colors

Our contractor returned on Friday morning. Some of the work we want will have to wait until spring, but some can be done soon. In theory, he is going to paint and mount shelves in the room that will be my office in about a week. Yay!

Today I went to Home Depot to buy paint. Now, I don't have a favorite color per se -- that is, my "favorite" varies depending on context (paint? clothes? carpet? food?). I like yellow in many of these contexts, though, and I was kind of bummed that painting the bathroom yellow would have been a bad idea, so I was determined to have yellow for my office. But I'm particular about yellow.

You'd think yellow would be easy, but it turns out to be challenging. There are lots of orange-yellows and red-yellows and green-yellows (yuck!), but just plain yellow seems to be uncommon in the land of paint chips. After studying the options for a while (and carrying some outside where I could see them under natural light), I chose one. I took it to the counter and after the person looked up the formula, asked him to confirm that it contained less green than red (and ideally no green at all).

He checked and said "it's pure yellow -- in fact, it might be our only pure yellow". He complimented me on my eye for color. And now I am happily paint-enabled. With luck, I will remain contractor-enabled. :-)

(The reason that painting the bathroom yellow would have been a bad idea is that the major color in the stained-glass windows in that room is green -- so a red-tinged yellow would clash, and even a pure yellow would look greenish-yellow during the day. I can't stand greenish yellow, in pretty much any context. So I went with blue, which worked out well and is safe.)

last few days

It's been a hectic week at work, due largely to our lack of committed, firm process for software releases -- or rather, the inability of the engineers (thus far) to prevent requests for a "quick and dirty snapshot -- just a beta" from going somewhere. We will discuss this next week. (I think I was finally able to impress on the right person, on Friday, that we are not just making accelerated progress -- we are doing stuff that we will have to undo later, and that has a cost.) The real answer here is to have frequent quasi-releases, where we go through the freeze/QA/archive process even if it never leaves the building. If we do this every month, then when someone nees the "latest and greatest" he is at most out of date by a couple weeks. Part of the problem this week was that it's been too long since the last release -- but until recently, the next release was not a priority.

Tuesday night was the D&D game. It was fun. My character is now in negotiations with an intelligent weapon, of all things. This should be fascinating. (Only two party members are even elligble to wield the weapon, due to size and class restrictions. The other one is not interested. In general, if my character, a sorceror, is in melee then something has gone horribly wrong, but if something goes horribly wrong there's something to be said for having a good weapon. But this might not be what the weapon had in mind.)

Wednesday night's West Wing was fun. I think a lot of the quality of that show is in the writing (as with B5); this show seems to be targetting more of a "thinking" crowd than many shows out there. Keep it up, guys.

I'm not sure how I feel about the "Rapture-esque" Twilight Zone this week.

Saturday night we went to a "wine and dessert" party hosted by Sharon and Eliot. It was a very pleasant evening and I got to see some people I don't see often, like Christine, Greg, and Jody. I also met some new people who were interesting to talk with. Ralph and Lori were there, too, as was my co-worker Jake (with his SO Erin -- not sure which of them is the connection to which of Sharon or Eliot). Sharon and Eliot have wide social circles.