Category: Jessica’s Tech Blog

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.

Hahahaha….I think I’ve been here too long…I’m at a workstation right now that has a Sun Keyboard…but its not a normal sun keyboard…its got the backspace where any PC user would come to expect it…so I’m actually having quite a hard time typing on it and keep ending up with \\\\\ everywhere out of force of habit of not reaching as far for backspace.

Sessions this morning have been really interesting, but my brain’s starting to get a little fried already.

So it turns out my new machine at work is not a 3.0ghz pentium 4 with 2 gigs
of ram, but a dual-processor 3.0 ghz pentium 4 with 2 gigs of ram.
R. just got a replacement machine that’s essentially identical to my new
machine to “fix” his broken cd-drive…overkill for the problem? perhaps…
but who’s gonna complain if IT replaces your machine with a faster one?

They sure knows how to keep me from ever wanting to go home though… ;-).
Just give me gluttonous amounts of computing power at my finger-tips…

PS: The guy from IT says, as he’s trying to identfy what was wrong with R.’s cd-drive, “Well, its either hardware or software.” Speak of the obvious,lol.

I went to Compusa tonight to see if they sold replacement toshiba power supplies. No luck. I tried calling them first, but their automated service was so confusing that I couldn’t get through to a real human, eventually hitting a number for a “manager on duty” that probably is supposed to go through to a real person but after ringing several times just dumps you back to the automated system. So I just ordered it from Toshiba directly. It was only $1 more for 2-3 day shipping instead of 3-7 day shipping…so I decided to splurge and get the air shipping so I’ll hopefully have it this week. Ohhh and on the plus side, sometime between wednesday (when I looked online to see how expensive the power cable is) and today the exact cable I need (funky connector and all) went on sale for $10 off. 🙂

Ummm, yeah, this is bad…the power cable for my laptop just caught fire…

So I start noticing this little black smoke puff coming from the back of my laptop, right? Since this is probably about the third time in the past couple days I’ve imagined I’ve seen this little “whoa, is my laptop overheating??” type moment, so I decide to look at it ASAP so I can catch it in the act of whatever’s gone wrong…

Next thing you know that smoldering wire is now a flaming wire, and I’m sitting here blowing it out like a candle while I scramble to unplug the a/c adapter at the same time. The power cable burned clear through before the flame extinguished itself, making the power cord now completely useless. At least it wasn’t like it caught fire while I wasn’t home or something…because I do sometimes leave it on (or forget to turn it off) when I’m not home…because that would have been way worse 🙂

Yesterday…I let my hair dry with gel in it so that it was all extra curly and let it hang loose, rather than my usual tie it back in a tight ponytail out of my face styling.

The difference between HR people and engineers? Nobody in engineering really noticed–well, actually, one guy did, and all he had to say somewhat quizzically, “did you do something different with your hair?” But then I went over to HR yesterday to get some paperwork. The girls in HR? A high pitched squeal of “Ohhmiiiigoosh, your hair looks soooo good like that, you should wear it like that more often!”