Category: Diary (Page 13 of 38)

Today after work, instead of getting on I-15 and driving back up the valley to home, we drive for 5 minutes and park at the Luxor, and meet up with an old friend from Microsoft, Randy Brown.

The Microsoft Foxpro team are in Vegas this weekend for a Ship Party – they got VFP8 out the door I guess.

It was fun seeing Randy again, and for a treat we took him out for dinner to the Mandalay Bay Buffet.

The M.Bay buffet is always good value, in my opinion. We took the tram back to the Luxor and bid Randy goodnight before squeezing our tummies into the car and off towards home.

The cats were perturbed at having to wait for their dinner.

Last night I worked until 2:00am on a project for Wonka, only to be woken at 5:00am this morning by Kami who had captured a baby rabbit and brought it in for us to review (presumably before dispatching it.)

Argh. No sleep. Must chase rabbit back and forth and back and forth and back and forth behind the couch.

We eventually trapped the bunny behind a bookshelf and judicial use of a tea-towel resulted in a moment of cuteness before I dropped the little guy over the back fence, hopefully out of Kami’s reach.

Later, at work, I was totally committed to uploading version 3.31 of Sales2 into production on March 31. Of course, nothing worked and I had to patch the production version twice more before leaving for the day.

Note to self #1: The end of the month is NEVER a good time to upload a new version of software, because the users are all trying to get their end-of-month work done.

Note to self #2: Cackling over a backup zip file name of 331_030331.zip should have been sufficient. Trying to upload version 3.31 on 03.03.31 was pushing it.

Note to self #3: Don’t try anything on 3 hours sleep.

After breakfast I decided to prune the Palo Verde severely – it was very looking very ratty, and I’d taken note of some similar trees during one of our drives over the last few days and realised that this particular species of tree looks pretty good if it is kept in check.

I got out the ladder and really went to town, working my way around the trunk about three times, limiting the stupid branches that are growing in the wrong direction, and pulling in the crown by about 30%. I was concerned that I was chopping off most of the fingers that were showing the signs of new growth, but I went ahead anyway.

I think it was sensible. There’s still a lot of new growth on the tree, but it looks a lot better – almost perfect in profile from our back porch. If you go around the side of the house you can see from that angle that the poor tree is actually leaning over about 20 degrees from true, but all my efforts to straighen it have been for nothing. That’s just the way it wants to grow now.

In the afternoon we shopped for votive candle holders and did a little more research regarding table decoration for the pre-wedding dinner thingy, then stopped off at Home Depot for a new Vinca plant for the garden. The cats had successfully destoyed the last one, but we wanted to try again.

I spent a number of hours sitting in the back yard, eating lunch and toasting in the sun. In fact, that (lack of) activity coupled with the pruning earlier has resulted in a touch of sunburn. Dumb!

Ah, the irony. We’re taking today off work, but we still have to get up early to make it in to town for a meeting with Jenaya at the Broker,Inc office. The meeting went well, basically filling Jenaya in on what has been going on at WonkaTech, and letting her know what some of our plans are. Essentially we’d like to start working four days a week instead of five, to free up some time for another project, and we wanted to see how that would go over. Jenaya agreed to bring up some of the issues at her next meeting with the I.T. manager, so we’ll see.

Next it was off to Oakey Avenue to meet up with the Toshiba repair guy we’d missed yesterday.

Jim is cool. He checked out the keyboard, verified that Mountain Dew is basically acid and eats away the copper contacts in about 10 minutes (indeed, this could be verified by my own unofficial experimentation.)

He unplugged the keyboard module and removed it, and said he’d have to order the replacement part as there were none in stock, and usually they kept the laptop overnight or whatever in a lockup. I was a little nervous about this, because it had a lot of data on the hard drive, both personal and work related, and we asked if perhaps we could remove the hard drive, or take the laptop with us and bring it back when the new keyboard arrived?

Jim understood the situation, and even verified that, if he left the original keyboard disconnected and used an external USB keyboard, the laptop functioned fine. So everything was looking pretty good for interim use of the laptop, until, while Jim was rummaging around in the back of the repair office, he came back with a cardboard box. “This just came in,” he said, “but the woman whose laptop this is for won’t be back in town until the 28th, so if we put this one in your laptop, we’ll use the replacement we ordered for you in hers, and no-one will have anything to complain about.”

He wrote up the repair bill as though the keyboard had “just failed” so that the repair could be considered under warranty.

So, lessons learned: 1) Jim is a cool guy; 2) do not pour Mountain Dew on your laptop keyboard.

On the way home down Rancho we passed a cafe called “New York Bagel Bakery” about which we have read reviews but never actually found in person before. A quick U-turn and 10 minutes later we had a couple of sandwiches for lunch, and a dozen bagels to put in the freezer.

The unthinkable happened today at the office when a book fell over and spilled a polystyrene cup with a couple of mouthfulls of Mountain Dew over part of my laptop keyboard.

I know better than to have precariously balanced cups of acidic substances near computer equipment, yet somehow this happened anyway. Perhaps the Visual FoxPro 6.0 command reference was getting tired of being ignored. (It was on the desk when I arrived, and it’ll be there untouched when we leave.)

I soaked up most of the excess with tissues and thought I’d got away with it, but 10 minutes later the END key stopped working; then the DOWN arrow stuck ON so everything was scrolling away on me. I copied important files to the network, then shut the laptop down and rang Toshiba support.

They recommended a local licensed repair place called “Advanced Systems & Networks” and it was half-past four when I called them, they said that their guys go home at 5:00 but if we hurried we might catch them. We quickly packed up our stuff and arranged to take Friday off before leaving the office and driving up-town to brave the traffic.

Alas, we were too late. The offices of AS&N were closed.

We have a meeting with Jenaya at the Broker,Inc offices tomorrow, so we figured as we’d be out this way the next morning, it wasn’t such a big deal.

Today we left work early for our follow-up dentist appointments. Lisa’s was scheduled for 3:00, and mine was at 4:00. (Those of you paying attention will remember that I had a cracked filling that needed replacing.) I was prepared to wait my turn in the waiting room with my paperback – “Voyage” by Steven Baxter – but at 3:40 they called my name and I went back and sat in one of the empty recliner chairs – the fourth one right at the end of the hall – and they put the little metal chain and alligator clippy thing with the dribble bib around my neck. These bays or cubicles all back on to a common walkway – think of a letter “E” with an extra cross bar or two – which means it’s pretty noisy. Lying prone, I soon discovered that over my shoulder there existed a door to a back room. Various clinic staff would bop through this door to make coffee, stand outside, and smoke, because every minute or so a blast of cold air would blow over me, bringing the complex odours of coffee and cigarette smoke. Periodically one of the assistants would come over and assure me that the doctor would “not be long”. I passed the time by listening to the conversation in the cubicle next door, in which the patient complained of the (lack of) diagnosis from his previous dentist, and the doctor guy assured him that, in his clinic, patient care and comfort was a priority.

40 minutes later, the doctor finally arrived. I swear, if another 10 minutes had gone by, I would have got up and walked out.

Saying nothing to me, he clattered around in the cupboards for a couple of minutes, before turning and saying briskly, “Hello, sorry for the wait, I’m Doctor Torturo, and today we have a couple of fillings.”

“Only one, I think. Number 12,” I say, helpfully.

“Why yes, you’re right,” he replies, cranking the chair so I am tilted with my head down towards the floor.

A few minutes of urgent activity above my head ensues, with the assistent murmuring helpfully, “That’s it. You’ve nearly got it. Need some help there, Doc? Looks like you’ll need another pair.”

The doctor was having trouble putting his rubber gloves on.

I didn’t dare say anything. The last think I wanted to do was complain – the guy was about to let loose with power tools in my mouth.

He numbed my mouth up without warning me – every other dentist has asked if I wanted pain relief, and I usually refuse because I have a high pain threshold and I like to feel what’s happening in there.

From the conversation that went on above my head while he worked, I can only I assume that deadening my the side of my head allowed him to work faster so that he could get home to his wife at the time that he had promised. I hoped it wasn’t before 5:00.

This dentist gave other dentists a bad name – and it’s not like they really need help! Dental work is traumatic enough already.

*

I met Lisa in reception – she must have been waiting an hour, and we settled up, while I absently chewed on my upper lip. We decided that Chinese soup was just the thing, but that I’d be happier if we ate a little later when we’d allowed for the anaesthetic to wear off a little. So we did a little shopping at Sam’s Club before enjoying a meal at the Wok’s Inn.

*

When the pain relief wore off, my tooth really started to throb, so I went to bed with an aspirin.

[Update – it’s fine now. Lisa suggested that repairing fillings always go deeper than the original filling, so perhaps that’s why this one gave me more trouble than usual. Perhaps the dentist skills had nothing to do with it. Perhaps.]

For our current project, I’ve had to break out my archive CDs of FoxPro 2.6 work that I made from when I left Cornerstone and delve deep into some historic code we wrote 8 or 9 years ago. It still works. Despite all the thought that went into that code, and all the detailed documentation that we made, I now wish that a) we’d put a little MORE thought into it, and b) that we’d documented it better. But it still works. Cornerstone guys, if you’re reading this – we did some good stuff. I’m sure you are still doing good stuff, but maybe you’d like to hear that the old stuff still works. The code needed me to tweak it a little, but basically I’ve been able to add a procedure library full of high quality, generic screens and functions that are busy working away to help make the Sales Order Entry system more stable and faster.

It makes not being able to port it into Visual FoxPro that much less unbearable. (The reasons for not porting the FoxPro 2.6 code base to the newer, more capable Visual FoxPro 7 are tedious and shall not be detailed here.)

We deployed our “cleaned up” version into production on Tuesday night, staying late to take advantage of a scheduled network outage to take exclusive use of the tables and perform packs, reindex, add a tag on DELETED()… the basics. Some of these tables we suspect have NEVER been packed or reindexed. There were a few hickups the next morning, just minor things. We’ve been working with source code that was decompiled from the current EXE (they LOST the source code… can you believe it?) and consequently the screens had forgetten whether they needed to be MODAL, READ NOLOCK… you know, important things like that.

Argh. We’re ok now. Almost everyone has commented on how much faster it runs, and IT NO LONGER CRASHES. A big win. I don’t think we’ll get much credit for this, because of course, users rarely see things the program doesn’t do. (It’s not slow, it doesn’t crash… but the search screen is now CASE sensitive. FIX THIS NOW etc etc).

It’s great to be working on something real instead of sitting around waiting for the axe to fall.

Speaking of wanting a full-time job: We’ve registered with the online job sites such as Monster and Dice, and after monitoring them regularly I think basically there’s not going to be the “ideal job” out there. Even ones that are “kind of” suitable are few and far between. I’m seeing maybe one a week, to which I submit my resume, or email, or whatever it requires. Only one so far wrote back to ask for the resume in Word DOC format. That was two weeks ago.

Our relationship with Broker,Inc is working out quite well, in that we are picking up paychecks each week that prevent us getting too anxious about, say, moving to another city to find work. We really don’t want to leave… but I’ve talked about that before.

The contract they have us on looks like being more like three months than two, but there is plenty of work there, and if we do a good job I think there’s a good chance they’ll renew the contract for longer, at least for one of us.

In real terms, we probably have just as much job stability as we did for our last 6 months at Acme.

The sun was shining, the temperature got up to 75 degrees – perfect for sitting outside on the back porch with a bowl of cereal and a good book.

I’m reading “Voyage” by Steven Baxter. It’s alternate-history sci-fi, speculating about what would have happened if the Shuttle program had not been approved and a manned mission to Mars had been approved instead. It’s dry in parts, interesting in others.

In other news, apparenty NASA are searching Nevada for peices of Columbia. None found so far.

We’ve found out a little more about how the corporate politics work at WonkaTech. It’s easier to deal with than the Acme culture, let me tell you. Basically the manager who approves our time sheets each week doesn’t seem to want us there (What do you mean, it’s not like Acme?!?).

There’s a number of business application – sales order entry, etc – that have some stability problems, and they want to replace the whole thing with a new generation of business ware – namely Siebel and EDS. This isn’t going to happen very quickly, however, and the sales reps are in pain right now because the of problems they have with the existing software. Our job is to fix it as quickly as possible, and put some much needed enhancements in place, and at the same time, document it thoroughly so that the Siebel/EDS consultants know what it is they are supposed to be replacing.

At this stage, we think we’re doing ok, and will deliver a new-improved version sometime this week, and the sales-people will be relieved and thankful, and we’ll be eventually assigned to another program that is causing similar problems. Or something like that.

It matters because at that point we’ll know if we are going to be working there for longer than a couple of months. We’d like to work for a decent amount of time – so far we have had no real alternative jobs in the pipeline, although we’re still looking, and will continue to do so.

We get up at 6:00 am every day, grab breakfast or a shower, get in the car by 7:00 and drive to the office of WonkaTech who are located in the South valley.

The working environment is horribly similar to that depicted on the BBC program “The Office”. I don’t know if you’ve seen it or not, but it’s a dead-pan satire of life in an office, almost excruciatingly accurate at times… I remember working at Telcom New Zealand. Supressed memories…

We have our own office, which sounds good until you realise that we’re both squeezed into this tiny room with two desks, with what is apparently the only airconditioning vent for the whole floor. We haven’t found the thermostat yet, all we know is that periodically blasts of cold air will freeze us while the rest of the office walk around saying how hot and muggy it is.

The noise from the rest of the floor is distracting.

As for the work that we’re doing: We’re maintaining and enhancing a Sales Order application written in FoxPro for Windows 2.6, apparently authored by a large succession of monkeys. Shakespeare it ain’t.

It’s fragility and tendancy to crash is a textbook case of why people go around bad-mouthing FoxPro. I get annoyed because they really should be bad-mouthing FoxPro programmers. Do you know why there isn’t a “FoxPro for Dummies” book? It’s because no-one would have bought it – FoxPro has a fairly gentle learning curve, allowing the afore-mentioned monkeys to pass themselves off as database application developers.

We have yet to prove that we can knock this thing into shape. I’m hoping we’ll do that next week.

We’ve got dentist appointments today, so we’re not going in to work. This was all arranged a while ago, so no-one was surprised or anything. If WonkaTech & BrokerInc pulled their act together, we would have been working for a week or so before having to skip out today, but delays happen I guess.

Today is also the first day of our week as a Neilsen Family. We’ll be keeping a diary of our TV viewing habits. Here’s to boosting Farscape’s ratings by a whole point!

*

OK, so my teeth are in pretty good shape. I have a cracked filling, apparently, although I’m not feeling anything bad from that area, and the tooth I thought might be a problem turns out to be fine. None the less, it has been temperature sensitive for the last month and I guess that was just a transient thing. It seems better now.

The Dentist Office, located in the rapidly growing Centennial Center area, was a bit of a factory floor production line, which made for an uncomfortable visit. Not my favorite environment.

PetCo was just across the road, so we picked up vital pet supplies (litter, canned food, and anti-flea) and drove home.

Our 8th anniversary was yesterday, but we celebrated this evening with a meal at Sushi Ko for Teppan Yaki. Very enjoyable, very yummy! Some left over for lunch the next day.