webcowgirl

Theme song: "What have I, what have I, what have I done to deserve this."

Note my coworker also has a cold. We are sharing cough drops. It's kind of cute.

It looks like we are ahead of schedule which is great as it means I might be able to go home early.

Yummy Chinese food slideshow on the New York Times today. Makes me want to go to Taiwan.

LATER: Wow, the release manager and the build engineer are both sick. This is pathetic. On the other hand, I've been passing out enough medicine that I probably ought to tape a sign to my head saying "Pharmacy."

I wanted to post a link to the "baby" my team gave birth to today:

JobJourney Scotland!

This is what I've been working on for the past two months. Nice to see the Scottish employment situation is so robust!

Also, it feels good to get a project out to live, especially because I've got a tummy full of "Chef's Special Spicy Duck Curry" from the unfortunately named Pu's Brasserie.

First, one of my reports (no nicknames for the people that work for me, only for people I don't like) brought in home made dosa for me today that her mom fixed. Oh man, I could see the chunks of red chiles in the filling. So, so good! Nothing like a nice little ADRENALINE RUSH to start the day.

I'm enjoying looking at these Japanese prints - oh how I wish I could hang some art on my walls! (I also found an interesting article on crows in Japanese woodblock prints while doing so.)

Second, I'm breaking down and joining the ranks of the bourgeoisie: as of today, I'll be having someone come over to clean my house regularly. (The deal is that there are these young college girls from Central and South America working at my office part time, and I think it seems kind of neat to give them a chance to make a little extra cash - there's not a question of who's better than whom, they're all pretty darned smart, and I figure ... they have some free time, why not help them pull in some bucks?) Clearly I feel some guilt about this, but on the other hand, I mostly feel a sense of relief. Even when I was unemployed I couldn't keep my house clean - I just don't have an eye for it. And why have to make special plans to stay home just to clean? On a nightly basis, I'm exhausted after work, and I have so little free time on weekends I hate blocking out four hours just to mop and wipe and dust (as if I ever dust) ... this will be nice. I've been saying for YEARS that my fantasy was to work hard enough that I could pay someone else to clean my house, so hopefully this will work out well - for both me and Pamela.

Finally, release today, with following problems: DB1 was brought down and then died, DB2 was brought down and then died, web server also died, then wrong builds were deployed due to a strange reliance on old relese notes. But we got it all out only half an hour later than expected and none of these issues were my team's fault. Yay!

I have to say, getting into work at 5:50 AM is much less unpleasant when the sun is shining. On the other hand, going from "in bed" to "out the door" in ten minutes is a bit harsh. I did enjoy my bike ride.

And of course, after we were told to hurry hurry, we can't even log into the site. Gah.

Well, I've signed off. That was a lot of work in a fairly short time - kind of fun, though. We have some tests to run once we're unsplashed and doubtlessly issues will occur during the day, but otherwise we're ready to go! And it must be said this was a MUCH less painful thing than getting new code out at Tripadelic.

It was lovely coming in this morning: cool and dark but not too cold, the air moist, and for some reason lots and lots of birds singing in the park near my work. It felt like a spring morning instead of deep in the heart of mid-winter. It felt homey and normal and that perfect surreal you get going in way, way too early to work - my whole life in QA, years repeating themselves, taking me all the way back to The Olde Days of the dot-com boom and all of those nice fantasies about retiring as millionaires after the IPO. I wonder if any of those Microsoft retirees are former testers? I scavenged some stuff for the bathroom from a box on the sidewalk and headed into work carrying it with me.

Nice article in the New York Times about the need to "restrain the imperial presidency:" The Democratic majority in Congress has a moral responsibility to address all these issues: fixing the profound flaws in the military tribunals act, restoring the rule of law over Mr. Bush’s rogue intelligence operations and restoring the balance of powers between Congress and the executive branch. So far, key Democrats, including Mr. Leahy and Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois, chairman of a new subcommittee on human rights, have said these issues are high priorities for them. Let's hope so. I realized I'm still afraid to send letter to Republicans criticizing them for fear of being placed on a watch list and having that make it impossible for me to travel easily.

I'm feeling dehydrated. We've signed off on what we need to start the site running again. I had to tell the PM for the project we've been working on for 8 months that we weren't able to run a single test and that we're signing off anyway. It's kind of embarassing but he understands that the money toliet is flushing and we have to make it stop. (Me big test manager, me make big decisions, pass on bad news.) We found a workaround to be able to do more testing later, hopefully to discover there are no bugs once this bug is fixed. Gah.

On to the next cluster to test. Too bad I didn't actually bet on 11:30 as it looks to be very close to actual unshunt time.

So basically we got in our new car and started up the engine and the wheels fell off and the engine fell on the ground. And our CEO is here and I want to go yell at him and ask why we're chronically understaffed. I am of course basically wearing jammies so I'm looking very authoritative.

That's it, we've got five, we're playing some Hearts.

And I'm getting hungry.

And the president of one of our divisions came in and I hit him up for more employees.

After a few false starts, I'm dressed and ready to go in to work (wearing the shirt in the icon, but with bags under my eyes). It doesn't look they're ready to go quite yet, but for some reason the fact I've had to get up and check my email every hour for the last three has kind of killed my ability to sleep. So I'm giving up and going in to hang out with everyone and have some of the food they'll have lying about as I have discovered that I am hungry. The sun IS starting to rise and the birdies are chirping outside, it is the height of doom and the start of the day of hell. Check back in after I arrive.