Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2014-02-22 01:59 am
azurelunatic) wrote2014-02-22 01:59 am
"Not to put too fine a point on it..."
As predicted, I was sore and cranky on Thursday. I did stop by the researchers in the courtyard who were doing the thing with the new version of an app, and went through their thing. I am often a wild card on those things. They had two gender options. I wrote in "It's complicated!" and circled that one. I complained gently about the workflow from the last one, where I'd been thrown out of the persona and the scenario. (Fortunately this one didn't have any problems like that.) I vaguely confused them with my quick-and-dirty colorblind-a11y test, where I squinch my eyes shut to make things harder to read and to have things that lack sufficient contrast make themselves known. When we got to the search portion of the test, the search had in fact entirely broken, which just *would* have happened to me, because that sort of thing always happens to me. They are looking forward to when I get released on their beta, because I notice things. Loudly.
I have a new alarm: "briefing", which reads me stuff from my phone to orient me. It's fascinating. It also goes with the fan automatically turning off, which tends to wake me up feeling somewhat sticky and annoyed. Sticky and annoyed is much better than the nerve-jangling jolt where all my nerves feel like my bones aren't square up, the one from the shrill audio alarm. Or, worst of all, a knock on the door.
My Overlady has returned! Work is not the same without her about. Purple is still on vacation. (Work is also not the same without him about.)
Today there was a guest speaker. (Tuesday: Azz: "Shall I save you a seat?" Purple: "Sure, unless I get there first.") A lot of people had the excellent idea to arrive early. I was limping along (very far) after lb and one of his people when I espied one of the campus shuttles approaching. I went for that rather than risk blowing out my knee again.
I arrived just slightly after lb and friend, which was good timing all told. We were well early. No sign of Purple, but quite a few folks with the same idea. I saw Mr. Zune was there as well. Purple arrived in good time. We had four out of five #cupcake, the fifth being possibly in an alternate universe (or maybe just Australia). I gave over the seat-watching to Purple, and hit the restroom, as I am well aware of my bladder's attention span.
"Make sure my seat doesn't get abducted by aliens," I said, as 'abducted by aliens' was apparently the closest phrase standing in for 'gets snagged by someone else'; my Overlady later apologized for her part in breaking my head, as she'd used 'abducted by aliens' in front of me a short time prior.
Purple agreed, with some hilarious and also terrible clarifications, involving substitution of the chair with a reproduction.
"As long as it fulfils the same basic functional requirements," I said.
Purple's next comment was about the chair eating the user. I allowed as how *not* eating the user is one of the basic functional requirements of a chair.
"You're a terrible person," I added fondly. "I like you." On which note I left.
The room filled up very quickly after it got going. Purple mentioned upon my return that he had taken his eye off the chair for a brief instant, in which it might or might not have been replaced by some very fast aliens. Hilarity ensued. Mr. Zune joined the conversation with the internet's thoughts on object permanence:
The speaker spoke! Rather, first there was the introduction from the CEO, the same one I'd introduced myself to as "minion" these few years past. (And in much the same company, happy to say.) Then the other two people from the company hosting & moderating questions. And at the back, the A/V guy was recording vigilantly for those who couldn't be there.
There were some prepared questions solicited from a high-level internal audience, and those had been sifted through. The speaker had many interesting things to say, not necessarily in direct response to the questions. It was a delightful experience. There were questions around the room and from remote. Yay.
The guy in Mr. Zune's management chain who had joked around with us that one time is apparently a name I know (an internally distinguished engineer-y type with a reputation for being opinionated and also correct). Name, face, yay.
After the speaking portion of the event concluded, everyone who had brought their textbooks with them lined up to get them signed. Since #cupcake had not brought textbooks, we headed off in our various directions.
I got back in time to meet the new interviewee and work with my manager on getting a novel purchase request submitted for a purchase order for a thing. The combination of iProcurement and the unfamiliar departmental procedures and the fact that my account isn't hooked up with the same accesses and accounts my manager's is resulted in dire confusion when I tried to submit, but she was able to sail on through. Yay. She had the glee of a new door that has been opened.
Oh, and the email issue.
Once upon a time, best-beloved, I had an email box on the Exchange server. Then darkness descended upon the land, and my department was bundled off to That Application Which Is Noun, Verb, and Sundry Other Parts Of Speech. And recently it has come to pass that That Application was verbing me pretty hard, enough to disturb helpdesk with all the noise, and my Overlady and I were moved back to Exchange. Now many modern minions choose to take email on their mobile devices. (A good chunk of engineers choose not to do this on their phones, and I can't particularly blame them.) Some of my workflow, particularly the stuff I can do from anywhere, is to read the email and file them away in the appropriate folder.
Like many of my work processes, my approach to email evolved over time. I made a folder named Archive, and then after switching to $VERBINGNOUN which had an experimental Archive function, I had to make a new folder named Archived and get rid of the Archive folder, because the experimental function depended on that specific name. And various other little things.
Upon switching back to Exchange, several of my most-used folders disappeared from mobile view. I grumbled about it, but there was enough going on that I didn't have the time to hammer at it. I would have done the uninstall/reinstall dance if I'd had time.
Then I swapped phones. The same problem that was showing up on Jonathan in our internally developed app was showing up on Andromeda in the stock app. That said to me that the problem was on the server, and it had only showed up after swapping mail servers. I filed a ticket.
My Overlady knew nothing about the problem offhand, but did give me some tips on file structure. I went back to my desk and called the helpdesk for an update, and played around with my file structure a little. Then I asked Google, just for fun.
Turns out that if the folder is corrupted a little, the Android won't see it. A horrible hypothesis popped into my brain: what if the common factor was that I had created the folders while $ELSEWHERE? Because I'd started on Exchange, I still would have had folders that had
originated from Exchange, which I hadn't altered. And it felt to me like all of the mobile-ly missing folders were created after the move...
I updated the ticket with my hypothesis and started manually shuffling folders in accordance with the prophecy.
I'm not sure how many people will a) have new folders in their inbox level, b) created them on the web client and not through like mail.app or whatevs, and c) now access their mail via android. I find the fucking corner cases. I'm amazing like that. If I could tell my past self something, I would say: "Don't worry. That talent you discovered while volunteering for LiveJournal, of finding the weird thing? That talent is transferable. There are other places you will learn to use it."
If you have kids and you want them to have the best chance at getting this skill when they grow up, teach them to look closely for little details that other people might miss. Teach them to create associations between the things they observe, and spot patterns. Teach them to comment about it when they notice something that seems out of place or interesting to them. The words "That seems strange!" should always be followed by "I wonder why it happens that way?"
"I'm the bellwether!" I told #cupcake. "Either that or the canary."
"I was going to say canary," Purple said.
Heh.
I have a new alarm: "briefing", which reads me stuff from my phone to orient me. It's fascinating. It also goes with the fan automatically turning off, which tends to wake me up feeling somewhat sticky and annoyed. Sticky and annoyed is much better than the nerve-jangling jolt where all my nerves feel like my bones aren't square up, the one from the shrill audio alarm. Or, worst of all, a knock on the door.
My Overlady has returned! Work is not the same without her about. Purple is still on vacation. (Work is also not the same without him about.)
Today there was a guest speaker. (Tuesday: Azz: "Shall I save you a seat?" Purple: "Sure, unless I get there first.") A lot of people had the excellent idea to arrive early. I was limping along (very far) after lb and one of his people when I espied one of the campus shuttles approaching. I went for that rather than risk blowing out my knee again.
I arrived just slightly after lb and friend, which was good timing all told. We were well early. No sign of Purple, but quite a few folks with the same idea. I saw Mr. Zune was there as well. Purple arrived in good time. We had four out of five #cupcake, the fifth being possibly in an alternate universe (or maybe just Australia). I gave over the seat-watching to Purple, and hit the restroom, as I am well aware of my bladder's attention span.
"Make sure my seat doesn't get abducted by aliens," I said, as 'abducted by aliens' was apparently the closest phrase standing in for 'gets snagged by someone else'; my Overlady later apologized for her part in breaking my head, as she'd used 'abducted by aliens' in front of me a short time prior.
Purple agreed, with some hilarious and also terrible clarifications, involving substitution of the chair with a reproduction.
"As long as it fulfils the same basic functional requirements," I said.
Purple's next comment was about the chair eating the user. I allowed as how *not* eating the user is one of the basic functional requirements of a chair.
"You're a terrible person," I added fondly. "I like you." On which note I left.
The room filled up very quickly after it got going. Purple mentioned upon my return that he had taken his eye off the chair for a brief instant, in which it might or might not have been replaced by some very fast aliens. Hilarity ensued. Mr. Zune joined the conversation with the internet's thoughts on object permanence:
The speaker spoke! Rather, first there was the introduction from the CEO, the same one I'd introduced myself to as "minion" these few years past. (And in much the same company, happy to say.) Then the other two people from the company hosting & moderating questions. And at the back, the A/V guy was recording vigilantly for those who couldn't be there.
There were some prepared questions solicited from a high-level internal audience, and those had been sifted through. The speaker had many interesting things to say, not necessarily in direct response to the questions. It was a delightful experience. There were questions around the room and from remote. Yay.
The guy in Mr. Zune's management chain who had joked around with us that one time is apparently a name I know (an internally distinguished engineer-y type with a reputation for being opinionated and also correct). Name, face, yay.
After the speaking portion of the event concluded, everyone who had brought their textbooks with them lined up to get them signed. Since #cupcake had not brought textbooks, we headed off in our various directions.
I got back in time to meet the new interviewee and work with my manager on getting a novel purchase request submitted for a purchase order for a thing. The combination of iProcurement and the unfamiliar departmental procedures and the fact that my account isn't hooked up with the same accesses and accounts my manager's is resulted in dire confusion when I tried to submit, but she was able to sail on through. Yay. She had the glee of a new door that has been opened.
Oh, and the email issue.
Once upon a time, best-beloved, I had an email box on the Exchange server. Then darkness descended upon the land, and my department was bundled off to That Application Which Is Noun, Verb, and Sundry Other Parts Of Speech. And recently it has come to pass that That Application was verbing me pretty hard, enough to disturb helpdesk with all the noise, and my Overlady and I were moved back to Exchange. Now many modern minions choose to take email on their mobile devices. (A good chunk of engineers choose not to do this on their phones, and I can't particularly blame them.) Some of my workflow, particularly the stuff I can do from anywhere, is to read the email and file them away in the appropriate folder.
Like many of my work processes, my approach to email evolved over time. I made a folder named Archive, and then after switching to $VERBINGNOUN which had an experimental Archive function, I had to make a new folder named Archived and get rid of the Archive folder, because the experimental function depended on that specific name. And various other little things.
Upon switching back to Exchange, several of my most-used folders disappeared from mobile view. I grumbled about it, but there was enough going on that I didn't have the time to hammer at it. I would have done the uninstall/reinstall dance if I'd had time.
Then I swapped phones. The same problem that was showing up on Jonathan in our internally developed app was showing up on Andromeda in the stock app. That said to me that the problem was on the server, and it had only showed up after swapping mail servers. I filed a ticket.
My Overlady knew nothing about the problem offhand, but did give me some tips on file structure. I went back to my desk and called the helpdesk for an update, and played around with my file structure a little. Then I asked Google, just for fun.
Turns out that if the folder is corrupted a little, the Android won't see it. A horrible hypothesis popped into my brain: what if the common factor was that I had created the folders while $ELSEWHERE? Because I'd started on Exchange, I still would have had folders that had
originated from Exchange, which I hadn't altered. And it felt to me like all of the mobile-ly missing folders were created after the move...
I updated the ticket with my hypothesis and started manually shuffling folders in accordance with the prophecy.
I'm not sure how many people will a) have new folders in their inbox level, b) created them on the web client and not through like mail.app or whatevs, and c) now access their mail via android. I find the fucking corner cases. I'm amazing like that. If I could tell my past self something, I would say: "Don't worry. That talent you discovered while volunteering for LiveJournal, of finding the weird thing? That talent is transferable. There are other places you will learn to use it."
If you have kids and you want them to have the best chance at getting this skill when they grow up, teach them to look closely for little details that other people might miss. Teach them to create associations between the things they observe, and spot patterns. Teach them to comment about it when they notice something that seems out of place or interesting to them. The words "That seems strange!" should always be followed by "I wonder why it happens that way?"
"I'm the bellwether!" I told #cupcake. "Either that or the canary."
"I was going to say canary," Purple said.
Heh.
no subject
I'm picturing JARVIS when Tony wakes up. Is that accurate?
no subject
Not too far off! A short tune to get my attention, date and time, calendar summary, headlines, and I think weather. Only slightly customizable, alas.
no subject
no subject
Heh. At least you will not have the whole album? (I picked the subject line because canary; when you mentioned the earworm potential, I remembered that there is someone who gets a whole album.)
no subject
Also, you have the most interesting workthings.
no subject