Bouncing bug reports, and other nuisances.

G'morning! Didn't sleep entirely well last night (not bad: just restless), so feeling sort of blah this morning.

We got a bug report emailed back to us. It dates back to April of 2001. We sent it to another team, because it's a transfer from our system to theirs, and we verified the files we were producing had the layout we were told to give them. It was assigned to someone....

...who apparently ignored it, and apparently no one remembered or checked up on it....

...until now, when, since that guy hasn't been with us for months, it got reassigned....

...back to my team, not to someone else on that team.

I discovered: that team is gone. Instead, there is a team for that product in each region. Snagged the proper region, reassigned it to that team. But still. Mmmf.

Email of Laura Summoning.

My team is wonderful. They have been aware how stressed I have been, and have mostly gone out of their way to add to it as little as possible. One new result of this: when they have questions, if they can still work forward on some portion of the item, they email me instead of coming in my office door. (If they can't work forward, then they drop in the door.)

Which is very nice. It means that I get to choose when I walk over and work with them, which means I feel like I'm dealing with things instead of merely reacting to them.

This morning's was titled "email of Laura summoning". I just liked the title, that's all.

Powdered donuts taste good with stupidity.

Someone brought little powdered donuts in today. They're addictively good.

Meanwhile, I managed to plug the phone line for the laptop into the socket for my phone instead of my computer connection. And, once there, the tab got too far out and now it's STUCK (the tab is inside the case so you can't press it).

Bah. I feel stupid, now.

And the computers...are not...cooperating.

My laptop is being nice. The rotation laptop and the one being decomissioned are being bears. I got the old one all set to go down, though. One last virus scan and I shut it off and say bye! The new one is just running slowly through installs. Since I was too lazy to put in its CD drive, I'm running them from a shared CD drive on my desktop. Hey, it works.

And meanwhile I type this up and reply to people's emails and do design docs on this machine, and it has no net. Once I install one more thing onto the rotation laptop, this machine can have the net back, and I'm sure I'll get swamped with email.

I get really frustrated by computers that lag. As anyone who has seen me do it can tell you, I type pretty darned fast. It is not enough to outpace an average (today!) computer running at average speed. I don't think a human could do that, honestly. But it is enough to outpace the lousy performance of a machine dragged down by a massive install. Waiting for it to catch up to see if I typed it all correctly (and to do what I told it) is a pain. Having it complain that \\\computername doesn't exist because of a typo is an even bigger pain.

Come on, load, load, load load...boring. Boring, boring. But I found the design doc I need to email to a coworker (actually, that was really easy - aha - I'm gonna steal net from the rotations laptop for a bit, and actually...get...this...done. I think I'll hook it back up in the lab, heck with the walk.

And a clean desk here and a clean desk there....

...oh, wait. It's not. Clean, that is. But it is down to one laptop on it, one desktop under it, one monitor on it for the desktop. It looks so much better. Unfortunately it makes the pop can, compressed air can, water glass, disks, pens, pencils, highlighters, explosion of post-it notes and mad scattering of papers look worse, but, hey.

I feel tons better. One laptop configured, one laptop gone, and my laptop here is being very good to me. Oh, and thanks to K & M! Who de-cased the wiring box, thus allowing my phone cord to be freed. All is good again, and several people had their days brightened by laughing at my expense.

Including me. Which I'm pleased by. After the first flush of I don't believe I did that!, it was funny. And I don't normally take being stupid quite that well, quite that fast. Today is good.