Figures…

I hate where I sit at work. It’s at the corner of two heavily traffic hallways, and right across from the largest conference room in our area. So consequently at least once a day there are people hanging around right outside my cube talking. Plus the guy kitty corner from me uses his speaker phone way too fucking much (ie. ever).

So when they did a massive reorganization of our space, which involved 70 people moving from one cubicle to another, guess who didn’t move? Yup. As far as I can tell, I’m the only one in our development group who didn’t move.

Fun with statistical clustering

I have a 60Gb iPod with 10,000+ songs on it. Every day when I get to work I hit “Shuffle Songs” and probably hear 100 to 125 of them during the course of the day. You’d think with such a vast library to hear from, it would be rare indeed where I hear two songs from the same album in one day. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. Monday, I heard at least three different songs from Shonen Knife, even though they make up only 46 of the 10,000 songs. Tuesday it seems like I heard a lot of classical, including at least two Bach piano concertos (although only one was Glen Gould). I’ve definitely heard at least one Johnny Cash song each of those three days.

Very odd. The mind is pretty amazing at finding patterns in randomness, isn’t it?

Customer Service, FBO Division

Because of the move, I evidently missed out on one of my chart subscription deliveries, so I have expired US charts. Also, I’m planning a trip to Springfield MA in a couple of weeks, so I need MA approach charts. Rather than order them on-line, I thought I’d do the right thing and go to the local FBO to buy them.

On Saturday afternoon, I went to Rochester Air Center, and the door was locked. That’s a bit weird during a weekend day, but the weather was low overcast and a bit drizzly, so maybe they figured nobody was going to be flying. I went across the way to Airventure Aviation, and the sign said they were open, but again there was nobody there. Hmmm. Not great customer service, I thought, not to mention being damned inconvenient.

Tonight, at about 5:15, I tried again. This time, Airventure was closed and locked, but Rochester Air Center’s door was open. I went in, and there was nobody around. The chart display case was open, I could have helped myself, but I didn’t think I had the sort of relationship with them that would allow me to do that, especially if somebody walked in while I was taking the charts out but before I wrote the IOU. (Yeah, I could have written the IOU first, but you know what I mean.)

So now I’m left with a dilema: Either I try again, and risk not finding anybody there, and the possibility that I’ve left it too late to order, or do I order on-line, or do I just download and print the charts I think I’ll need. I don’t like the latter choice much, because it means my options are limited if I have to divert.

Various updates

  1. Got the UPS software working again, after I converted from using the mge-utalk driver to the mge-shut driver. No idea why the other driver, which has supported this UPS just fine for years suddenly started having trouble. Oh well. Such is the world of open source software.
  2. Our company photo contest results were announced today. I didn’t win anything. I guess at least part of the problem was that I ignored all the advice I got from my friends and submitted the pictures I liked best. But because of my wrist problems I didn’t have as much time to work on them as I would have liked. Oh well. Not to sound like sour grapes or anything, but the guy who cleaned up in several of the novice categories takes pictures of bicycle races and sells them at the race, which make him more than a novice in my book. Most of his pictures, though, were really good and would have won in the advanced categories as well, and my favourite one of his didn’t win anything. Actually, all the competition was really good. Of course it doesn’t help that there were three other people submitting pictures from Alaska cruises, and one person who went to Antartica.
  3. My SafeType keyboard was acting a bit weird. Every now and then I’ll be typing away and suddenly all 4 LEDs in the middle (caps lock, num lock , scroll lock and one other labelled “W”) all come on for a second or so, and a whole bunch of typing gets missed. I’ve seen this about two or three times a day at work, but when I brought the keyboard home for the weekend, I was seeing it about once a minute. Mildly annoying. I moved it from my powered USB hub to plugged in directly to the Powerbook, though, and I haven’t seen the problem since. Must be some sort of timing thing.
  4. I worked hard this week to provide a new architecture for dealing with encryption keys for our digital cinema product. Today the guy who has to use these keys comes over and starts talking about unresolved issues and use cases. My thought was why didn’t he think through these issues and use cases before he asked me for this new architecture? The upshot is that I have to totally redesign the architecture again, back to something a little more complicated than the original, but much less complicated than the one I did this week. And since development has to be finished by the end of next week, I guess I’m going to be billing some hours this weekend. Normally I’d be really annoyed at the wasted effort, but I enjoyed the intellectual challenge of that code I wrote this week.