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Drivers
Monday, March 2, 1998 I took the bus to work today, after leaving my car at the local Texaco station. I'd rather have left earlier, but the station doesn't open until seven AM. It had been recommended that I have a tuneup and other service, in hopes that this would ameliorate the rough running and shuddering that the car has been doing lately. Except for the time it takes, I like commuting by bus. It's very peaceful and low-stress. I use the time to think or fantasize about things, and enjoy the scenery. But it does turn a half-hour trip into an hour plus.
My boss and I had a meeting with folks from the other parts of my product's team. Our part of the product team has a database of developer's tasks that helps in monitoring the progress we are making. This database is linked to webpages on our team website. The managers on the rest of the team want to put their developer task list on similar pages, but they use a different program to track the tasks. I'll be working with their webmaster to adapt what we do to their purposes. Flattering that they want to be like us! I'm glad it isn't the other way, and they aren't forcing us to adapt to them. One interesting topic of our group program manager meeting: politics between us and the other parts of the product team. Word is we need to work on being nicer, more diplomatic and more cooperative. (I say "we," but I don't think I've stepped on anyone's toes.) As a first step towards this, there will be a weekly lunch for the entire PM group on Mondays -- not a catered lunch, we'll just plan on sitting together in the cafeteria. As we left the meeting, I said to another woman that this political stuff exists on all scales, from folks getting miffed within our small team, to the larger group, to the attitudes towards us that exist Microsoft-wide! So we joined the larger group for lunch. But it is all too easy to still just talk to the people we know! At least there was one woman sitting at our end of the table who wasn't in our immediate group. I thanked her when we left, for saving us from being an all-Trident group. This reminded me of our efforts at Potlatch, to not just hang with the Seattle fans! I was interested to hear that Monday is the busiest day for hits on the Microsoft.com website, with a drop-off on the weekend. I piped up that I've noticed the same thing on my own site, and then had to make clear that I meant this site, my personal site. People view web pages at a far lower rate on the weekends, and catch up on their reading on Mondays, whether work-related pages or not!
In the afternoon, my former bay-mate Greg (now a full-timer in the databinding group) came over to try to fix the server problems we've been having. I asked him if I could watch over his shoulder, since I am tired of not understanding what is wrong with the darn machine. It's awkward because I don't have access to the lab; to get in there I'd have to knock on the door (and I'm such a shy thing, you know, that I really don't like to do that). So I sat alongside him while he checked the driver versions, and he gave me a pointer to the page that explains how to set up the data components on the server. We tweaked the pages various ways to test the problems. There were multiple factors to test, and we need these pages to work in IE4 and in "future versions" of the product. Being in the lab was extremely nap-inducing. The warmth, the noise from the fans inside so many machines, all combined to make it necessary for me to get out of my chair and watch Greg work from a standing position! Eventually our problems were solved when he changed the database drivers back to the version we were using before. The people who had been doing things to the server last week denied changing these, but the pages had worked last week, until some "server maintenance" was done. I was just happy to get things working again, and now I know how to fix it if the same thing should happen again. My other accomplishment was correcting the formatting and doing copyediting on some specification documents that describe one of the coolest things we'll be doing in the next version of our product. I'm glad that the author doesn't mind me correcting his grammar and fixing the typos. It's a tangible task that I've always liked, but it's only visible when it isn't done. There was one sentence that I couldn't just correct; I had to rewrite it. I sent mail to the author, saying "I can't parse this sentence!" and proposing a new version. I wasn't sure I'd understood what he was trying to say! But he agreed to my change, so I guessed correctly.
An Australian reader writes, "Believe it or not [this journal] reveals plenty, more than you realise." This goes along with my friend Kate's description of reading Anita's BOD: "...the personal is implied by the accumulated details rather than spelled out..." But I don't want this to be an exercise in Kremlinology, where tiny details may imply a hidden message! Or do I? The enigmatic sphynx is an interesting pose. Is there a mythical creature that is a totem animal for you?
I picked up my car on the way home, after a quick stop at City People's Mercantile just across the street from the station. I bought some vetiver-scented lotion that I can't wait to try out! (Too bad they haven't perfected that RealAroma plug-in yet.)
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