Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2015-02-12 12:39 am
azurelunatic) wrote2015-02-12 12:39 am
Wednesday: The Sticky Box is not for human consumption
One of the fun interludes of yesterday afternoon was helping inoru_no_hoshi test whether a headset worked for phone. Yay!
Went to bed early last night, and conked out sometime around midnight. Woke up at my "sensibly early" alarm, which is 9. Even dilly-dallying around, I was still in the office by 10:45, and the lack of any early meeting made me crank through some things. The person acting as release manager for the helldesk software finally got us logins to the piece of software which they have cram-jammed their issue tracking into. And you know, compared to the helldesk software, I have to say that SFDC (as they call it) is (comparatively) elegant and straightforward, aside from the fact that they hide their FUCKING SEARCH BOX in one of those murphy-bed side drawers that you have to notice in order to open. And it's shut by default, unless that's also a narrow-screen problem.
But I get ahead of myself. (SFDC? Oh, that. That is what they call SALES FORCE DOT COM for short. You know, the SaaS CRM that I'm violently allergic to? To the point that when explaining the fact that they use it for an issue tracker to Madam Standards rendered every fourth word out of my mouth unprintable, in a vicious whisper? Turns out that after [helldesk], it's not bad at all.)
Any day when you have to call HR is probably not great. Any day when you have to call HR because the ticketing system is doing terrible things to someone who shouldn't be hassled by it? It was a surprisingly pleasant conversation, and the person who is being hassled by the helldesk program is safe to write a rule to route the excess email to the trash. I remain unimpressed by the helldesk program. The HR guy promised to get me the number of the ticket about the duplicate notifications so I could track it. I'll have to check back.
The snowed-in guys in MA told me about their hardware. I spent a surprisingly short amount of last night wandering around my corner of the building ogling my team's hardware for administrative purposes. Since Massachusetts is pretty far to wander, I emailed the MA guys directly, if vaguely as to the purpose (I'm doing this under the Acting Director's guidance, and for a purpose, but in case it goes badly I'm trying not to spill the beans, Boston baked or otherwise). One of the guys who share an office and work as a unit told me that his backup drive was possibly on its last leg, making alarming noises. This clearly would not do, so I placed an order immediately. You do not fuck around with things like that, you replace them before you have a data loss incident.
I was feeling fairly productive by the point that I told Purple that tomorrow, I'd be heading to lunch early due to a 13:00 meeting (because conference, because Thursday). Purple promptly said that it wasn't all that early and sent the lunch ping, then realized that I'd said "tomorrow". Heh.
Lunch was pleasant. Purple teased me gently about my sleep schedule, as last night it was almost diurnal-person. One of the guys had discovered that in the early days of cars, people crashed into things all the time. They were used to horses, which have robust anti-collision principles, and cars did not. Though the modern car is changing that. Purple distrusts all of the many things which can go wrong in a self-driving car, like sensor failure. I distrust humans' ability to maintain proper attention and react in time. This went into how a "baby on board" sign can be a warning that the driver may be distracted by any number of small children being horrible within the car. "Anyway, you shouldn't have been tailgating and watching Spongebob through the rear window!"
This further devolved when one of the guys mentioned that there was some guy who had been cited for watching in his car something which "should not have been watched in public". Yours truly pointed out that there was a long and kind of terrible tradition of people doing things inside moving cars which should not have been done in same. Combining that with video is just asking for trouble. We had moved on to other driving things, including LA drivers and the terrible on/off ramp to 101 by Rengstorff, when radius came by brandishing a small box. This time it was a personal package (heh), so he had no need of my work FedEx login, but he wanted to know could he use my packing tape. I said something permissive involving the Sticky Box, which occasioned endless giggling and the inevitable re-engineering of various sentences to make them worse. "Throw it back in the Sticky Box when you're done" became "When you're done, you can stuff it in my Sticky Box." We are terrible people. *beams happily*
Fortunately, there's a "Not for Human Consumption" cling on my Sticky Box, so there is no chance that anyone will try to eat my Sticky Box.
I had a meeting up top the hill with the Dean, about Movie Night. Mr. Sub-tle was still pretty elusive. But I had prepared with a list of all-time best, classic, and cult movies from Rotten Tomatoes, for suggestions for the 2nd instance. The Dean happily claimed those. Additionally, he likes the peppermint & white chocolate truffles.
Since I was going to be up on that end of campus anyway, I had brought a map and a handful of candy intended for people associated with the helldesk software. I'd meant to introduce myself to the person newly in release manager role, but he wasn't at his cube. I left a few things on the side of his desk. Then I went down to the (well-lit, as it was on the low side of the hill) basement with a handful of candy for the senior developer on the project, the sensible fellow we met at the rather terrible meeting in September. He was happy to see me, and happy to hear that I felt there was visible progress. He also does pay special attention when he sees tickets coming in from me. "I was raised in Open Source," I explained. Dear LJ, you brought me up right. I mentioned that I had finally got a login to the bug tracker, so I could do acceptance testing. Release on this one is next week. He did say something about next month's which has me intrigued.
I went to triage my email in the milkshake bunker. Mr. Zune joined me there, and we talked mostly hardware and statistics. Then we walked back.
I then launched myself into the wilds of SFDC. There was, as previously mentioned, swearing. But it went well overall, succeeding in four out of the five tests, and not being any more broken in the fifth test than it is in production already (for apparently unrelated reasons). One of the things I tried to do once I finished my own assignment was to attempt to tackle the ticket of the A-Team Leader, who is one of the not-so-technical administrative assistant types. (I am unusual among Virtual Hammer administrative assistants in that I come from an actual helpdesk and minor dev background.) Unfortunately, it involved triage stuff that my account, even on the testbed, can't apparently do.
My phone battery being horrible, I determined that I should try to get to the phone place before they closed for the night.
I hit step count pretty easily, and while I was moderately sore and took a little blue pill, I was not majorly, tearfully sore. Yay stamina!
Apparently ordering a laptop stand for Rocky was very thoughtful of me. He mentioned craning his neck and squinting at the laptop screen, and one of these problems can be solved with a $30 piece of hardware.
I pinged Purple, and we got out of there very close to a sensible time, I'd just to put a few things on the wiki. We didn't stand around chatting too long in the parking lot, either.
I had a hard time explaining to the guys why an Otterbox was not recommended for this phone at this time -- when you have a phone back that is out of spec with what the Otterbox is expecting by 1-2mm, the Otterbox will not take kindly to this. "It's being flaky," I described to Purple, and showed him the crack and where pieces are literally flaking off of the hard part of the thing.
One of my requirements in a phone case is somewhere to hook a strap. This one is sort of terribly placed, but reasonably secure.
So now I have a new battery and a new backup battery. And it was still early enough that I could get back to the west end of the bay and refuel before Costco gas closed for the night.
And now it is bedtime.
inoru_no_hoshi test whether a headset worked for phone. Yay! Went to bed early last night, and conked out sometime around midnight. Woke up at my "sensibly early" alarm, which is 9. Even dilly-dallying around, I was still in the office by 10:45, and the lack of any early meeting made me crank through some things. The person acting as release manager for the helldesk software finally got us logins to the piece of software which they have cram-jammed their issue tracking into. And you know, compared to the helldesk software, I have to say that SFDC (as they call it) is (comparatively) elegant and straightforward, aside from the fact that they hide their FUCKING SEARCH BOX in one of those murphy-bed side drawers that you have to notice in order to open. And it's shut by default, unless that's also a narrow-screen problem.
But I get ahead of myself. (SFDC? Oh, that. That is what they call SALES FORCE DOT COM for short. You know, the SaaS CRM that I'm violently allergic to? To the point that when explaining the fact that they use it for an issue tracker to Madam Standards rendered every fourth word out of my mouth unprintable, in a vicious whisper? Turns out that after [helldesk], it's not bad at all.)
Any day when you have to call HR is probably not great. Any day when you have to call HR because the ticketing system is doing terrible things to someone who shouldn't be hassled by it? It was a surprisingly pleasant conversation, and the person who is being hassled by the helldesk program is safe to write a rule to route the excess email to the trash. I remain unimpressed by the helldesk program. The HR guy promised to get me the number of the ticket about the duplicate notifications so I could track it. I'll have to check back.
The snowed-in guys in MA told me about their hardware. I spent a surprisingly short amount of last night wandering around my corner of the building ogling my team's hardware for administrative purposes. Since Massachusetts is pretty far to wander, I emailed the MA guys directly, if vaguely as to the purpose (I'm doing this under the Acting Director's guidance, and for a purpose, but in case it goes badly I'm trying not to spill the beans, Boston baked or otherwise). One of the guys who share an office and work as a unit told me that his backup drive was possibly on its last leg, making alarming noises. This clearly would not do, so I placed an order immediately. You do not fuck around with things like that, you replace them before you have a data loss incident.
I was feeling fairly productive by the point that I told Purple that tomorrow, I'd be heading to lunch early due to a 13:00 meeting (because conference, because Thursday). Purple promptly said that it wasn't all that early and sent the lunch ping, then realized that I'd said "tomorrow". Heh.
Lunch was pleasant. Purple teased me gently about my sleep schedule, as last night it was almost diurnal-person. One of the guys had discovered that in the early days of cars, people crashed into things all the time. They were used to horses, which have robust anti-collision principles, and cars did not. Though the modern car is changing that. Purple distrusts all of the many things which can go wrong in a self-driving car, like sensor failure. I distrust humans' ability to maintain proper attention and react in time. This went into how a "baby on board" sign can be a warning that the driver may be distracted by any number of small children being horrible within the car. "Anyway, you shouldn't have been tailgating and watching Spongebob through the rear window!"
This further devolved when one of the guys mentioned that there was some guy who had been cited for watching in his car something which "should not have been watched in public". Yours truly pointed out that there was a long and kind of terrible tradition of people doing things inside moving cars which should not have been done in same. Combining that with video is just asking for trouble. We had moved on to other driving things, including LA drivers and the terrible on/off ramp to 101 by Rengstorff, when radius came by brandishing a small box. This time it was a personal package (heh), so he had no need of my work FedEx login, but he wanted to know could he use my packing tape. I said something permissive involving the Sticky Box, which occasioned endless giggling and the inevitable re-engineering of various sentences to make them worse. "Throw it back in the Sticky Box when you're done" became "When you're done, you can stuff it in my Sticky Box." We are terrible people. *beams happily*
Fortunately, there's a "Not for Human Consumption" cling on my Sticky Box, so there is no chance that anyone will try to eat my Sticky Box.
I had a meeting up top the hill with the Dean, about Movie Night. Mr. Sub-tle was still pretty elusive. But I had prepared with a list of all-time best, classic, and cult movies from Rotten Tomatoes, for suggestions for the 2nd instance. The Dean happily claimed those. Additionally, he likes the peppermint & white chocolate truffles.
Since I was going to be up on that end of campus anyway, I had brought a map and a handful of candy intended for people associated with the helldesk software. I'd meant to introduce myself to the person newly in release manager role, but he wasn't at his cube. I left a few things on the side of his desk. Then I went down to the (well-lit, as it was on the low side of the hill) basement with a handful of candy for the senior developer on the project, the sensible fellow we met at the rather terrible meeting in September. He was happy to see me, and happy to hear that I felt there was visible progress. He also does pay special attention when he sees tickets coming in from me. "I was raised in Open Source," I explained. Dear LJ, you brought me up right. I mentioned that I had finally got a login to the bug tracker, so I could do acceptance testing. Release on this one is next week. He did say something about next month's which has me intrigued.
I went to triage my email in the milkshake bunker. Mr. Zune joined me there, and we talked mostly hardware and statistics. Then we walked back.
I then launched myself into the wilds of SFDC. There was, as previously mentioned, swearing. But it went well overall, succeeding in four out of the five tests, and not being any more broken in the fifth test than it is in production already (for apparently unrelated reasons). One of the things I tried to do once I finished my own assignment was to attempt to tackle the ticket of the A-Team Leader, who is one of the not-so-technical administrative assistant types. (I am unusual among Virtual Hammer administrative assistants in that I come from an actual helpdesk and minor dev background.) Unfortunately, it involved triage stuff that my account, even on the testbed, can't apparently do.
My phone battery being horrible, I determined that I should try to get to the phone place before they closed for the night.
I hit step count pretty easily, and while I was moderately sore and took a little blue pill, I was not majorly, tearfully sore. Yay stamina!
Apparently ordering a laptop stand for Rocky was very thoughtful of me. He mentioned craning his neck and squinting at the laptop screen, and one of these problems can be solved with a $30 piece of hardware.
I pinged Purple, and we got out of there very close to a sensible time, I'd just to put a few things on the wiki. We didn't stand around chatting too long in the parking lot, either.
I had a hard time explaining to the guys why an Otterbox was not recommended for this phone at this time -- when you have a phone back that is out of spec with what the Otterbox is expecting by 1-2mm, the Otterbox will not take kindly to this. "It's being flaky," I described to Purple, and showed him the crack and where pieces are literally flaking off of the hard part of the thing.
One of my requirements in a phone case is somewhere to hook a strap. This one is sort of terribly placed, but reasonably secure.
So now I have a new battery and a new backup battery. And it was still early enough that I could get back to the west end of the bay and refuel before Costco gas closed for the night.
And now it is bedtime.