(no subject)
Mar. 14th, 2018 08:15 pmToday was trying. I still felt lousy on the way to work. My coworker had a very large number of questions about some code I'd sent him, all of which I had already answered, but he wanted to ask them again and have me answer them again, because (I'm beginning to think) he is almost purely an auditory learner. I showed him a neat way of doing hardware debugging, which removes our somewhat quirky software from the process, so he can isolate his problems. Our corporate software design team provides us with hardware interface software, which they write via reading manuals, because they don't have access to all the hardware they have to support, so quite often the software doesn't actually work. This time, that was an issue, but once I'd talked him through finding that out, and writing new stuff on his own, and realizing how much faster it is to just write it than to debug someone else's and then send the support team email describing the problem, and then wait for them to respond, and vnc into his machine to verify the problem on the actual hardware, and then revise their code, he was thrilled and started writing up his own stuff. That's what I've wanted for a long time, so I hope it actually sticks this time. Anyway, he did all that and the program still didn't work, and it turns out we have a bum piece of hardware, that made it out of the factory with only about half functionality, so now we have to figure out how to update its firmware.
While all THAT was going on, our forward controller in Ingress called in a strike, so I went out to blow some stuff up that was in the way, and about halfway through doing that, the other team came boiling out to fix things back up (but they had no interest in fixing the thing that we needed broken, so that was fine.) One of the other team is a woman I'm trying to get hired where I work, to replace my coworker with whom I run Mad Scientist Hut, because he got fed up and quit, and she's fed up with her job. She's interviewing with us tomorrow. Without even thinking about it, I said "good luck tomorrow!" and she gave me an appalled look and I realized she was standing in a group of five other people, all of whom work with her, and none of whom know she's trying to leave. (I'm outnumbered six to one locally.) So I backfilled, "I hope you catch a whole bunch of bulbasaurs!" because she and I are the only people playing Pokemon. Whew. I hope she gets the job. She'd be happier, my company would be happier, and she'd have vastly less time to play Ingress, which would be an enormous help to me.
Work ran really late, as I was still trying to help my poor coworker deal with our stupid piece of hardware, while simultaneously writing software to load custom waveforms onto a function generator, while simultaneously trying to find a bunch of replacement parts for some boards I'm having fabricated right now. So, a fast drive home, with a pause to get fish for dinner, and I walked into the house to find that Monty, who assures me she is starving, found a juice box somewhere in the house and carried it to the rug in front of the front door and chewed on it enough to puncture it, and then walked repeatedly through the apple juice in her wandering around the house. So there's been a lot of cleanup work going on tonight.
And, forsooth, the huge pile of apple pie that was supposed to be dessert for the next two days molded already!
While all THAT was going on, our forward controller in Ingress called in a strike, so I went out to blow some stuff up that was in the way, and about halfway through doing that, the other team came boiling out to fix things back up (but they had no interest in fixing the thing that we needed broken, so that was fine.) One of the other team is a woman I'm trying to get hired where I work, to replace my coworker with whom I run Mad Scientist Hut, because he got fed up and quit, and she's fed up with her job. She's interviewing with us tomorrow. Without even thinking about it, I said "good luck tomorrow!" and she gave me an appalled look and I realized she was standing in a group of five other people, all of whom work with her, and none of whom know she's trying to leave. (I'm outnumbered six to one locally.) So I backfilled, "I hope you catch a whole bunch of bulbasaurs!" because she and I are the only people playing Pokemon. Whew. I hope she gets the job. She'd be happier, my company would be happier, and she'd have vastly less time to play Ingress, which would be an enormous help to me.
Work ran really late, as I was still trying to help my poor coworker deal with our stupid piece of hardware, while simultaneously writing software to load custom waveforms onto a function generator, while simultaneously trying to find a bunch of replacement parts for some boards I'm having fabricated right now. So, a fast drive home, with a pause to get fish for dinner, and I walked into the house to find that Monty, who assures me she is starving, found a juice box somewhere in the house and carried it to the rug in front of the front door and chewed on it enough to puncture it, and then walked repeatedly through the apple juice in her wandering around the house. So there's been a lot of cleanup work going on tonight.
And, forsooth, the huge pile of apple pie that was supposed to be dessert for the next two days molded already!