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you get a call on your cell phone earlier than you normally come into work with urgent questions that just couldn’t wait another 15 minutes till you get into the office…

Doing integration testing can always be quite entertaining. Today I found a bug that is completely consistently easily reproducible–if you do some combination of things on about the order of complexity as most video game cheat codes–Send a reset. send four ammo level sets as one message. Then send three more ammo sets individually. then reset. notice reset was ignored, incorrectly. reset again. suddenly it works. As it turns out ammo level set wasn’t setting the toggle bit… so if you had seven ammo messages going across, the first two resets had identical toggle bits and thus were being filtered as duplicates.

So the company picnic was today…it was pretty cool. I met some families of some people that I hadn’t had the opportunity at the past picnics to meet the families of, which was neat. Definitely gives you a better idea who people are as a whole and not just within the confines of the context of work.

Played a little volleyball…got a little sunburned, so I went to find someone with sunscreen to borrow. After walking around a while I saw this lady with a couple little kids, who I asked if I could borrow some sunscreen from. And while I was putting it on, back comes the dad–and much to my surprise, it turns out to be someone I knew–a really upbeat friendly fellow who I run into at the picnic table at lunch sometimes. He had thought that somehow I’d seen him over there earlier or something and had come over to talk. But no…it was just luck (if you could call it that). He’s such an upbeat guy, and his wife and kids were soooo sweet, so it was great to meet them.

And then there was massive Uno playing too. Apparently that’s THE game to play lately everywhere I go…which is fine by me, I like the game. In fact, I have an Uno deck. D., whom I know from the softball team at work, was totally prepared, had a card table, folding chairs, Uno, and a friend she sings gospel choir with (who knew she sings in a church choir? Isn’t that cool the things you learn at company picnics). D. had some cool “club rules” to play–where you can play a draw two on a draw two instead of drawing and it passes it to the next person who either has to put down a draw two or they have to draw four and so on…so they are cumulative till someone doesn’t have one to play and has to draw…leading to amusing results like having to draw 10 cards…and we were playing “infinite draw” (no passing after two cards that are the wrong color) so the games lasted foooorever. We only played three rounds and D. won every round. J. (friend who works in another division) and C. (who I also know from the softball team) joined us for a round or two also. More fun with five than with three!

This week’s project at work is to catch and reject any data that has location coordinates that are too far away from the training range. In and of itself, detecting an out of range coordinate is fairly trivial (especially since we’re using UTM coordinates rather than Lat/Lon), its the permutations of the type and shape of the obstacles that make this complicated. So so far I’ve come up with about 9-12 different convoluted involved cases I need to test to make sure this works “properly”…double that if I want to regression test the non-error condition cases. But the good news is, I’m making forward progress and I’m trying to approach this methodically so I don’t miss any major cases.

“This year’s badges have print you can only read by grabbing the tag and pulling it up to your eyes, or by getting your nose closer to some folks than is actually healthful. Whoever designed the badges needs to be forced to put their noses close to all the attendees until they get the point.” —http://weblogs.java.net/blog/arnold/archive/2005/06/names_matter.html

That cracked me up…me and R. (coworker) were complaining about some people with bad BO in some of the sessions. I think it would be far beneficial to the conference to give away free deodorant samples in the backpacks

This guy had some pictures of the AfterDark birthday bash highlighting some things I didn’t get to see. I was there at some point, but apparently not at the right time to see some of the things he saw. Cool to at least see the pictures after the fact.

“Rules of Line Land: When you see 5000 people in a line, you should get a place in line THEN ask what the line is for. This seems to be the only way to get into meals before they run out of food. Breakfast was only coffee and juice by the time I got in, but I seem to be only about 1000 people back in the Lunch Queue. Seriously. The line for this morning’s “General Session” was about twice the length of anything I’ve seen at the Cinerama.” — Sean B.

Yep…there were quite a lot of lines…and I saw quite a few of those lunch lines that not only went out of the big room where they had the lunch area, but twisted around through several hallways all the way from the south building to the north building…I luckily mostly got lunch fairly early and didn’t so much have to deal with that messiness…but still…the prinicple definitely applies.

my cube at work isn’t very cluttered at the moment. I try to make it a part of my routine that I spend the last fifteen minutes of work on friday just straightening up my cube and putting papers away and leaving my desk so that I can walk into a nice clean cubicle on monday morning with a sparkling clean desk just begging me to come sit down and enjoy my nice clean space.

I have a lot of “urgent” emails that I need to catch up on at the moment. Of course, the “wally” rule about urgency always never ceases to be true (leave any urgent task 7 days and most of the time it becomes obsolete)—You’ve seen that Dilbert strip right? Its one of the ones I have thumb-tacked up in my cubicle.

What sorts of things do you have decorating your office? Mine is almost littered with comic strips, animal posters, “green living things” (ie. indoor houseplants that can tolerate torments of abuse like lack of light and inconsistent watering), little colorful items like a stuffed Dilbert someone gave me, annual cerebral palsy fundraiser thank you gifts, miniature origami, plastic flower leis. It all gives a little color and life to the otherwise drab “cubicle blue” space that I spend so much time in.