random bits

[cellio]

Great. My car has a heisenbug. The pesistent warning light failed to persist through today (it cut out on the way home from work on Friday). I called the dealership to ask if my inability to demonstrate the problem would preclude their exam, and they said yes. So I didn't have it looked at tonight. And I have no idea if the problem is gone temporarily, gone never to return, or a sign of a burned-out indicator. I'm going to assume not the last, for now.

Speaking of bugs, the cable connecting the DVD player to the TV is not at fault. Drat. The guy at Radio Shack, after applying a testing gadget, described it as "astonishingly good". I don't have either a spare TV or a spare DVD player to debug with, but the DVD player is more portable so I'll start there. Aside: the set of connections on the back of the TV only slightly resembles the picture in the manual, and they're not labelled. Whee. I might have noticed that earlier had the folks who delivered the TV not also wired everything up for me.

My new SDK developer started work today (yay!). I anticipated and planned for a bunch of possible problems. The only one I missed was network failures with the computer she'd be using. Oops. It's kind of hard to fetch things from various internal web sites without a good network connection. Fortunately, we got that fixed before I resorted to burning CDs. (This is a temporary, floater, machine, as the one we actually ordered for her is apparently still on a truck somewhere.)

sanpaku on a certain class of PS2 games: Honey. You don't really think that fantasizing about blowing people's heads off in the mall could ever take the place of you, do you? Just wait over there while I run over this hooker.

Comments

[goldsquare.livejournal.com]

"No spare DVD player".

Laptop?

[cellio]

Ah, I didn't realize that laptops might interact with an external DVD drive. Good point. I'll ask Dani if his work laptop (some modern flavor of Mac) has the relevant connectors. (I don't have a laptop myself.)

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the tip o' the pen!

We had the Check Engine light on intemittently in our Prizm between the 15K and 30K phases and occasionally thereafter, with no rationale or ill effect. It is The Universal Car Problem, and therefore not worth worrying about.

[cellio]

Thanks. My previous car first gave me a flash of the "check engine" light at age 14, so I'm not used to this.

[nsingman.livejournal.com]

Sorry about the car, but thanks for "heisenbug." It's such a great word!

[cellio]

You're welcome. I first heard it from a developer whose bug went away when he turned on profiling. :-)

[jducoeur]

Seconded. Definitely a word I need to add to my vocabulary: concise, and highly meaningful to the kind of people I'm likely to use it with...