Monica

It's National Send Your Porn to DGlenn week. Happy to help, dglenn. :-)

According to an article in Ha'Aretz, 18% of Israelis live below the poverty line. The story lacks a key piece of data, though: the number of those who are willfully unemployed, like some of the right-wing folks who argue that men should spend their lives studying instead of supporting their large families. Has the real poverty rate actually changed?

I'm pleasantly surprised by this season of Enterprise (so far). There have been some stupid bits, but they are doing a competent job of telling a story over the course of several episodes instead of Trek's usual single-episode resolution with reset button. I hope they can keep it up. I hope they already have the ending written and that it's plausible.

Alas, it was not such a happy week for West Wing.

You know there's something wrong with a suite of software demos and test code when it's faster to write a new application (albeit a small one) than to get an existing one to run. Fooey. We're supposed to be doing a better job with maintenance. (I didn't care about the application per se; I needed to see a couple specific features in action, for documentation purposes.)

I was pleasantly surprised to get my fish for free tonight at Giant Eagle. They have a policy that the first improperly-scanned item is free, but I did not experience a scanner error. I experienced an error in programming the register that generated the label for the fish. (That'll teach me not to look at the package they hand me before putting it in the cart, I guess.) That apparently counted. I wasn't trying to get groceries for free; I just wanted to not be charged double the posted price. But I'll take it. :-)

Dani's sister and her husband visited last night on their way from DC to Toronto. The husband is an extraordinarily picky customer; had I remembered this, I would not have suggested a restaurant that we'd like to be able to return to. :-) But it all worked out and the waitress we had was amazingly good (and flexible). I presume they got off ok this morning, as we did not receive distressed calls at work asking for clarification on the directions out of the city. (On the way in they set aside our directions for something they thought would work better; it set them back about an hour.) So either they got off ok or they were too embarrassed to ask for help.

I was reminded tonight that a lot of conversation works only because of shared references. My friend Yaakov was explaining this to me once in the context of allusions to Saturday-morning cartoons: since he has been an Orthodox Jew all his life, he has never seen Saturday-morning cartoons. He just doesn't have that shared experience. Similarly, those who are geeky about computers, or D&D, or science, or whatever can make cracks that only similar geeks will understand. This came to mind tonight when Dani made a very funny, very obscure comment that only music-history geeks will get, and I realized that we do this sort of thing much more often than we might think.

(Ok, I'll try to explain it. He was talking about some goofy-sounding accounting principles (that is, I say they're goofy and he says they're not), and I made a comment about red ink. He said that writing a number in red signifies that it has two-thirds the stated value, kind of like Canadian money. Certain medieval music was written in both black and red notes, where the color of the note alters its value. Black notes are bigger.)

I returned to work yesterday to find that the HR folks wanted to move me and my office-mate to a different office. (They have a new hire they really want to put in our space. And after we finally got the white-noise generator! Well, I guess he'll need it...) So they moved people out of a different office (I require a cave) and moved us into it today. I think both of the people who got bumped got worse space than what they got kicked out of; I hope they don't hold it against us. We didn't initiate this, after all, but we're now in better space than we were.

Ok, I'm a geek. But it'll be good for the project, once they get used to it. :-)

Our company makes an SDK (software development kit). That means that we sell our product to people who then use it to make their own products. We provide documentation for those programmers. We also provide the building blocks of a user interface, which they can use or not.

It was only a matter of time before we had to start worrying about user documentation for that interface. Now, we can't just do up a user guide for the interface, because our customers can modify it and need to be able to produce their own customized user guides to go with. And we can't, it turns out, just make them do all their own user documentation. (We currently provide a quick-start guide, a UI cheat sheet of sorts.)

So I'm now thinking in terms of a "UDK", a "user doc kit". Like the SDK, we would supply building blocks and they would put them together as best suits their needs. As with the SDK, we would provide a basic implementation that makes sense and that they can use if they like.

I know I'm not breaking new ground here, but I'm enjoying thinking about the parameters of the problem so I can structure it appropriately. (It even makes up for the prospect of having to write some of that user doc...) We need to support people using everything from HTML to Word to Frame to some Mac-specific PageMaker-like tool (I don't know its name), so it looks like I'm going to settle on unformatted text files and standard graphics formats (JPG, PNG, etc) as the portable common format. I'd like to do something a little richer than that; we'll see. (I proposed XML or HTML but they didn't like that.)

We have a project in-house that needs user documentation, so I'll have a handy guinea pig. They asked me for help with user docs; I sold them this approach instead, which is generalizable. It would be stupid to just do a project-specific user guide and later raid it, cut-and-paste style, for the next project that needs this. Besides, this way we can package the bits for customers, too.

I am, I am told, abnormally good at naming classes, interfaces, methods, and the like. Other developers routinely come to me for help with naming things they're developing.

Today a developer came to me with a slightly different request. He has decided he's not good at naming, and he thinks he's not the only one, and would I be willing to give a little seminar or something on the how-tos of good naming? (I've already written a document, but it's practical advice and dos/don'ts rather than methodology.)

I'd like to do this. If successful it would improve the code base and give me a little visibility boost. Now I just have to figure out how to tease out the science (methodology) from the art (instinct); I'm guessing the former is teachable in this format and the latter isn't. The art (of anything -- programming, crafts, others) is why internships and apprenticeships exist -- you can't just do a brain dump and go.

Today was the annual company retreat (in North Park). It was ok. We got explanations/demos of a few recent, significant projects, which I appreciated. We had a good discussion in the afternoon about company direction. And there was enough food for vegetarians to eat.

They gave out some "awards" that I thought were mostly pretty stupid, like "person who travels in the most style" and "person whose life would make the best sitcom" (huh? seemed kind of insulting). I think I should probably have been on the nominee list for "most likely to think he is right". :-) As far as I can tell there were no actual nominees, though; Micky just made up a bunch of junk. In general, I can do without that kind of inane stuff.

I like this year's t-shirt better than last year's.

I have over 200 unread pieces of email now. That's after deleting the spam.

I have a doc deadline today at work (SDK release). Some of my coworkers seem to think I should be frazzled. I've learned over the years how to plan for these things, so I'm right on schedule -- including some planned-in last-minute emergencies. :-) (That is, I allocated time to then-unknown tasks that I suspected someone would come up with.) I'm running what I think will be the final build now.

There are things I want to say about the pledge-of-allegiance thing, but I know I don't have time right now so it'll have to wait.

My new computer arrived last night. Yay! I haven't done much to it yet (took a while to get it to see the network, and that was an important first step), but after Shabbat I'll begin the frenzy of installing software and the like. I also saw my USB external hard drive just zip along, which is pleasant. (The drive is USB 2.0, backward-compatable to 1.0. My old computer was 1.0; this one is 2.0. The difference in data-transfer rate is 40 times. That is not a typo.)

Eventually, I want to partition the drive and put Linux on it (dual-boot). But the 10 minutes I spent last night reading Red Hat documentation were insufficient, so that'll wait. Partitioning the drive from the start would be easier, but it contains dire warnings about interactions with NT and I don't have time to figure them out right now. (The OS is Win2000, which is based on NT.)

I also got a delivery from the beer co-op this week. Looks like an interesting assortment. There are two beers in the mix that I don't personally like, but I have friends who do. (The beer co-op is a method of sampling lesser-known beers in a state that requires that you buy beer by the case.)

Ralph's D&D game was Wednesday night. It was fun as usual. I think we need to come up with a heuristic for communicating what is important and what's not without giving things away, though. We were about to embark on a journey that would take a week and a half to two weeks. We spent a while discussing travel arrangements, how much gear we were carrying, where supply points were along the way, etc. As a player, I expected encounters along the way and possibly even some "weather hazards" (it's getting on toward winter). Ralph had planned to get us to our destination that night, though, without encounters along the way. But he couldn't just say to the players "this doesn't matter", or that would have given this away. On the other hand, we could have saved half an hour of preparations.

Last night before getting the computer I went to services and ended up leading them. (The rest of the people there voted me most likely to succeed, or something.) I really wish the associate rabbi would call or something if he's not going to show up to lead, rather than leaving us to figure this out. This is the second time this has happened recently. (The senior rabbi is out of town; normally he does this one.) I almost didn't show up, but the store was open late enough that I could so I did. (I usually go.)

Speaking of leading services, I'll be doing that again next Friday at Tree of Life.

Sunday afternoon we are going up to Cooper's Lake to paint the Pennsic house, assuming it doesn't rain. We're just doing the exterior, so this shouldn't take that long. I don't have the carved bits for the interior done yet. (Actually, they're not even drawn yet.) I hope to make and apply those in July sometime. (The house is a re-creation of a building in Cordova around the year 950 CE. They did lots of decoratively-carved stucco. I can fake that. :-) )

I think my doc build is done now.

My company makes collaboration software. One of our projects has a big deadline coming up, and they've set up a testing area. A couple weeks ago there were three machines. Monday there were seven, yesterday ten, and today a dozen. With nice flat LCD screens, because these are piled up 4 to the table.

I'd really like to borrow a breeding pair. :-)

(And when the crunch is over, I want to see if I can borrow one of those monitors for evaluation purposes...)

On Wednesday my machine at work started acting up. Frequently and (apparently) randomly, it will just go into hyperspace -- something is consuming all of the CPU, leaving no cycles left to, say, launch emacs or follow a link in a browser or get a directory listing from a shell. The task manager reports improbable results, e.g. saying that Netscape is consuming 50% of the CPU when it's not doing anything. I tried all the standard tests (disk errors? viruses? defrag?) to no effect.

So this morning one of the sys admins tried to patch the OS. It didn't work. So now this weekend he's going to try bringing it up to date on service packs and patches (it's out of date, and when he tried to install SP2 the machine crashed and the OS needed to be patched again.) All of this took something over 3 hours, and the machine is still sick, and I can find no pattern to it and no precipitating event. I mean, it's not like I installed any new apps or changed any system settings last week before leaving for the 4-day weekend. The machine wasn't even turned on during that time.

I sure hope I'll have a functional machine on Monday. The periodic reboots are a real impediment to getting work done.

I felt kind of crappy when I woke up this morning. (Can't tell, but it's possible I'm catching a cold.) Things got better after I got moving (and drank large quantities of water and a quart of OJ). But I also haven't been sleeping well, because Dani's snoring has gotten worse and he keeps waking me up (or delaying my getting to sleep in the first place). Mid-afternoon, I was feeling pretty cruddy and was contemplating just going home.

But we have a magic room at MAYA, so I tried that first. It's a small room with a "Z" on the door. It contains a bed, comfy pillows, an alarm clock, and a "do not disturb until <time>" sign to hang on the door. It's an interior room, so almost no daylight gets in.

Half an hour in the Z room made an enormous difference!

I know that's what it's there for (and it's HR-endorsed, not a clandestine engineering-group thing), but I still felt kind of sheepish using it -- I scouted the hallway when entering and leaving, etc. Maybe what I'm waiting for is evidence that other people actually use it too.

We got a new CFO today. When her predecessor (now VP of business dev) introduced us, the new CFO said "oh, I know Monica". Err, umm, ack... I felt embarrassed because while she looked kind of familiar I could just *not* place her (and probably lots of people look kind of familiar who aren't really). But then she went on: "you were at CGI, weren't you?".

Yes, I was. I left in 1988.

Ok, how many of you still clearly remember the people you worked with in 1988 (you young'ns can skip this question), especially those who were *not* your day-to-day coworkers? I mean, it's not like Robin was another engineer I worked with all the time; she was probably one of the accountants or something. I don't remember.

I've always been bad with names and faces, but somehow I don't think this one reflects that badly on me. :-)

Our company is a spinoff of MAYA Design, and we share office space. MAYA Design is populated with many visual designers; this is primarily applied to user interfaces, but it has side effects. Our office space, for example, is very unusual (mostly in a positive way). A lot of thought has gone into the office space, and it generally works. But it can look funny to the uninitiated.

For example, there's the round conference room. And most of the offices are in the "inner core", not by the windows, but they have large windows in them (so having an office gets you daylight but doesn't deprive others). The library is kind of triangular, with bookcases built to fit the space well. The hallways have a nice graceful flow to them.

There are almost no rectangular rooms. My office, for example, is basically a rhombus. (I think that's the correct term. Two parallel walls, one perpendicular to both of them, and one that is straight but at an angle.)

Today an odd thing appeared in one of our so-far-unused rectangular rooms. (We got new space recently and haven't fully populated it. We aren't going to remodel now, but will later, I'm told.) There is now a large plastic cylinder occupying most of this room and running from floor to ceiling. The walls are translucent, so I can see that there is something in the center of the cylinder, but there are notices saying "fragile" and "don't touch", and what I suspect is a door is currently closed, so I have not investigated.

I assume that this is somehow related to some UI testing someone is doing, or something like that. But I can't help thinking that it's really a psychology experiment and there are hidden cameras and microphones in the room.

The room next to my office is a conference room, sort of. It used to be office space, but the room is now dedicated to one of our major client projects. They needed space for a bunch of machines, and they also need to have frequent teleconferences with the part of the team that's overseas, and so the easiest thing was to just give them a room. The problem is that this room was never designed as a conference room, so the sorts of sound baffling that you might do for a conference room weren't done. So we have thin walls, thin doors, an echo/amplification effect from the walls in that room, and numerous loud people. Holding multi-hour daily meetings. Daily.

My office mate and I talked to the project manager about it; we were hoping he could experiment with moving the phone (and thus the meetings' center of gravity) farther away from the shared wall, or that his awareness of the problem would help keep things down in there. Sadly, it's not working. He means well and he's a very nice person, and he's come into our office a few times to hear what it's like, but sadly, he is a large part of the problem. I'm naturally loud too, so I empathize; he probably realizes that he's loud and works on it when he's got the cycles to spare, but when you really get into something those cycles get chewed up by other things instead. Lord knows I've tried to fix this problem in myself and frequently fail. So I don't know how to solve the problem of meetings in this room. It's not going to just go away in a few days; it's there for the long haul.

My office mate is going to bring in a white-noise generator to see if that helps. And we've asked the office manager about cheap, easy options (I'm thinking sound-proofing foam on the back of the door and on the shared wall). The goal isn't silence so much as muffling; maybe we can work something out.

The other side of the conference room borders on the outside hallway. If you stand in the hall, you can clearly hear the conversation. I'll bet they wouldn't be thrilled to know that denizens of the other software companies in the building can potentially hear their meetings, but we haven't had the opportunity to point it out to them yet.

Sigh.