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. ( Fucking helldesk, including a call to HR. )

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. ( The discussion progressed to some weird places, man. )

( further innuendo )

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.

Happiness with the whole equinox thing! Yay!

I woke up around eleven-something-ish and did things online. Then I went and gave the plasma. Doing that always invigorates me, because it's doing something good and I get Random Expendable Budget that goes toward writing nights out with the girls, laundry, groceries, fuel, and generally some left over to be completely random with. Like the pastry-oid breakfast for work on Sunday. Dad got paid enough to do impulsive gestures like that on a grander scale (see: "Seismic Salad"), and while I can't do that, I can definitely show the love with bagels, doughnuts, muffins, and Danish.

(I've said it before and I'll likely say it again, but one thing Dad is really good at is figuring out what people really want, and making it happen. Not necessarily their deepest dreams, and he doesn't cheat at cross-ball, but when he can arrange something simple that would bring joy to someone's life, he does.)

I've been reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test while giving plasma for the last couple weeks, because that's the best chance I have to read un-interrupted. It's a fascinating book. I'm sure it was a profoundly weird era to have lived through.

Construction on the Phoenix Metro light rail is intense, especially in the three-mile zig-zag from Bethany Home and 19th Ave down to Camelback, over to Central, and down to Indian School. I love the concept, especially given that I use public transit so much, but I have mixed feelings about driving through all the construction. But it's so exciting to see it in progress!

I wound up in Target. I found a GE telephone headset for a reasonable price. I took a look at the rubber wrist strap jump drives, but I was a good girl. I eyed one of the inexpensive guitars longingly (again), but I was still -- a good girl. I was profoundly shocked and amused to see a $20 cellphone that takes prepaid cards. I guess I've been out of touch with the cellphone market, because the last time I saw disposable cellphones they were in something cyberpunk and then hot girls were walking out of convenience store fabricators. Granted, the $20 cellphone was dinky and played like a really cheap calculator on the display model.

But.
This is science fiction. It was science fiction in 2000. This is 2006. Granted, that was a near-future type story, but it was a 20-years-from-now near-future type story. That's a quarter of the time.

The new headset feels like a work headset, except the microphone seems to be nicer, and the plug doesn't quite fit into the jack just right. And the work headsets have a conventional telephone receiver plug, RJ-11, rather than the teenytiny ones that are measured by inches or centimeters or whatever.

Came home to find that I'd somehow managed to whack the espresso machine on, and it doesn't have a safety cutoff switch. Nothing was on fire, but the box of chocolate covered espresso beans that had been parked on top of it had grown slumped and internally sticky. I switched it off and hoped for the best. I fear it's ruined forever. It has a profound smell of overheated equipment about it. I'm just glad nothing caught on fire.

Then I wound up going over to visit trystan_laryssa and her new computer. Her computer is an Acer, just like Allegra. Well, a couple generations removed from Allegra. It was nice to have brand recognition. Her computer has a 10-key pad. So. Jealous.

Fruits Basket, yay.

Taking trystan_laryssa to school after we wake up -- the matriarch of the household usually does the rides, but as she's got another engagement this morning, she's out of the running, and I'm in.

So, I sleep.

Phone app queries 2 things every ~minute: GPS and signal strength. Lists corresponding GPS & signal strength along with time of query. Files this. Intermittently, either automatically or at user's direction, app files this off a la distributed computing batch processing. File is headed up with service name & make/model of phone?

Mothership gets transmission, anonymizes user (do not want to be able to track a person's location with the phone signal strength map data, ever), and collates map in near real time based on time, service, and perhaps time of day, phone model, and gods know what else. Plots to map, either real time or to user query. (Free users, map refreshed daily with new info; paid users, map shown as real-time as we have it?) Needed: a corresponds-to-c'thia map, either sattelite imagery, street, or both. (Both, please -- does Google want in on the fun?) ( Read more... )

This is actually being posted at 12:47 am on July 14th, but I thought it vital to mark in my journal when I got the call from tygerr and heard more about the state of the launch than the major news sources (CNN Headline News on in the break room at work) knew.

It'll be interesting to compare timestamps on when these things get released, y'know?