After a quick breakfast and capturing the event on my new camera, the ladies (houseguest and hostess, teacher and student, Merry and Kathy) were off to class for the day.
OK, for the time being, the writing at work is done. It’s a 92 page document. Whew! I’ll let it sit for a few days before I reread and edit it.
Our house guest arrived and we went to dinner at a new BBQ restaurant named Mann’s on Research. Converstation was excellent, dinner was good, but I’m full. The rest of the weekend I’ll make myself scarce, but since they’ll be out of the house it’s more like they’ll be scarce.
Dunno what I’ll do tomorrow. Nothing planned, so boredom will set in early. Gotta get some sort of hobby.
I have been writing all day at work. I am working on updating our project’s design document. Prior to development we had written this document with what we planned to do. Now that we’re done we have to update it to the reality of what we actually did. Since yesterday I’ve broken the current document into a master document and many subdocuments each of which is a chapter (something I’ve only just learned how to do with MicroSoft Word and its outline format). Yesterday and today I’ve worked on the Introduction and the Portal, the web application, chapters. Another member of my group is working on his chapter for the work he did. I sat all day typing and reading and writing. My butt was sore from sitting so long. Now there are still several more chapters to do, and I don’t relish sitting there all day tomorrow and the next. But I will persist.
Even though it is Labor Day, and it’s my day off, I’ve got to do a few things. So befitting of the day’s name, I’ve got to labor. For example, I just mowed the lawn. Next Kathy and I are going carpet shopping (again, another thing for the house before our guest arrives). Hopefully after that I’ll take a break and either read or see a movie. So some of the day can be called a day off of work. And remember today was the Congress Avenue Mile, so maybe only a fraction of the day was spent laboring. I really can’t complain.
We have a houseguest coming next week so we’re in the final frenzied days preparing for her arrival. Because of her we’ve gotten new couches, reupholstered a chair, bought decorations, and done a myriad of other things. This includes a mental list of jobs in my boss’ head. The current list of jobs is not long, but there’s a list. The boss tells me what jobs are mine on the list, and I go do them. Yesterday I was to clean out the caulk in the downstairs shower, because it was a bit mildewy, and redo it. So I use a knife and scraper to remove all the old caulk, down to the grout. Then I bought white silicon caulk and redid it. Now it looks swell, white, clean, pretty, but will our guest ever know. It’s not my place to stay. I just do what the boss says, and it keeps me active and busy and not bored, which recently has been in a problem of mine. Today the job is the cleaning the kitchen floor. OK, later…
My recent posts have been without images because I didn’t have a camera. However, my new Canon A310 Digital Camera arrived today. It came with a 32MB Compact Flash card, and I’m still awaiting a 256MB Lexar Compact Flash card. Now I have a new toy to play with. So I don’t have an excuse not to include pictures. Pictures to follow when appropriate.
My current computer programming language of choice is Java. This has changed over the years. I’ve been working with Java for about 8 years. Prior to that I worked with C++ for about 5 years. As a sojourn in the middle of the Java years I worked with the C language, but my emphasis remained Java. This was unusual, because most people go from C to C++, whereas I did the reverse. But it was required by the job and I adapted. Today at work I had to develop a small C program to recreate a problem we were having. Writing it was tough, because I was rusty. It’s been years since I’ve written in C. So it took me a while, but I got it done. Yet after completing it I had a bug. I had written some of it as if I were writing Java, which was wrong. I’ve done this before, and I’ve also read programs by other people that have “an accent”. What I mean is that the author’s primary language is something other than the one that the program is written in, and it clearly shows that. For example, in C you must declare all variables first, that is, before you use them. Whereas in Java you can declare them inline as you need them. So if you read a Java program where all the variables are declared first, you can easily see the “C” accent.
I’ve been working on a Grid Computing project at work for the past few months. The team developed a web application portal with HTML, Servlets and JSPs, grid information repository based on relational database schema and tables, grid services using Globus Toolkit, special drivers for automated provisioning, and a Storage Area Network (SAN) with 2.3TB of disk storage running on a 14 node blade computing environment. In July we went into system test, and have busily been fixing problems since then. Many had to do with using, integrating, installing or configuring five or more software products together. Recently we’ve begun to do performance testing. Over this time I’ve been fixing bugs, and making adjustments to make the system easier to use, and cleaning up little uglies that turn up. There have been times where I’ve had to rewrite something to adjust to the demands of the system. Now I’m nearing the end. I’m beginning to defer doing things, because the return-on-investment is just not worth it. IOW, I can see the light at the end of this project’s tunnel, and it’s time to call it done. I’m sad that it’s coming to an end. I like the camaraderie of everyone working together, and I especially like the challenges of solving the problems that have come up.
Well the house is quiet except of the Monday Night football game playing downstairs (it’s the fall, my dear partner loves football, what can I say). The daughter is gone. The sons are gone. Do I miss them? Sure I will always always miss them, but separation helps one acknowledge the special times when we’re all togther. Also I understand that this is part of the normal cycle of things. Young children are so dependent, then as single adults the opposite seems to happen. They’re more much more independent. You rarely see them. Yet as the next generation arrives the family comes back together again, and the cycle begins again. We’re in those in-between years, and things are quiet. Oh, yeah, the digital camera went too, now I gotta do something about that. [Update: Canon A310 & 256MB Lexar Compact Flash on order.]
The painting job is done, done, done. The door trim is painted, the walls too. Now I’m told that I’ve got to recaulk the downstairs shower. We have a visitor coming and it needs to look beautiful. Methinks the jobs never end, and the boss [may her initials, K.S.W, be logged in the world-renown big book of job creators] keeps finding new ones. Wouldn’t-cha-know-it. OK, off to Home Depot for the necessary tools and supplies. Later….
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