White Lightning Axiom: Redux

Well, managed to get to work by 7:45. Just in time to pretty much spend the whole day with my new QA Person. This poor lady does not know what she is in store for. I think I will declare today as the official "Mess With The QA Person" Day. Yeah, of course she can make my life so much more miserable than what I can do to her. I must give her some slack though, she has only been here a few weeks now. The task she is doing is one that has only been attempted once before... by me. The feeds group has never had the luxury of having their code shaken down for bugs, and it shows. I was sent a test file from the Skymall folks today and when I tried to run it through the system, the whole thing came crashing down. Why? Because there was one extra comma on each line. Not a very graceful exit condition, but I don't have much control over it. I feel bad for John, my PM. He will get to deal with this over the next week while I'm on yet another vacation. My last piece of work on this is to fix the 'Collateral Catalog' insertion routine. The way I got the system to add in a catalog as a line item does not make me feel very good. I look for every time the order number changes in the file and add in a line number of 101 for the catalog. All I can say about it is that it is done and if some sucker manages to order over 100 different items, then he probably does not need a catalog for more Sponge-Bob stuff. He needs to see a shrink.

I spoke to The Mrs today about the runners for the hallway and grand staircase. I guess a more accurate term would be whined and complained. I really want to get something down to protect the hardwood and my painfully applied sealant. She is doing her best with what limited time she has to find something, anything, that would look decent and handle the traffic. I guess we are finding this process a bit more educational than we had anticipated. The odd size of the hallways and staircase is not making our search much easier. We occasionally break out the tape measure and record our shame by running up and down the hallway. "Three feet wide at this end ... what? 47 inches down there? Wait ... its not three feet in the middle though ..." Our next house will certainly be made from a single concrete slab with no stairs and probably concrete walls ... with iron rebar. The New Haupertionain World Combine Headquarters Compound. I call it my dream bunker, the Mrs calls it my insanity.

I got a little surprise today on my way home from work. The temperature outside was nominally warm, but not so much that if I took it easy, I would not break out into one of my sweat-fests. Once I get started, my body seems determined to purge all fluids out of my body via the pores in my head. Needless to say, I park the car with the windows open a bit and beneath a set of trees that shade the car in the afternoon. This ensures that the hot-box on wheels doesn't melt the plastic strap on my wrist-watch before I can get the AC going. Today, that cycle was not to be repeated ... the ac pumped out hot air for the entire trip. If this kind of disaster had happened in June, you can be certain that the Saturn Limo would be in the shop faster than the sweat would bead on my brow. In this case, I can roll down the windows and hope that the 4x60 (4 windows down at 60mph) will be able to accommodate my cooling needs. I will certainly need to get this looked at though if the weather takes a turn for the warmer any time soon. Perhaps I should think about leaving it at the shop while I'm away on vacation v2.0 next week. Time to call my mechanic and get his bounty/ransom fee ready.

Once the Lovely and Adoring Mrs had finished her carpet/runner foray for the evening, I dropped the dinner activities for the Twin Toddlers of Turpitude in her capable hands and went outside to pound sand. Well, actually shovel sand. I'm getting tired of looking at the same giant pile of sand in the driveway every day. Tracking it into the house, picking it out the laundry ... the fun never ends. I toiled and slaved and hefted and slung. In the end, I thing I got about three of the five remaining tons of sand moved to the Twin Towers construction site in the back 50. If things go well tonight, perhaps I can finish it up and regain the lost acreage on my driveway. If not, it will have to wait till next weekend. I will probably need a few more tons once it is all said and done, there is a 10 foot extension that needs to be put in place for the slide from tower two that will need a lot of fill sand.

# posted by mdmhvonpa @ 8:51 AM