(no subject)

Today I got up a bit early (for a Saturday) and went to Japanese class. (Nihongo no kurasu e ikimashita.) Afterwards, I went over to my brother's house. He and his wife have decided to rip out the whole kitchen and redo it, so we spent about six hours at that. They were fortunate that their existing kitchen cabinets, which weren't particularly beautiful but were in essentially brand-new condition because they're both very careful, retained enough usability that Habitat For Humanity showed up and removed the whole set, delicately, and carted them off to a HFH resale store. HFH even removed the countertop and disposed of it for them. So, we started with a stripped kitchen. Our project was ripping out the stupid soffits that builders around here so love to put above the tops of the cabinets, up to the ceiling, and frame in with ferocious amounts of pine. We tore out the drywall and the soffits, cut some holes in the wall, ran a new 220V line for an electric stove/oven, moved two light switches, and framed in a fake sink, so they can experiment with exactly where they want the sink located, while having it usable for hand washing and tea water acquisition while the drywall repairs progress and the new cabinets go in.
I am reeealllly sore now, as most of the work consisted of tearing out stuff over my head, so I came home and had Advil salad.

more work complaining

About two weeks ago, my manager mentioned (casually, I thought) that at some point we were going to need some software to talk to the new chip we have coming back. I wrote software to talk to the previous generation of chip, using our test framework, and when I wrote it I did it with the expectation that I might need to change the interface protocol, so it has an undocumented, overloaded function that takes one extra argument, and that tells it to use the (irritating) new interface protocol.
So from my perspective, I'd already done what he said we were going to want at some point.
I like having things already done, so when he says "hey we need this" I can say "already have it."

Thursday morning I was talking to the system engineer in charge of this project, and he asked how the interface software was coming along. I offered to show him, and he said "wait, what we need is a stand-alone executable, that anyone can run without the whole development environment." I'm all "why on earth do we need that? We all have this installed and if you don't I will go ahead and install it for you." He replied "this is the interface that all the evaluation board customers are going to use."
As in, this is going to be released to all our customers.
Which is AIEEEEEE.
And yesterday morning my manager came in and asked me "so do you think you'll have that interface GUI done by this afternoon?" and was clearly disappointed and frustrated with me when I said, no, I wasn't even finished reading our corporate requirements for software usability and GUI design.
I don't even know how to discuss how frustrated I am with this, when he's already frustrated with me, because when you go into a discussion when both people are irritated with each other, it's very difficult to get a positive outcome.

To highlight my frustration, the system engineer, who is one of our senior engineers and considered one of our smartest and hardest-to-work-with engineers, sat down with me to look at what I did have working, and I had to keep reminding him how the chip worked, and he was impressed and grateful for what I did have working, but of course my manager didn't see that interaction.