but not that bad either… The soundtrack was weak…
So all in all, I spent too much money on my head this weekend.
Amy arrived Thursday night and we didn’t do anything terribly exciting other than grab some snacks and talk… Friday I went to the dentist and she got a haircut while I was in the torture seat. We did some record shopping and watched some movies that night… Saturday I bought new glasses and we saw a David Lynch double feature of Blue Velvet and Lost Highway… This was the first time I made it the whole way through Lost Highway awake… =)
I have finished my current project at work and released it to the QA peeps… I am pretty sure it is solid this time, much more so than last time when I had about 3 weeks less than I needed to finish… This is the project I mentioned a few weeks ago…. They rushed me and rushed me to finish it by the end of June and then pushed it back anyway to add more features. Fortunately, when they asked me how long it would take I gave them a completely unrealistic estimate giving me plenty of time to go back and fix all the bad code I shat out in the during June when I was rushing. Now I have finished cleaning things up (somewhat), added the features they wanted (which honestly make the product better), and still managed to come in before the obscene estimate I gave them before. =) I don’t like doing that, but they really fucked me over with my last deadline so I needed to make sure I had time to make things right before adding all the new features they wanted.
In addition, I walked into a nasty bug report that took me from 9:30 until 3pm to fix, and it was once again a MS problem… This was in the DDE code that I wrote months ago and haven’t look at since…. It ended up being two distinct problems, both manifesting themselves differently, but some massaging of our registry keys and everything got better quickly. This would have been a much tougher fix if I had cheaped out on the design of the DDE code, but since it was fairly robust, I was able to just use a different method of accomplishing something and I didnt’ need to write anything…
After all this, though, my brain is pretty damn fried…
Amy is coming up tonight for the weekend, but she won’t be rolling into town until late. With her visit, my trip to Rochester/Syracuse next weekend, and the my trip to Vermont the weekend after I am going to be pretty busy….