Short notice, Conversatron, Place the States, & Proportional sizing

'k, coworker, how do you expect an email at 0135 to be sufficient notification of an appointment at 0900? :P

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Super-Intelligent Space Monkey on Parliaments!
Dave and James on Sartasm!
George Clinton on Parliaments!

How well do you know your state locations without the lines? Place The States! (I got 96% on my first try, avg. error 11 miles, worst error about 50 miles.)

Wacky! These images show what a man's body would look like if each part grew in proportion to the area of the cortex of the brain concerned with its sensory perception or movement. (via jwz)

Work, it just never quite goes as plans, and generally takes longer.

Today's service call didn't go as planned either, naturally. After getting notified of the service call I was continuing by 0130 email and two 0900 calls, I headed into DC by about 11, including all too much time find a parking garage and then space in it, to find my POC not available, and probably not even in the building. Fortunately, another couple guys were available to assist, so I went about my business. Swapped out a drive, rescanned the system.. and the inventory failed. Inventories failed for the next several hours, as I captured some logs, tried to complete a code upgrade, made a plethora of phone calls, and eventually had a tech specialist drive in from Sterling, new part or two in hand. The new part made no apparent difference; the code upgrade seemed to correct a long-standing but non-harmful junk-characters-on-the-screen issue, and the frequent error of "label too long" made no sense to Bill or me. However, sometime late afternoon, we realized something.. about half the tapes had a second barcode label on top, used for another cataloguing system, and which hadn't been a problem before. However, it appeared that running an inventory via the library, with its downward-pointing scanner and continuous scanning, was seeing those labels, getting confused, and failing to inventory. We pulled the dual-labeled tapes, and lo, the problem was resolved. (Of course, it took more time and the opening of one drive case to connect an internal cable to convince the software to see all of the drives, but the major problem was cleared.) Left there around 20:00. (Also, had lunch at Cosi, which was a bit pricey but quite tasty. And I got to play with my GPS, which doesn't work very well between tall buildings, and needs better street-level detail which I'll purchase later. :)

Tomorrow, I have to be up ugly-early for what -should- be a reasonably easy call, but you know how that goes. One of our libraries needs to be relocated from one building to another, so I have to deinstall, put on a truck, and reinstall down the street. The library needs to be on the truck, in Bethesda, by 06. Gah.

In nice work-related news, I've been saved from bureaucracy by my supervisor and manager! One of the customers has been spewing bureaucracy by the dozens of emails, regarding all kinds of preliminary setup and extra emails, a daily conference call, and after-hours and weekend work. My super and manager have put their feet down, stating in no uncertain terms that a) all the questions are unnecessary, b) our engineers will not be participating in a daily call, c) our engineers will not be working after-hours unless the customer pays the uplift fee, and d) if they want more calls and emails, they can take it up with our project account managers. Ha!