Heiling taxis
News ·Monday September 18, 2006 @ 23:52 EDT (link)
IEEE sent the new ballots out, but they only have the messed up positions, and I already threw out my old ballot. I washed my hands of the whole mess, and tore up the new one and threw it out too. I guess I could vote online, but what little interest I had in the outcome is long dead.
A couple twits to write about today; first, WA plate 974 TIX, a red Nissan 350z. The fool was in such a hurry getting off the 520 at 51st Street that he had to move into the left lane to pass two cars before turning at 156th. (Didn't do him much good, though. I was right behind him at the 45th light and then after some emergency vehicles went through the light at 40th it was stuck on green, but the left turn signal—he and I were both in different left turn lanes—was stuck red. Eventually he gave up and went straight, and after about a minute the lights started blinking red to turn the whole intersection into a four-way stop.
The second is from last week sometime, actually, 9-11 itself: WA 431 VKQ, and managed to be an idiot without even moving: he took up two parking spaces (opposite, not side-by-side), when he could have handily fit in one. Microsoft building 36, level 3; black Ford Expedition. Learn to park!
Two big things at work: first, reviews; very positive, decent bonus, and some stocks too (they don't do options any more), set to vest over five years, like the grant I got when I started. As things stand now I plan to stay in Word for Office 14; it'll be good to be there for the full design stage, and, as my manager said, have some features of my own rather than just inheriting them. Second, we've tightened the source code depots another notch; stages went about like this:
- about a month ago, (fairly informal) peer reviews became necessary to check in code
- next, development lead triage: direct manager and whatever other developers had code to check in looked at all fixes and the manager decided if a fix was:
- NO - we won't fix this bug; the risk to importance (exposure, ill effects) ratio is too high
- LIKE - we'd like to fix this, but it's not critical
- MUST - we need to fix this to ship the product
- MOREINFO - we need more information to evaluate whether we should take this fix or not
- then, the "triage bar" went from LIKE to MUST, so anything that was formerly a LIKE became a NO
- team triage began a few weeks ago; all fixes are taken before a group consisting of the Word development and test leads and the group program manager, and sundry other interested leads and managers
- this week we're at "Office Box" triage, and it's been moved into a bigger room downstairs; every group in Office has representatives, although Word has its own triage first which can NO or MOREINFO bugs to avoid taking them to OB triage; I haven't been to any of these yet but will tomorrow; it should be interesting
We drove out to Honey's uncle Dave and aunt Lynn's place in Pullman last weekend, returning just in time to check in before the depot closed and OB triage began. We got in around midnight Friday (Saturday morning), and left around 1415 Sunday after church. We'd taken our bikes in (my current carrier is much better than the miserable thing we used to take our other bikes from Boston to WV; it was so bad we left those bikes in Charleston), and then loaded them up in uncle Dave's Ford F350 and biked about 10 miles on a trail in Moscow, ID. We also brought the game Scotland Yard, which was well received, and played Euchre (which I'd taught them) and Snorta (a multi-player War variation). We had a good time, but their dog was a little loud and boisterous although her training's progressing. I also picked up some apples at the farmer's market, for making a blackberry-apple crumble (I picked the blackberries down the road while out walking last week).
(Oh yes, heiling taxis is my term for when people wave their hands around in church to show how much more spiritual they are than the rest of us... too bad I didn't have any Scotland Yard taxi tokens handy.) Also: "Why change the world today when you can foist off the responsibility on your children?" (procreation as procrastination quoted from comments). And: the the state of the school system up north (in BC) is not good; the gays have control of the curriculum, and parents would have to lie to get their kids out of advocacy programs, since they otherwise won't take no for an answer.
