July 6, 1990
Dear Everyone:
A thoroughly discombobulated week, here.
(It will be interesting when I get to the end and run “Spell
check” to see what the computer thinks of that word.
When you type in “Wilke”, it comes back and suggests you really
mean “wile”, which is entirely possible.)
I had Monday off (vacation day); at work Tuesday;
off Wednesday (Holiday – Happy Birthday, Mom!); back in the salt mine
Thursday and Friday. Just
about the time you figure out where you are, it’s time to leave again.
Just about the time you start to relax, it’s time to go back to
work.
I was actually supposed to be on vacation/holiday
until Thursday, but I took one day from this week and tacked it onto
last week so that “Jeannie” and I could go to the Star Trek Convention
in Los Angeles, where we had a very good time, indeed.
Because so many people attending the con were from out of town,
out of state, out of the country (one young woman came from Germany and
presented Dr. McCoy with a piece of the Berlin Wall), the people who
arranged the con provided entertainment for Saturday night.
This consisted, in part, of Kevin Pollack, a
professional stand up comic.
He’s really very good, as evidenced by his repeat appearances on
The Tonight Show.
He tailored his routine a little bit for the Trekkers, doing
impersonations: William
Shatner overplaying Captain Kirk; Robin Williams as Ensign Chekov;
Christopher Lloyd as Spock; Dudley Moore as a very drunk Scotty (why
does everyone think Dudley Moore is only funny if he’s “drunk”?); and
Jack Nicholson as a frightening Dr. McCoy.
Sunday night, while watching the news, I caught a
glimpse of Pollack at a charity benefit, still doing almost the same
routine.
Now I have to go 3 whole weeks before I get any
more vacation time. Life
sure is rough.
I hear that Mother has decided that we will
celebrate all of the summer birthdays when we get together in Sunriver
in August. I don’t know why
we haven’t thought of this before.
Think of what we’ll save in calories alone by not eating half a
dozen cakes. Speaking of
which, those weekly Organization Review Team meetings are murder on my
diet. That’s because
everyone brings some tasty little thing for us to nibble on, like
doughnuts and muffins and poppy seed cake.
It’s sort of like a bake-off, each person trying to outdo the
last, except that none of us has time to do any baking.
Instead, these little treats come in neat boxes with the
Safeway Bakery logo on them.
So much better for travelling to and from Richmond.
In other news…
I’ve been spending a lot of time the past few weeks
testing Report 401. Report
401 is supposed to give you a
list of boxes with the “extended” description of the contents of each
box. Most reports only give
you the first line of the description.
This is because, in Company, there was only one line for the box
description. However, in
That Other Company, they allowed up to four lines and the Otherites
don’t want to give up any of their descriptions even if the description
is something like “BOPHUTHATSWANA 81/0037 81/0123 BRAZIL PI7406114
PI8108445 COLUMBIA 146740 199464 (51)” which means as much to me as it
does to you.
Anyway, somebody in Texas ran a Report 401 and
discovered that it didn’t list certain boxes that should have been
there. So “Frances” in
“CITC” started looking into it.
She’d find a bug, fix it, and then contact me (either by phone or
computer note) to run a test on it.
Important
Note: “Never open a can
of worms unless you’re prepared to go fishing.”
Every time we cleaned up one bug, another would
show up somewhere else.
Meanwhile, somebody in Towson, Maryland, ran Report 401 twice in one
day, God knows why, and wanted to know why boxes that appeared on the
first run didn’t show up on the second.
I’m damned if I know.
I’d run a report, looking for boxes with extended
descriptions, using certain “selects” like “only this Owner and this
Series” or “any Owner with these 3 Series”, etc.
I’d also run Report 101, which seems to be relatively bug-free,
as a control since it should find the exact same boxes only with just
the first line of description.
At first, 401 would come back and say “No data found” which I
know is a lie because 101 would find lots of boxes.
(It’s true, computers do lie when it suits them.)
Then I’d report it to “Frances” and she’d put in a fix and I’d
try again. Next 401 reported
no boxes if the first box in the list had only one line of description.
Call “Frances”. New
fix. Now 401 reports
only boxes that don’t
have more than one line of description.
Then I found out that, while “Frances” was busily
putting fixes into 401, “Tom”, who’s in the same room with her, was
equally busy putting fixes into 401 for a completely different reason.
Consequently, they were, in effect, unfixing each other’s fixes.
Programmers!
“Frances” now tells me that she has gotten all of the bugs out and “Tom”
has ceased putting other bugs in, so if I can find the time this
afternoon, I’ll run 16-20 reports that should test 401’s little heart
out.
If it works, I can send that memo back to Maryland
and just say, “It’s fixed!”
(Don’t ask me how.)
Everyone just came back from lunch, so I’ll have to
go now. They brought me an
ice cream bar and I can’t eat ice cream and type at the same time.
“Alice” is here and we’re (tentatively planned)
going to a movie tonight.
Love, as always,
Pete
PS The
computer tells me that “discombobulated” is, indeed, a word; I’d just
misspelled it.
P.
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