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Of Shoes and ShipsMy great comfort is, that the temporary celebrity I have wrung from the world has been in the very teeth of all opinions and prejudices. I have flattered no ruling powers; I have never concealed a single thought that tempted me. |
   
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Friday, September 19, 1997
I won a contest! Yay! Net.fame for me! When Darren Holloway was critiqued on the diary-crit-l list, he had the idea to have a contest to celebrate the 2-year anniversary of his journal. He entered the critiquers who had included favorite quotes from the Lifelog in their writeups, plus anyone else who sent him a favorite excerpt. Then he did a random drawing, and I won! So he'll send me -- a book of quotations! Great for me, since I can use them in my own journal.
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A prime example of feature creep: a demo had been designed to show off some features of the product I work on. Thursday I get a call from the marketing team. The person who was going to give the presentation (a big boss and not the person who created it), had said that the demo also had to work in a competing product! Now, if the demo had been designed with this in mind from the start, no problems! A very do-able goal. But it hadn't been, and the person who had created it was out of town. So I got put on the case. Luckily, my bay-mate had some time free, so we worked on it together. Of course some miscommunications meant that we had had a version that did what they wanted on Thursday evening, but we continued working past that and got ourselves in a world of hurt.
So we worked today getting back to where we were. Thanks, Harv!
While we were working, I was on the phone to helpdesk, trying to figure out why my two machines weren't able to see each other on the network. Nobody else could see them either, but I could connect to other machines. Some problem with WINS registration. I lost track of how many times I had to reboot; installing protocols, turning settings on, turning them off. I was typing with one hand and holding the phone with the other, since I didn't think the whole bay would appreciate me putting helpdesk on the speakerphone for hours on end.
In the late afternoon, there was a big party in the Pebble Beach cafeteria, since our team met a rather important milestone. Where did this thing get started with spraying people with liquids as part of a celebration? It just doesn't add to the fun for me. But it was a good party, with only the annoyance of a big boss holding up one of the jackets that all the (full-time) workers will get, and talking about what a great ship (oops! forget I said that) gift it was, one they'd be proud to wear.
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A few days ago, I joined a mailing list devoted to the works of one of my favorite authors, Georgette Heyer. I just started getting mail from the list today. So far so good! They have some definite guidelines and list practices that aid in list efficiency and enjoyment.
I do think special-interest mailing lists are a good thing! If you have an interest, it's a good bet that there is a list for it.
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Since culinary notes seem to be a recent trend in journals, here's a snack I bought myself this evening; pepper salami! The brand I bought is a product of Canada, hard salami with a coating of cracked black peppercorns. I have a fondness for cracked pepper on things. I remember in high school, eating the Boursin cheese with black pepper. There are now many cheaper brands of a similar type of cheese, but they only duplicated the herb and garlic varieties, not the pepper kind.
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