Vacation

Started: 2004-10-02 10:33:15

Submitted: 2004-10-02 11:15:33

Visibility: World-readable

I'm now in Lincoln, Nebraska, the most exciting place between ... Wyoming and Iowa, at least. We're currently enjoying Megafest 3.2 at the unnamed residence of Yanthor and Anya in the north-eastern part of the city. Our movie voting got an upgrade once again: it now features concurrent voting by all those involved, thanks to a handy web-based interface. During the process, the thought crossed my mind to add real-time voting where everyone could see their votes with respect to everyone else's votes and change them as they saw fit. (I suspect that will result in inaccurate results; I think our current scheme of blind voting produces the most accurate results reflecting the opinions of those involved. Any misgivings won't keep me from writing the necessary code, though.)

My plan was to leave work at noon on Wednesday, but due to some obnoxious print quality issues, I didn't manage to leave until just before 1400. (After working for an hour and a half on Sunday, and staying late early in the week, I ended up working 25 hours on a 20 hour work week.) We got into Lincoln around 2330 CDT.

It turned out that Yoda had the largest cargo capacity of any vehicle at the Megafest (with the possible exception of Tobias, which was filled with stuff Bitscape didn't unload for the Megafest), so I ended up carting tables from Humblik's apartment to Yanthor and Anya's house shortly after midnight Thursday morning, then carrying tables Yanthor acquired at Office Depot the following day.

I noticed Yanthor's hand in specifying that all the showerheads be seven feet above the ground. (Include rant about showerhead height here.) Yanthor and Anya have a shower with two showerheads in their master suite, which seems like a good idea to me.

We watched Yanthor's recently-acquired DVDs of the first two seasons of Red vs Blue. It was amusing; I tried to resist the urge to come up with some machima of my own.

On Friday, I headed out on foot to some local geocaches located three kilometers north of Yanthor and Anya's residence. The first two were fairly easy finds, but the third (which promised to be more difficult than the average cache) eluded me at first. My GPSr batteries died while I was wandering around trying to find the cache. At last I spotted the cache: hanging from the ceiling of a fifty-meter long one-meter diameter concrete pipe. Although I lacked a flashlight in my caching kit, I crawled in after it and fumbled with the lock to remove the lid of the polycarbonate two liter anti-animal food canister. The cache's contents were in a nylon drawstring bag which I carried to the mouth of the pipe, signed, and returned to its original location.

This morning I got a call from my meta-boss who asked if I might be able to come into work tomorrow and beat the printer into shape before our customer shows up on Monday. (Our customer will be in the building for all of a day before heading to a trade show; if he likes what he sees on Monday, things will be good.) I really don't want to cut twenty-four hours off my vacation, but I'm not yet sure what choice I really have. However, it remains to be seen how much I can actually do in one day; we have some theories about what it might take to fix our problem, but I'm honestly most inclined to distrust the hardware itself, since I'm almost convinced my software, while not perfect, shouldn't be doing anything this spectacularly wrong. Sanity-checking my software should take at least ten minutes; sanity-checking the hardware might take four hours to do (assuming we even have the hardware on hand to do so; I'd really like a four-channel scope, but the best we can do is two two-channel scopes), and if it's broken, there is literally nothing we can do about it because it's not our design.

I have no answers, but plenty of questions remain. I think I'll go play Settlers of Catan.