Everything I used to bore people on newsgroups and mailing lists with, now in one inconvenient place.
I waited too long to request an IFR reservation for Sunday for Oshkosh (I should have been on the STMP site yesterday afternoon) and now there aren’t any arrival slots in any timeframe I could reasonably make. I wonder if I could file IFR to the FAH VOR and proceed VFR from there?
I was hoping to not have to do the Fisk arrival without a copilot, but it looks like that’s going to happen.
I signed up for the EAA Rideshare to try to get somebody to ride along on my trip to Oshkosh. I got three people responding, and the two who gave their “preferred response” as phone, neither of them have returned my calls. The third was all set to come, until I told him that I was going to return on Thursday.
My main task for this release has been to rewrite large swaths of the database code. Along the way, I had to rewrite a lot of code. Well, evidently in the course of rewriting the code, I fixed a couple of bugs that some people in QA don’t consider bugs. And now they’re hassling me because there weren’t bug reports (PCRs) for the things I changed, and want to know what else I’d changed. I told them that I didn’t stop to document every bug in the subsystems I rewrote, I just wrote the new code to work correctly. But that isn’t good enough for them – evidently I was supposed to spend years doing their job (documenting what was wrong with the sub-system) before I rewrote it so that the bugs they liked could have been reproduced exactly.
The worst thing about this is that yesterday we had a 1 hour meeting with managers, customer service people, installers, QA and developers because QA had freaked about another behaviour that I had never liked and I’d fixed it on purpose, at the end of which every person present except for a couple of the QA people had voted that they like it the way I made it now, instead of the way QA wanted me to put it back to. And this new discovery is in almost the exact same area.
Today I was supposed to have another private lesson with Dan, and then attempt to keep up with the team while they trained. But Dan couldn’t get there until nearly the time the team was supposed to show up, so I went out and tried to practice a bit before he got there, and then paddle with the team. But without a skeg, my boat was damn near uncontrollable on the bay – there was a tiny bit of wind coming from the west, and my boat kept wanting to weather vane into the wind. And then a boat would come along, producing a wake coming from the east, and my boat would try to turn into the waves. I’d be trying to practice a good forward stroke, and end up turning in circles. Then I’d try to keep up with the team but in order to paddle in the same direction as them, I’d be doing sweeps on one side for 10 or 20 strokes before I dared make even one stroke on the other side. I can’t really practice my forward stroke when I’m only able to paddle on one side at a time, so I yelled to Dan that I was heading back as they disappeared in the distance.
As I turned back to the dock, I got a long series of wakes coming at me, and by sweeping on the upwind side I actually got a good surf going, and about a third of the way back was assisted very nicely by that. That was the only fun part of the whole evening.
My employer has recently gotten all into “employee health”, mostly in the form of nagging us about what we’re eating. Probably they’re hoping to save on health care costs, but they’re spinning it as “we’re concerned about those of you we haven’t laid off or outsourced yet”. One of the things they’ve done is put “Healthy Choice” stickers on the least objectionable things in the vending machine.
The other day, I noticed that beside the vending machine, they’d put these redemption coupons, where if you collect 3 “Healthy Choice” stickers and stuck them to the coupon, you could redeem it for a free Healthy Choice snack. Hey, I thought, one free snack every 4 days, that sounds like a good idea. Then I read the fine print: you can only redeem the coupons on the first thursday of the month, at the cafeteria, between 11:30 and 12:30. I’m surprised there wasn’t a “beware of the tiger” sign involved in the process somewhere. I’m sure the process was carefully designed to discourage people from redeeming them.
So rather than save up my coupons, and suddenly one day a month having a vast armload of free snacks, I started peeling my stickers off at the vending machines, sticking them to coupons, and leaving them there for others to take. My lead was soon followed, and now every day there are several of these coupons full of stickers, waiting for somebody with a different sense of time spent versus reward gained to try to redeem them. I hope that person walks in on that appointed day with hundreds of these things.