Writing Wrongs

Boring day at work plugging into the test case database where in the engineering spec it says the product has to pass that test.

Lunchtime, went to UPS and shipped the ASUS back to Amazon and the Tivo back to Tivo. Lunch at Popeye's next door.

Home after work, took a look at my newly recorded shows on the Tivo box and it hung the same way the other one did. Ordered replacement wi-fi adapters online, since everythin else has been changed out.

Powered up the Toshiba, and of course it had more updates waiting. 3 of them. Then rebooted and there were 11 more. This morning I plugged in all the email accounts. Or was that last night?

Ye Olde Towne Band rehearsal, we played most of what we're playing in the Sunday concert. My lip gave out about three tunes from the end. 8 months without practicing will do that.

One of the women tuba players gave me some cookies (she had mentioned them on FB). We have two women tuba players and two or three men.

Home, ate the cookies (yum!), tumbled the shirts in the dryer but did not have time to take them out and hang them up. Dinner was roti and bacon. Domino tried taking bacon out of my hand. I gave her some, but only little bits because she has accidents when she eats too much human food.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
Tumble & hang up the shirts
Maybe hang at Starbucks with the netbook. It needs updating too.

Started the morning on the phone to Tivo support, they worked around the hung machine by having me unplug the wi-fi adapter and plug it back in. When I left for work it said it was 78% done downloading.

All-hands meeting at 8 am, since it was being held at MMI HQ in Chicago. Former CEO spoke, I was not impressed. Google founder spoke, he did very well for someone who probably would prefer to be in his office, coding. New CEO spoke, I was very impressed. He knows how to do a presentation, Q&A showed he listens & remembers.

Checked my brokerage account, and yes, by golly, yesterday all my MMI stock was automagically cashed out at $40/share. Which is good because technically I didn't pay anything for them. But technically I  did. Here's what happened:

In 2007-9 I bought Moto stock on the employee purchase plan. It started at $10.50 but kept going down, probably was about $7 when I pulled the plug on a losing program. When Moto split into MMI and MMS, I got about 1 share of MMI for every 6 of Moto, and the full number of shares of MMS. Then MMS split 8 for 1 or something bad like that.

Anyhow, the cash out is good enough to buy 5 shares of Google on a good day. Which I don't plan on doing.

Lots of busy stuff at work, and a bug fix to verify, which was fun to work with. Took an old set of commercials and set them to play in a loop as if they were a cable program. Did the same with a couple of other video clips.

Lunchtime I went to the Safeway at Rivermark, needed a few minor items, also got some creamy goat cheese to put on the sourdough mini slices I had on the counter at home. Then to Yo Yo Sushi across the parking lot. This one is about the same as the other one I went to recently. Excellent sashimi.

1-on-1 with the boss, he missed the meeting, so he asked what I could tell him about it.

I'm between projects, so I volunteered for a boring one but it's one I can do. My main project was supposed to begin Monday but engineering is not ready.

Home, fired up the Tivo and it was back at square 1, and hung at the same place as last time, but with a different error message. Workaround B got me through - power off the adapter & the router, then router up and then adapter back in place. Then I called Comcast to pair the cable card. The tech had no idea what he was doing, but I did so it all worked out.

I managed to add my season passes, except for football season because Tivo had not loaded the full database yet. No rush. It hung on me while I was doing that, same as the box it was replacing, so I re-arranged some furniture to get the Tivo wi-fi adapter away from the big speaker and near the wall which the router is on the other side of.

Tivo was recording on both tuners, so I fired up the DVD player, launched Amazon Prime and watched an old Star Trek episode.

Dinner was celery stalks, ha gow and sui mai with double chocolate fudge brownie ice cream, and pistachios for dessert. No goat cheese because I'd forgotten the sourdough minis had gotten moldy so I threw them out 2 days ago.

I had planned to take a nap, but that only lasted half an hour.

The old Tivo and the ASUS Zan machine are boxed up and ready go to UPS

Plans for tomorrow:
work
UPS
YOTB rehearsal

http://howeird.livejournal.com/18003.html

First thing, Motorola Mobility's CEO nnounced that all government agencies have approved the Google buyout, and it will be final in a couple of days. Yay! Lots of talk about it at the team meeting. Boss' boss was there, which is his habit when he's in town. I like him. It will be interesting to see what happens to his job, because at the moment he is in charge of groups here and in San Diego.

After the team meeting one of my cow-orkers shared with me a corrupted video stream, which let me run two tests (they are both the same test, sometimes we have dupes because the test cases span close to 15 years and about 20 major releases. That had to run for a few hours, to make sure the machine didn't crash when bad video was being jammed down its multiple throats (in this case 12 inputs and 128 outputs).

So I went shopping. I was looking for a 256GB SSD for the Toshiba. I wanted to put it in the machine before re-installing everything. I had wiped it back to factory when the ASUS was configured, but the ASUS is going back. Turns out there is no >128GB available for that model of Toshiba, and any other model would be $2k and too bulky.

I'm doing easy transfer back from the ASUS to the Toshiba right now, and it's only 10 GB. 128 should be fine.

I started to open the Toshiba to see what kind of drive it had, but it needed a tiny torx driver, smaller than the smallest I own, for the final screw. I had all the other screws out. Went online and saw this is not an SSD, it's a panel of memory cards tied together on a board, attached with a ribbon cable. M-SATA. Not meant to be user-serviceable. Not that that would stop me if there was  replacement available, but there isn't.

The ASUS has 256GB, and it might be plain SATA.
( Read more... )

Back to work, the tests passed. Did some research for the rest of the day.

Home, made a final check with Toshiba about the drives, then went on amazon and clicked the RMA button on the ASUS. After the transfer is done I'll nuke it back to factory settings, box it up and ship it back.

BASFA had a revolving door. It was wonderful to see gridlore alive and well enough. Too bad he and his entourage had to leave early. The G&J B did their usual early bail after dinner. A few people wandered in late. Several new faces, which is good, they all seemed to have a good time and adjust to the pandemonium. kevin_standlee gave a fine review of The Game Show Show, which he enjoyed immensely. He runs a match game show at sci-fi conventions and does a masterful job, and he enjoyed the heck out of the game show pieces and being a contestant. He assessed it at worth full price twice. My follow-up ended with "worth half of discount price", which surprised everyone. If I had been there just as a game show history buff, I'd have loved it. But I was there as an actor with several leading roles in musicals and operettas under his belt, and it just hurt me to watch the leading man try to sing. He's an opera-trained baritone, but he has to really work hard and concentrate on  technique 100% of the time to sound it. And he does. Even when he's singing a Broadway-style musical. If he was any good, he's be in operas instead of writing his own musicals in a converted cinema in San Jose. There are three opera companies in the area, one of them actually pays the cast. They are Nice People™ and they try very hard, so I'll leave it at that.

I was disappointed that my Rumor of the Week was not chosen. It never got to a vote. But I did get a few zingers in.

Plans for tomorrow:
Pack up the ASUS
Work
???

Trees make a multiple pinhole camera. Shot at 6:40 pm which is close to what was supposed to be maximum coverage in Sunnyvale, CA (how appropriate!). It got a little darker between 5:30 and 6:40, but by the time the eclipse was over it was getting to be twilight anyway, so it never got much brighter after the eclipse.

Thanks to a comment made by quadrivium over on the Book of Face, I had loaded onto my Kindle the classic novel Slave Girl of Gor by John Norman. It is, perhaps, the most poorly written romance novel of the 20th century. Or maybe not, since I have not read many of them. Three, I think. It is Not Safe For Work, so I read it before I go to sleep (at home, not at work). To balance this out, for times when I am wearing clothing, I also have on the Kindle Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Written by Herself by Harriet Ann Jacobs. They balance each other in an odd way, the first being fiction about a girl born free, kidnapped into slavery and getting more and more into it, and the second being about a girl born a slave, trying to get out of it.

Reading the latter book was mostly how I spent my evening, outside in the sunny side of the apartment's picnic area waiting for an eclipse. I was stupid and did not go to Fry's as planned to get safety glasses or something similar, and since the cell phone was between my eyes and the sun I was able to take pictures, but without a filter all I got was a bright ball of sun, as if nothing was happening. At about 6:15 it started to get a little darker, but the big clue was when the wind picked up dramatically and the temperature dropped. It never got that dark - maybe 25% darker.

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This morning I slept in, Domino joined me for some of that, and spent most of the morning loading about a hundred updates onto the ASUS laptop. I managed to sync Firefox with my main PC, except they lied about it syncing passwords - I had to do those all over again.

I'm not 100% sure I will be keeping this machine. The Toshiba fingerprint login is much more reliable than ASUS's face image login. ASUS has placed the delete key next to the power button, and they are the same size & shape. And the "home" and "end" keys are function keys so it takes two hands to use them. The touchpad is HUGE and I keep brushing it by mistake.

It is faster than the Toshiba, and has a sharper display, but not by much.

While I was installing, friends in Baltimore Skyped me, and we chatted for about half an hour. My old theater buddy George and his parents (who were visiting from Ashland, Oregon). He and his parents are all long-time friends, we did The Wizard of Oz together in Fremont, CA in 1986. George and I were in at least three other musicals before that. He has given up theater for a wife and two boys. So it goes. Domino jumped up on my lap during the chat. George used to have about 6 cats, but gave that up too when he moved east.

Plans for tomorrow:
work - 10 am meeting
BASFA, probably

Called ASUS support, the rep was doing a good job considering he was not familiar with the machine and was working from an obsolete script. Essentially, the FN+F2 wireless turn on/off is broken, one must use the taskbar widget to enable BT + wi-fi. And the face login doesn't work if one is wearing glasses. It was not a low light issue as much as a too much glare issue.

This morning's fun is to try syncing my Firefox settings from the desktop to the laptop. Never tried that before.
 

It was a day fraught with intestinal discomfort. Was about to be 10 minutes early for my nails appt when I had to turn the car around and spend some quantity time on the throne. Got to the appt 10 minutes late,  had to wait half an hour, used their facilities too.

Not the best nail fill by the silent manicurist, but it'll do. Good haircut from the talkative stylist. Wanted to have lunch at the Amarin next door, but they are not open weekends. IHOP down the block, one more pit stop before waiting for a table.

Home, nap time (which was planned). Domino knew something was up, she went into sphinx position next to my head, and was still there when I woke up at 4.

Spent the rest of the day getting the ASUS up to speed. Windows Easy Transfer lies. It did not transfer my email settings. When I tried to run Outlook, it asked for the product key. I had no idea where that was - looked through my binders of program CDs/DVDs but no Office 2010. Nothing in my download folders either. Installed lots of other stuff, finally remembered that I had the DVD still in its retail box on the bookshelf. Loaded that - had to do a complete re-install - but will have to plug in all my accounts by hand. Boo Hiss.

Two pieces of bad news. The sign-in-with-your-face doesn't work if there is not sufficient light. The camera in this thing is not very light sensitive. And the big WTF is Wi-fi and Bluetooth cannot be used together. Pisses me off because I bought the bluetooth model so I could use a BT mouse. The Toshiba doesn't have this stupid hack. I don't like touchpads, you need three hands sometimes. With only 2 USB ports, and the super-thin architecture, it's pretty stupid to need an RF mouse dongle.

Plans for tomorrow:
play it by ear. The more I think about it, the less Maker Faire sounds like a good idea. I think I need quiet.

  

Busy day at work.  The CTO gave a presentation on a new device which has been on the wish list for at least 4 years, it was very thorough but easy to understand, and he did a masterful job of showing how the timing is now right to get the intro version on the market ASAP and then ease our way into the full blown dream machine.

Lunchtime I went to the apartment and picked up the new laptop, and shared turkey bologna and Kraft Singles with Domino. Two of the few things she will eat out of my hand.

Back at work, Something Went Wrong with the machine which lets us stream video clips. I have two tests waiting for that to get fixed. Received a new set of dates for two of my projects.

Home, set up the two laptops on one of my spare routers via ethernet cables, turned off wi-fi, and ran Windows Easy Transfer. Both machines are Windows 7, and it was very easy to start, but with about 350 MB transferred, it wanted the "old" computer's password.  I haven't used the password since I first got the machine, because it has a fingerprint reader. I tried all my usual passwords, but nothing. I canceled that part, and left it to grab the remaining 5GB while I took off for the RetroDome and The Game Show Show.

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Nutshell: this is the same gang which destroyed You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown last year. A double-wide married couple, he is trained as an opera singer, she is more  of a ballroom dancer/musicals soprano. I thought I was going to see a series of TV game shows simulated on stage, but what I got was a 2-act 3-hour musical similar to the 1940's Radio Hour, mostly backstage soap opera set in a TV game show. It doesn't deserve a full review, so here's the mini:

Leading man has an opera-trained voice and has no idea how to relax and just sing. Leading lady was once a wonderful dancer, but that was 60 lbs. ago. All the people in the show except for The Woman Who Plays All The Small Parts were too old for the show. Audio was way too loud (everyone was wearing a face mike, and there were also hand-helds, stand mikes and desk mikes. Most of it sounded strident.

I almost walked out a couple of minutes into the second act, when ( spolier ) they went all macho man sexist anti-career woman as their message. If I was the leading lady I'd have clocked the sponsor and stomped out.

The set was well done except for the wheel of fortune being too high for any contestant to reach. They did do three snippets of game show with audience members ;participating. The Match Game section was a hoot. They totally misused kevin_standlee's mike.

Lots of forgettable music, childish lyrics and most of them went on forever.

The cast was very energetic, and they could all nail all the numbers with one more week of rehearsal. And they could stand to cut four numbers and add another game, and pay more attention to when the applause sign should be tuned on.

Not worth the discounted subscriber price.

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I was expecting the show to be over by 10:30, but it was 10:53 when I was out the door, and had just enough time to grab some enteric aspirin and dishwashing liquid from Target across the way which closes at 11.

Then some grocery shopping across the street.

Back home, the PC transfer was done, but it was not complete because of those files which needed the old computer's password. I did the trick on the old computer of adding another administrator account, with one of my more usual passwords, and using that to reset the "howeird" account password. But when I tried the transfer again, it still wanted the original password.

So I am running the system-to-factory-settings routine on the ASUS, will set its howeird account to the same password as the new one on the Toshiba, and try again. Let it run overnight.

Plans for tomorrow:
10 am manicure & haircut
lunch at one of the restaurants near the nails place
Home/nap

I needs me a computer demolition geek icon. To-do list.

UPS delivered the ASUS Zenbook just in time for me to go home, claim it from the office, bring it to the apartment and plug it into the charger. I don't like the power brick, it's about 2" square and hogs the outlet. Good thing I use an octopus power strip where I'll be setting this up.

ASUS has the slickest packaging. Very classy.

Had lunch with Domino till it was time to head back to work. I'll probably go home again after work, before heading for the retrodome. There should be a check in the mailbox from my broker to pay for this and a couple of other toys.

Depending on what time I get home after the game show show, I may do the Windows 7 transfer thing from the Toshiba to the ASUS. It ought to be pretty quick with two SSD drives. If not tonight, then tomorrow after manicure & haircut.