ピュア・ザ・ダイアリー！！

I just wanted to point out that piman just released 0.11 of Quod Libet which contains as part of its ever increasing goodness two features for which I was instrumental, including one that I took to (uncharacteristic) completion.

It's so good working with someone who appreciates the 80%--90% completion I prefer to do, and will take it the remainder of the way to useful. And then thank me for it. At work I have to 100% or it doesn't get done, but I don't want to digress into that right now. For now let's bask in the splendor of Quod Libet being visible in GnomeFiles's top 20 best rated, with a 9.16 rating, placing us at #18. It's been steadily rising all day, so don't be surprised if it's changed.

Good day today. Inexplicably we got today off, and even harder to believe I spent it well. I went shopping in the morning. I bought computer bits on a sale that had expired (whoops) that they let me have anyway (no $5 rebate, but I don't mind). Then I bought random vegetable matter.

And then continued my day of cooking. Not only had I cooked myself eggs for breakfast, I then took it upon myself to make vegetable stock. That wasn't enough for me. I perservered and went on to use almost half of the stock to make a yummy potato-lentil soup. Now I just have to continue freezing discs of veggie stock in half and full cup increments... Yum.

So a certain anime convention wants an NDA to let me volunteer? What's up with that? I mean I could understand it if they were developing new or unique products. I might be able to understand it if there was a serious amount of work and compensation on the line. But it's already a pretty unbalanced relationship (volunteering, right?) and now there's a one way agreement?

This sort of thing makes me seriously consider reconsidering volunteering. Does that make me hypersensitive? Silly? Smart? Wrong? Ugh.

Up early to get to work early for a half day of training. Yay! That means I don't have to do real work until this afternoon, at best. Thanks to the demise of daylight savings time making this possible!

My parents are back from vacation. QL and Yasm both released yesterday. Election day cometh.

I wonder how long until I finally get tired of pygtk's ideosyncracies enough to write my own wrapper. Probably forever, but you never know. I only want to because I just went through the mental torture of implementing the song properties dialog for that music player of piman's.

And it's 90% there. Much better than any related solution I'm aware of, at least for editing Ogg Vorbis tags. And it leaks memory. In python. This is the trouble of pygtk; it's so easy to do things that work poorly, and so hard to do things that are right. But right now we have a song properties dialog that rules!

I'm being moderately productive lately. Got a major fix applied at work and we review it on Tuesday to make sure it doesn't have any gaping oversights. Got interested in piman's music player, and probably surprised the hell out of him by throwing him patch after patch (at least I expect the first ones were surprising). I got a friend to install a compiler that may let us work on the projects we keep threatening to. And I installed an addictive game on my newly available windows box.

Oops. There goes the productivity.

And then wizgandalf tells me that I missed an email saying that YASM's ELF support is broken on AMD64, at least for linux, because it uses .rela.text instead of .rel.text sections. There's so much work to be done to fix up ELF. I mean it runs, and it's solid for the subset of functionality it supports, but it's not ready to scale.

Maybe I should just play my game . . .

It's been too long since my last update. That's okay, I haven't had much to report. I'm settling into my role nicely. They only screwed up the check once, and they did adjust for it. ( Though I thought differently for a while... )

My current assignments seem to center around Windows 2003 Server and how it's a pain for our code. Apparently we made some set of assumptions that newer security enhancements are breaking. And despite the fact that those complaining are using a release of our product from long before 2003 came out, it's somehow our fault. Bleah.

And, finally, the real impetus for my writing this. Those stupid email disclaimers. Do they mean a thing? Or are they just an evil scheme to fill up mailing lists with useless extra noise? I'd normally just be miffed, but my new employer requires us to use them on emails that contain potentially confidential stuff.

Hmmph! Do they think I'm that careless with my words? Or that if I am, these extra words will make up for it? Jeez!

So the major gripe I had yesterday over my new offer is being resolved. Somewhere in the mix of me doing some support while I moved over to development, nobody ever put in for my raise. And after my previous manager was so good about making sure I got the initial ones, I figured it was a matter of them waiting until the transition was over.

Not so.

I'll find out tomorrow how good the new takings are, but there most definitely are new takings to be had. So the fires will subside.

So this wraps up 25 years, wow. I'm still poised somewhere between the phones and the debugger. Though with what I've been hearing about the teams, maybe there'll be a pull to get me totally one way. Ideally the right way.

I think it's getting close to the time I need to start meeting more new people. It's either that or moving out, and I'm not ready to buy a place without a roommate ready to share the space. So to meet people...

I guess it's official enough now; B-- took me around to meet the team. The word? I'm a developer! One year out of school, 5 months into the job, and development wants me enough to try to pull me from support when support needs every last one of us they have.

And I'm fool enough to go for it!

It comes with a price - namely that I have to go back to support for June when they expect to get hit worst. This will be after most of a month not taking phone calls, so I'll have forgotten all the old tricks, and not learned any of the new ones. But I grabbed the opportunity in a second anyway.

Go Me!

My head still hurts. Today was a really heavy call day; I assisted with 17.5 issues just in my phone shift. I guess I'm doing well finally...but we really need more people on the phones.

Ajay? Jason? That's your cue to get hired and trained. Now!

What a week it's been. Made some good progress on my job, my transcodes, and then convinced myself that i'm totally not ready to consider a 200k purchase of a condo, much less whatever a real house would cost me!

Now I just have to figure out what's going on with the ac3 audio tracks that cause it to break something like 21 minutes through the 25 minute stream...or cheat and just use mpa tracks, breaking the DVD spec...ugh.

P-p-promotion! I've deceived them into thinking i'm competent long enough for another fellow on the team to move on to brighter and better days over in Testing (hah!). Now i get to jump up and help fill in the gap he's leaving us with. And this means i'm taking the premium queue calls as well, and getting the every so slightly bigger buxx. Go me!

So a few things are annoying me all at once. My computer's been freezing more and more often since i upgraded to 2.6.3; maybe it's time to step back to 2.6.2 and risk a malicious local user like myself getting root like i already have. i quiver in fear of myself.

And i also found out that with spumux i can't make subtitles that are actually temporally adjacent to eachother. Which means all my efforts to support overlapping subtitles by generating all necessary combinations just won't work. Way too much flicker. And i don't get how the subtitle layer can be so ugly; not the clean PNGs i feed it at all!

A tired weekend so far. Finally started looking for colored cursors for my X, and found the JaguarX cursor theme. It looks pretty good so far!

Where'd all my coding energy go? Bleh. Maybe i'll get it back in another week or two; it sure seems to come and go in phases since i started working. Or more likely the phases are just drawn out longer. Wonder if tomorrow will be a lay around the house sort of day, or a go visit George sort of day...

My coworker brought in pictures of his kids-to-be. First-time father coming up, and his wife is bearing the brunt of two little growing twins. He's just beaming about it; always good to have someone so happy.

May her pregnancy go well.