Tag Archives: Work

Employment History

2 Replies

A lot of my peers are getting active on ‘Professional’ social networking sites … like LinkedIn.

The question I have is: If you worked at a company that went through a number of acquisitions (like I do) … do you list the employment at each company individually from the date of the aquisition … or do you use the date that you started with the first company, but still list the new company?

Continue reading →

End of Vacation

Leave a reply

Well, it’s been a fairly busy two weeks …

  • Work on the floor is (more or less) progressing.   I got the final rank of boards cut and installed.   We still need to touch of the paint, install the base molding, quarter round, and carpet threshold.
  • Tuesday we went to village hall and cast our votes for Obama in the early voting program.   Just want to get it out of the way.
  • Wednesday we headed down state to visit my niece Melissia … it was a thoroughly enjoyable trip.   We went for a walk in the Stephen Forbes state park and saw “Beverly Hills Chihuahua”.   The state park was nice and pretty empty.   About the time we left the park, it started raining.   Perfect timing.   Did a bit of shopping and then saw the moving (which was enjoyed by all in the theater … all 3 of us).
  • Saturday both Ginny and I had checkups at the doctor … everything is in working order.
  • Started an email exchange with a woman who wants me to GIVE her a domain I own … because she’s running a business with the name.   When I indicated that I would sell it to her, she got all bent out of shape.   I wasn’t asking multiple thousands of dollars for it … I only asked $600.   Last email from her indicated she would probably sue me for trademark infringement (she doesn’t currently have a trademark on the name, but she did indicate that she filed for one).   I’ll keep an eye on the name on the US Trademark Office’s website and, if it becomes registered to her, I’ll take down my placeholder site.
  • Today I want to try and get the floor finished … at least the painting done and base molding & quarter round up.   The threshold might take a bit of time.

And, tomorrow, it’s back to work.

Well, mostly back to work … I really didn’t leave.   Like a glutton for punishment, I checked email periodically and had to address a few issues.   Nothing major though.   Hopefull, when I get back, the I18N project will be done and we can get on to real development again.

Ups Oops

Leave a reply

They gave me a new machine at work a few days ago … along with this new machine came a APC 750va UPS.

This is pretty cool, as I’ve been advocating having UPS’s attached to personal workstations for quite some time. I even went to the expense of purchasing my own UPS for my workstation before they got me the new one.

So today we had a power failure in the office … it was then that I found out that you have to pay attention to the outlet on the UPS you plug the computer into. I had inadvertantly plugged my computer into the Surge Protected outlet … not the Surge Protected & Battery backed up outlet.

So, when the power failed … so did my computer … my speakers, on the other hand, stayed powered up without a problem. 🙂

be750bb-annotated.jpg

Stupid Outlook

Leave a reply

Sometimes I really hate MS Outlook.

Yesterday I had to run a test that Cindy, one of our QA people, was having problems with … she was trying to test our issue tracking system against a DB2/400 database, but were getting a system error from the iSeries.

She emailed me the instructions … they was pretty straight forward …

log on to test system
open a command shell
cd into the testing directory
run
. ./setup.script
command parm1 parm2 parm3
command parm4 parm5

Unfortunately, Outlook removed some line breaks and it looked like this:

log on to test system
open a command shell
cd into the testing directory
run
. ./setup.script
command parm1 parm2 parm3 command parm4 parm5

And so I couldn’t run the command properly because the parameters were wrong.

I wasted about 2 hours last night trying to figure out why the test procedure wasn’t working.

And, yes, I did find the option to disable that particular behaivor.

[tags]Outlook, QA, Testing, Work[/tags]

Frustration Abounds

Leave a reply

I had a very frustrating day at work today … nothing was working right … even when it did work right, it wasn’t supposed to.

I’ve been trying to track down a bug in some software that only manifests when we put the system under a very heavy load. Unfortunately, a heavy load is very hard to simulate.

Luckily, our QA has a pretty solid test framework that will simulate 18 users performing 10 transaction each all at the same time.

Problem is, I can’t debug when the test framework is running. If I try to run the test framework in my debugger, there’s enough delay added by the debugger AND additional latency in the communications that the error I’m trying to fix doesn’t manifest (not to mention that the server I’m interacting with doesn’t have as much of a load on it).

My only option is to add logging code to the software and run the test framework over and over and over again.

I ran the test framework a few times in the morning and saw the error … I wanted to add a bit more diagnostic code to extract more information about the failure.

I ran the test framework again THREE more times … and not once did the error manifest.

I know the error is there … I just don’t know what I need to do to fix it yet. And if I can’t get it to manifest, I can’t refine the solution.

Darn frustrating.

[tags]Work, java, debugging[/tags]