Writing Wrongs

Slept almost an hour past the alarm this morning, which is good for the uninterrupted sleep but meant I had to rush to get ready for work. I did manage to wander in at a reasonable time.

Spent the morning exploring another tcl command and at least got the thing to run, just without any useful information returned.

Lunchtime was car time. Got the car washed (I expect to have trade-in people looking at it tomorrow), then went to Honda and Ford and made appointments to test drive tomorrow. Larry Hopkins Honda makes me nervous - every time I go there the salesclowns are different, and very tentative, and speak less English than one needs for this job. At Sunnyvale Ford, on the other hand, there is always someone greeting me within seconds. Toyota is almost as good that way.

Next on the way back to the salt mines was a stop at UPS to pick up a package. 15-lb bag of cat food, it came in a box large enough to hold body parts.

Work, MOS.

Home. Had 3/4 of the remaining rack of Costco beef ribs and some cole slaw. Yummy. Domino liked the beef too.

Watched an episode of Elementary and do not like where they are going with it. The mystery is how long Lucy Liu will be in the cast. They have already gone beyond two natural bye-bye points. Also watched an ep of The Mentalist, IMHO a vastly superior show, which is also going somewhat away from its strengths into the realm of soap opera.

Plans for tomorrow:

So the schedule is:
10 am Toyota, Celine is the rep and I'll be test driving a Yaris and a Corolla.
Lunch next
1 pm Honda, if "Max" Koumba from Gabon is there, he may get the honor of having me drive a Fit and a Civic
3 pm Ford, Tim and a Fiesta then Focus.

There's a storyteller meetup at 7 or so I also want to go to.

Quiet day at work, except they were re-programming the keycard access and somehow managed to set off the very loud "a door is open somewhere in the building" siren.  It was on for most of the afternoon, with short periods of off. Email explaining what was going on would have been nice, the alarm sounds a lot like the fire alarm.

Continued looking at the tcl docs. Not much else.

Lunchtime I gave a ride to a co-worker to pick up her car from the shop, and stopped at a shopping center which had a Starbucks, a pizza/pasta place and a Japanese place. Japanese place was closed, pizza place was empty except for two employees eating their lunch at the bar. So, Starbucks it was. Love their criossant hot dog.

Home for a bit after work, loaded the baritone into the car and went to band rehearsals. Cruel conductor picked piece after piece with lots of high notes. My lip gave out after an hour. Maybe by the end of the season it will be able to handle the set.

Some of the rehearsing is for the 4th of July, which I won't be at this year on account of  

We have a concert on the last Sunday of each month May-September.

Got a call from the rep I saw at Sunnyvale Toyota and made an appointment to test drive a corolla and maybe a Yaris on Saturday morning. I'll also make appointments for ford and maybe honda. There is now enough cash n the bank to buy something if I want to.

Plans for tomorrow:
work
car wash
???

Which reminds me, I need to buy some iodized salt. Or does sea salt contain enough iodine?

After many days of BORING! at work, today two emergency major projects needed my attention. Yesterday I had shown Automation Guy that the syntax in his tcl docs was wrong, and by the time I arrived this morning he had found the fix, which turned out to not be about the tcl syntax but SNMP syntax which there is no way to document correctly. You just have to know to add that ".0" to the end of certain commands.

He then made a syntax error which kept the program in an infinite loop. Well, not infinite, just 2,000 minutes.

Before I could fix that, one of my favorite engineers came by and told me I could use his two linked machines to run a test I wanted to do last Friday and yesterday but didn't have a pair of my own machines with the right stuff to link them. It took 20 minutes to update their firmware, then 10 to run the test. And another 15 to write it up.

When I told boss, he reminded me that the results of the test justified a bug I had filed which Engineering zapped as "works as designed".

Lunchtime was Sizzler. They had a special on Steak & Lobster, I decided to splurge. I asked for the steak done medium, they made it well done. It was so small a piece it was not worth sending back.Tasted okay. The lobster was lobster tail, a small-ish one, but cooked to perfection.

Back to work, there was much to be done to the tcl program to make it part of the official automation run, that took the rest of the day.

Straight home, decided I needed to lie down, so I did. And slept for 2 hours, much to my surprise. And almost stayed there.

But I had a Project to do, which needed clothing on my body. First I put the small microwave which smells like smoke into the big box  which had housed the replacement replacement unit, taped it shut, put it on a dolly and motivated it to the dumpster. Next, I dollied out the replacement unit, which only smelled a little bit of smoke, and left it in the recycle section where someone will grab it and have a free almost-working microwave. Or the apartment minions will dispose of it.

Kaan and Domino had been parking on the boxes and the replacement unit (they were in the livingroom). Now I have space for an exercise bike. The apartment has a couple of those in the main building, but that's a block away, and it requires changing clothes and stuff. Now I just need to find an exercise bike.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work
YOTB

The plan for Monday was to try to get to Tina's Nail Salon on the other side of town, have a much-overdue manicure (I had lost one acrylic overlay already) and get back to the motel, check out by noon and make the 12:40 train which was about a 20-minute walk away.

Part of this was based on the shuttles - I thought they ran every 15 minutes at 10 am, but that turned out to only apply to the one going up State Street, perpendicular to where I wanted to go. The one I wanted was every 30 minutes, and it needed changing shuttles at the wharf. I walked (slowly) to the warf before a single shuttle went by, and was about 1/3 of the rest of the way before it got too hot and my legs said "no mas". So I wandered along the trail, thought I would get some shots at the skateboard park, but no, that was being hosed down by a guy with a very noisy water pumper truck.

I did get a pretty good chair photo:
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Backing up, I was up by 7:30, had the continental breakfast by 8:30. Packed about 90% of the way before stepping out.

Tried out the 270mm zoom on distant bikinis, it was quite nice, though the focus was a little soft. Wish I'd brought the Nikon 55-300. It's soft in the mid range but sharp as a tack at 300.

Got back to the motel, checked out at 11:30, walked slowly to the train station, was there about noon. Checked Amtrak's app, and it had not data on the train status. Train is scheduled for 12:40, but it didn't even know that. By 12:20 it was saying the train was going to be 20-25 minutes late. SBA Amtrak is totally lame - the readerboard never mentioned the Coast Starlight, it was stuck on "Welcome to the Pacific Surfliner" and they made no announcement that the train was delayed. At about 12:45, there was an automated announcement of "first call" for boarding the Coast Starlight, which was amusing because it was not going to be there for another 20 minutes. 10 minutes later the first call was repeated. The train finally arrived at 1:05.  

I got a window seat on the opposite side from the trip down, which meant the same view. :-( Someone going to OAK was put in the aisle seat, but after the assignment I never saw him, I think he had friends in another car. The train was packed, including the sightseeing car, so there was no escaping the two people behind me who had just met (they both boarded in SBA), had nothing in common, and yet managed to never shut up for 8 hours. Inane stuff. She is a real estate salescreature, he said he is a retired Boeing assembly worker, but reading between the lines he was laid off at 55, is now 56, and can't find another job. They traded recipes, misinformation about Amtrack (he insisted they don't have a west coast to Florida auto train because he knew there was one from the northeast). After a couple of hours she started to try to sell him stuff that she got commissions on as a real estate mogul. She also fancies herself as a wine gourmet, he knows nothing about wine except it's red or yellow. She said they should go to the club car and get a bottle of Zinfandel to split, he agreed. But in their jabbering they missed the announcement that the club car person was on break. They had a little disagreement about the Zin - she insisted it was a red wine, he said he saw a pink in. The guy who knows nothing about wine was right, of course. Much later they tried again, and came back with a small bottle of Chablis.

I could go on, but it was so inane. She is married, he didn't say if he was, but I'd bet he is. She lives in Portland, he in south Seattle. When he ducked out for a nature call, she phoned her daughter and said she would invite him visit them and see Multnomah Falls.

 Shadow's End  by Sheri S. Tepper is on my Kindle, but it is a very complicated novel which weaves between three or four plots, so the chatter behind me was not escapable through that. Besides, the scenery is amazing for most of that ride, I didn't want to be buried in a book.

We continued to be late as Union Pacific continued to play games with the signals. To add to the fun, the minions were unable to turn the heaters off, so the air conditioning was losing the battle against that plus the 99° heat outside. It was about 78° in the cab most of the trip. Maybe more - the string cheese I'd brought was softened, and the American singles slices were melted.

We got to SJC at about 9 pm, I was home before 10. In the mail was the check from my stock cash-out from the previous company, which went into the CU today.

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Today - Tuesday - was wasted in trying to set up for the test which I was working on at the end of the day Friday. After a lot of juggling it was clear we do not have the combination of equipment in our QA lab to run this test. Project manager sent an engineer to help me, he saw that there was no way to do it and offered me the use of his setup tomorrow for an hour. I figure it will take about that long.

Lunchtime I went to the highest-rated nail parlor in town, Michelle's,  5 stars from 29 reviewers. Many of them recent. Weird location across from a high school, behind a Shell station, between a BBQ place which had zero customers and no staff in sight at 12:30, and a bulgar wheat crepes place. I showed them my nails, they told me come back at 1, Michelle needed to see.

I went and had a bulgar crepe - they are all named for soccer teams - I had the Arsenal which was the opposite of its name - plain cheese. It was very good.

Back next door, showed Michelle my nails, we decided the old acrylic was yellow and ugly and needed to come off. Usually when they do this they use a press-on nail as a shiv, work it under the acrylic and it's usually painful because they score the nail underneath. But Michelle is an artist, and managed to pop them all off with no pain.

She used a high quality acrylic powder, after putting a press-on nail on each finger with superglue, and then trimming it short. This is also a popular way to build a base when there is no nail past the finger. The only nail which didn't need this was on my left thumb.

After the usual buffing, gel and UV curing she did a hand and lower arm massage with some kind of heated lotion. Nice touch. The nails look beautiful now. And feel a lot better too. I will be going back there next time.

Back at work, Automation Guy challenged me to show him one of the tcl scripts which did not work. So I did, and he was stumped. I also showed him how the commands worked correctly manually. He says he can fix it, tomorrow. It was nice to be vindicated.

After work I headed for Lucky's for a short list of stuff and then the Starbucks next door. Then home. Kaan is now very agressively trying to get Domino to play with him. He seems to be making progress. He was able to get right next to her a couple of times without being hissed at. 

Plans for tomorrow:

Work
Maybe make appontments to test drive some cars on Saturday.

Good continental breakfast at the motel, apple turnovers and fresh bagel made up for no waffles.

I left in plenty of time for the whale watching tour, which is good because I misread the directions and walked all the way to the far side of the harbor where my last trip took off from, only to be told it was right in front of the street my motel is on (across a parking lot, but close). I still managed to be way early.

There was a full boat for the trip, lots of children and almost as many stupid parents. From the side the boat looked perfect, a huge catamaran. I parked myself aft where there was both a hard seat and something to lean against. Most everyone else went to the front of the boat.

The whole harbor was socked in with fog, so we took off very slowly. The captain managed to run over a green channel marker while we were navigating past a red buoy with a lot of seals hanging out on it. The one we ran over was only about 3' tall, the red one about 6 '.

We saw a whale about 100 yards away after 45 minutes, sort of in the mist. We followed that one for a long time then lost it. Captain headed for port but on the way back we saw another. I think it was the same one which I saw last time, which hangs out in  channel close to shore.

Between being far away and having people popping up in front of me, and the captain trying to keep th whale in front of us instead of alongside, I don't think I got any  calendar-quality shots. It's the wrong time of year, anyway.

Back to the motel to drop off my day pack (I had brought along a jacket, which was never needed), then caught the shuttle (50 cents, used to be 10) to the pier, and then walked toward where Yelp said there was a good nail place. Google maps made it look like it was 4 blocks away, but it was more like 10. TLC Nails is a bare bones setup with four nail stations and a section off to the side which looks like a pedicure area, but without the foot baths. I ask the manager for an acrylic with gel top. "We don't do acrylic here. would you like just gel?" Sure. Not as long lasting but my nails are a mess. She finds a manicurist, who sees my nails and convinces me i am in the wrong salon, so I leave.

Okay, 2nd nail place is way up the main drag, I take the shuttle. Another 12 blocks. The address is 1221. It is an empty store front with a for lease sign. I cross the street to read the notice on the door, maybe they have moved. Well, someone has moved, but not the nails place. Yelp is way out of date on this one.

By now I am starving, there is a Thai place called Galanga, I have their house duck, which is delicious, but hereticly served with a knife because they did not cut the duck pieces small enough. Had a nice chat with the bus boy, whose English is not a good as my Thai. :-)  He said my accent is like a Thai person's. Yay!

3rd nails place is 6 blocks away, past the end of the shuttle line, and is only open for another hour, so I took the shuttle back to the pier, and hung out in the shade of a palm tree while sitting on the little wall by the bike/jogging/walking/pedal car trail. Lots of eye candy on this warm, sunny day at the beach. I took some pictured but mostly just enjoyed the view.

walked slowly back to the motel, posted some photos on FB for my sister (one of the yachts in the harbor had her name on it:
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It is not a common name...

I wanted to get it online early enough Baltimore time for her to see it, but later found out she was in Pennsylvania looking for apple pie and ice cream. This is her first mother's day as a grandmother, I kind of expected her to be with her daughter in law.

Grabbed the Kindle, left the camera, headed up the block for a highly recommended place called The Brewhouse. The map said 2 blocks, th legs said 6. Beef Stroganoff was superb, but I didn't realize when they listed mashed potatoes, it was a side, but it turned out to be what they poured the Stroganoff on top of. Yummy, but I should have ordered the risotto.

Dessert was amusing. The menu said the peanut butter cream pie was rated a top 10 dessert by the LA Times. It was different, and very yummy.

Service was super-slow, I was out on the patio (my choice) where they let people light up cigarettes despite the no smoking signs and laws. :-(

Waddled back to the motel, washed my face and saw the SPF4 which I had applied this morning did not work. My face is very red but my arms have a nice deep tan.

Plans for tomorrow:
Breakfast
Pack
Try to find the place I had my nails done 3 years ago.
Coast Starlight to SJC leaves SBA at 12:40 pm

The trip on Amtrak to Santa Barbara was on time or early at every stop, but somehow it felt longer then the last three times, which weren't. I guess when you have seen the same scenery so many times, there isn't much left to hold your interest. One thing which surprised me is there is a huge hangar at Edwards AFB which has what may be the world's largest American flag painted on the side. Last time I passed by it had a NASA logo, no it sports a SpaceX insignia. weird that an allegedly commercial endeavor is given a building at government facility.

There were way too many small children on the train, but they didn't cry or scream, and mostly kept close to parental units.

I brought plenty of snacks, only made one run to the snack bar for a soda. I had a bulkhead seat, no tray, so I stayed in the lounge car until I was done. Should have also picked up a bottle of water. There was a water dispenser near my seat, but no cups. :-(

Oh wait, I know why it was boring. This is National Train Day, but there was almost nothing on board or at any of the stations. The first year, there were exhibits and live music at SLO and gifts for kids at SBA, but this year nothing at SBA (in the morning there was a free ride on one of the short spurs, but that ended by noon) and at SLO there was a lemonade stand, hidden in a corner.

It was a long slog from the train to the motel with a backpack and a carry bag with leftover snacks and my jacket, in the hot sun. The street which i usually take which cuts a couple of blocks off the trip is all dug up at State Street so I had to go the long way. Several jerks riding bikes on the sidewalk despite clearly marked bike lanes. Lots of smokers here too.

without the baggage and after it cooled down some, it was an easy enough walk back to State Street for dinner. There is a place on the corner with the. Perfect. Location, and it was almost empty. On a Saturday night! The prices are somewhat elevated, but reasonable for the location. I had th grilled salmon hollandaise with steamed spinach, and it was great. So was the house salad  and the coffee ice cream sundae. $38 after tax.

Plans for tomorrow:
10 am whale watching cruise
Wing it, staying overnight, returning Monday

Lust, really. More on that later.

Work was boring until 4:45 pm, when boss asked me to replicate a possible bug which one of the engineers found in his code but had not tested on actual machines. Long story short, I did not have the right machines to replicate this, and by the time I was sure of that I had already missed the best train to SF for the Giants' game.

Made the next train, which got me to SF at 7 for a game which started at that time 4 blocks away. It took long time to climb to the top of the ramps where my seat was. The fog had rolled in, in was cold and windy. I bought a hot dog and then headed for "View Reserved Row 13". It was 13 more steep steps up. I got there, and discovered the seat I was looking for was on the other side. Back down, and vertigo kicked in. I was VERY high up, and the stairs are very steep. Instead of going up the other side I bailed. Walked down to the promenade and around to the SRO spaces by the splash section. By now tis the bottom of the 4th inning, and many Giants are hitting the ball. I left the stadium after the 4th run, I think. They scored 6 that inning.

Walked back to the train station, got the 8:40 back south, home by 10. Which is good because I have to pack for my Train Day trip in the morning - be at the station at 9 for a 10 o'clock Coast Starlight (padding because I need to park, get my tickets and a parking pass, put the pass in the car and walk back to the station again).

Oh, about lust. There are more beautiful women at the Giants' game, and in the surrounding neighborhood. The area which was once a shady, dangerous dump is now Yuppie Delight. There's even an upscale bowling alley.

Well, only in the Sierras today, Day of Thor. I miss thunderstorms. I miss counting the seconds between the light and the sound.

The usual boring day at work, except I did help one of my team figure out how to tell if the lab video network adapter was working on his new Win7 computer.

Follow-up call from an admin at Sunnyvale Ford. Told her it'll be a week or two.

Subscribed for a month to online Consumer Reports, and looked at their car write-ups. It is clear they have a whole different set of priorities than me. They gave Ford Focus the worst marks for reliability, based on their psychic hotline prediction of probable malfunctions in the first year, disregarding the next 5 years which appear to be trouble-free or close to it. They may be right, but another WTF is the report is based on about 12 different combinations of Focus models and options. Their review did make me think twice about the hatchback. But I'll leave that for the test drive.

In lieu of lunch I went to the nearby park again. It was deserted. Heard a woodpecker.

Home for an hour, then off to Ye Olde Town Band rehearsals, my first of the year, only the 2nd for the band after 2 cancellations. Concert on the last Sunday of each month. There is a pet parade they will be part of in a couple of weekends. I'll miss the 4th of July concert 'cause Westercon.

Changed the litterboxes (wanted to do this before rehearsals, but the kitties were using them), because a big box with 6 more refills arrived, and it was getting to the point on one of them that Kaan would be thinking outside the box when I'm away this weekend.

Just dumped the last 60 days of readings out of my Hgl meter, and it looks like a bad roller coaster design. Meeting with the diabetes specialist tomorrow.

Plans for tomorrow:
Diabetes appt at 11 in MV
Work
Catch the train to SF, BASFA night at the Giants game.
Pack for Santa Barbara

lisa_marli re-posted on FB a graphic purporting to show a teacher doing school work on hs own time, and a diatribe caption about how teachers do that. And she commented that she used to help grade his class' work because he taught accounting, and she is good at accounting. I will tease her here instead of there and mention that my father once taught Werner von Braun's undergrad classes as a TA, and graded those class papers, but I never learned any astrophysics or orbital/celestial mechanics. But that's just a tease because by the time I was old enough to learn that stuff, he was an engineer and all his work was top secret, so even if he wanted to he couldn't teach it to me. And he didn't want to.

But it got to thinking about my grade school teachers. I am going to try to remember them and say a smidge about each one.

Kindergarten: Name??? Blonde, young, was insulted that I could recite the alphabet before she taught it to us.
1st Grade: Miss Moshey. She had taught German to US soldiers during WWII. Her favorite phrase was "mach schnell, bitte". She was horribly strict for a 1st grade teacher, but eminently fair. Here is an example:( Read more...Collapse )
2nd Grade: No idea.
3rd Grade: Another blonde. She tried to reason with me that the baby Mom was pregnant with might not be a girl. I was certain it would be. My sister was born two weeks after school ended for the Summer, and I had to wait for months to nyah nyah nyah the teacher.
4th Grade: no idea
5th Grade: Mr. Costa. Science teacher at heart, he had the best field trips, and supported my science fair entry. His tests were easy for me, I kept getting 110% (there was always a bonus q). He also change my life for the worse by assigning me to a different 6th grade class from all the others just because I hit a bully with a rock while we were filing back to class from recess.
6th Grade: Mr. Egger. Total jerk. Did not deserve to be teaching. When I corrected him in class for his WRONG definition of vapor, by reading it out of the big dictionary, he took my report card, slapped an overlay strip and made all my grades D or worse. My parents complained to the principal, and he did not get re-hired the next year. Irony, he went to a high school elsewhere in the district, where he taught science. The next time I saw him was in 8th grade, he was judging the science fair. :-(

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It was also Nurse Appreciation day/week/eon. My appreciation for nurses started in college when I shared a house with a bunch of fellow folkdancers, and one of them was dating a nursing student who was living in a houseful of nursing students, and I dated one of them and hung out with all of them. They all had stories about how a nurse had saved their lives, and inspired them to become nurses.

I have never been sick or wounded enough for nurses to have done that for me, but I saw them in action when my folks were in hospice care at a nursing home. There were two kinds of nurses - the basic RN, who saw his/her job as helping and old person live; and the hospice nurse, who saw his/her job as helping the old person die. Mom's hospice nurse was a total drag. Mom and Dad both had two or three basic RNs who were wonderful.

Went to bed at the very early hour of 11, but did not actually get to sleep until about 1:30. And woke up briefly to look up something on the smartphone. Finally changed the radio to Portland's classical station, which helped.  I had been doing a good job lately of falling asleep to WNEW in DC, but before midnight they have some reedy voices. Or maybe it was just last night.

And that raised a question  which I must look up sometime. I coulda sworn that I grew up listening to WNEW in New York. What's it doing in DC? It's all-news, so I see the hook, but...

Work was more head-banging with tcl language. There was a nice long lunch break, farewell lunch for the (so far) only casualty of the company sale. He was also one of the last people hired, and AFAIK the only sale engineer based in the home office. I had mixed feelings, because he is a nice guy, very experienced and pretty technical, but he did Something Stupid with a customer which impacted me because I had to do the lab test for it. The layoff made sense because the company which bought us no doubt has an SE in place for that region. We went way far away to Milpitas and something Macaroni's, excellent service, somewhat inflated prices, noisier than Chili's, food quality about a 7 out of 10. Italian.

Costco after work to get some staple foods: Payday bars, Kraft Singles, Precious string cheese, croissants, mixed nuts. And a new staple, cashew clusters. It took a long time to find stuff because they had rearranged 3/4 of the store. There's a new dairy room, the whole room is refrigerated. I saw lactose-free milk, so I bought a 3-pack. This meant walking all the way to the other side of the warehouse to grab a 2-pack of Hershey's syrup. I will probably make egg creams soon.

Home, put everything away, got the mail and headed for the Keypoint CU branch which Google Maps claims is next to the new Pinkberry across the street from Trader Joe's. I park, and walk all around that new mall-ette, and the closest I see to a CU is a closed shop which says a barber is moving in soon. Walked out to Toys 'r' Us, and there was the CU, all the way on the other side of the parking lot. It looks new. Deposited the check from the IRS and got some cash back for my trip this weekend.

 Home, cooked up some Green Giant sweet corn in butter and a box of clam strips. Safeway's house tartar sauce is a FAIL. No relish.

Busy next few days coming up:
Tomorrow -Ye Olde Towne Band rehearsal
Friday night - BASFA night at the Giants game
Saturday morning - train to Santa Barbara for National Train Day.
Sunday whale watching cruise
Monday - return train trip to San Jose