25 July 2001
Last year: My glasses had broken in half, snapped cleanly at the center of the bridge.
Short entry today. I spent most of yesterday working with my officemate on his part of the project, playing Baldur's Gate, and chatting online. And while the work was satisfying, the game was fun, and the chatting was enjoyable, there's not really much I can say about any of it without boring you to tears. So I'm keeping it short.
Random is writing a sort of specialized FTP server/client. It's weirder than that, but I'm keeping it short. Anyway, he's been having problems where data will get lost from one side of the connection to the other. He'd decided to go back to the person who wrote the underlying COM port communications library and ask for help, so he wrote a very small, simple program for this person to use so they could use a port monitor.
Well, the small, simple program behaved perfectly. It didn't drop data. So Random realized that the problem - whatever it was - had to be somewhere in his code. While we were talking about it, he decided it would probably be faster to start over from scratch than to track down this annoying and intermittent bug. I spent some time yesterday helping him design the guts of the thing. I hope when he comes in today he'll have something to test.
In other work news, I've been assigned the task of writing the user's manual for this project. I was almost irritable about it, but then I realized that the other option is to let my supervisor do it, and he's got the worst grammar I've ever encountered - ever - in any kind of professional situation. And it's not just bad, it's confusing:
From an e-mail I got just this morning: "Look at the files that have Section 4 in the above directory with references "Section 4" to see examples..."
The more formal he's trying to be, the worse it gets. So I might as well do the user's manual and save our tech writers the effort of having to rewrite everything from scratch.
I started over in Baldur's Gate. How on earth did I miss some of this stuff? No wonder I hadn't gained any levels by the time I got stuck! I was skipping over 90% of the mini-quests!
Sucked in? Me? You bet.
I almost got to bed before midnight last night. I was going to, and then Karen asked me to do a very short side-session with her. It was short - only a little more than an hour - but that made it just a little before 1 before I got to bed.
I'm sure Karen was still feeling chipper - for the last couple of nights, she and Ashby have been staying up until dawn playing, and then sleeping in late. (Later for Ashby than Karen, though.) But there was no Ashby last night, and I was drooping by the time 12:30 rolled around.
(I almost wish we'd waited to run the session. There were several avenues of discussion that I was dying to follow, but clipped short just so we could wrap up.)
That's about it. I'm off to work on getting screen captures for this user's manual. (Whee...)
Word of the Day:
gauche - lacking social experience or grace; not tactful; crudely made or done
Currently Reading:
- nothing
Current Projects:
- drawing
- Hall stuff
- garden