montecristo

What is with the sky today? Heck, it's July, and it looks like rain. This is unusual. I'll bet it burns off by noon though. I'm not a really big fan of overcast days. Geeze, I'd rather see a nice rain, especially in the summer, or even a big thunderstorm, or else a sunny day. Just general cloudiness is boring. The big cumulus clouds are nice, good for watching while lying on your back in some nice green grass, and the nimbo-cumulus, the thunderheads, are really spectacular too, but this part of California just doesn't generate either of those all that often.

For the past two days, I haven't seen a single ant in my kitchen. Yes! I think I have defeated the Empire of the Ants. The ant baits, constant scrubbing, and removal of all organic matter from my kitchen has finally paid off. I win! Gah! I hate bugs in my house. Die! Die! Die!

The eating and sleeping are all messed up. I'm trying to turn my day around more, so that I can get to work earlier. I'd like to come in around 7:00AM and leave by 4:00PM, which would give me more time in the evenings to work on McGuffin software. As it is, there's not a lot of time after I get finished puttering around putting things away and getting supper and reading the e-mail. This schedule-wrangling has messed up the eating too. I had a bowl of chilli, a cup of mocha and six frozen White Castle hamburgers all day yesterday. Oops. Actually, these little mini-burgers are really tasty. There are no White Castles out here in the western U.S., and it's one of the things I miss about Ohio, but fortunately you can get them frozen at the grocery. Actually, the burgers were Jackie's idea, from when we when grocery shopping while they were here over the Fourth. With any luck, I can get myself back together tomorrow.

This morning, one of our application engineers sent me a revised specification for the work I'm doing on the capacitor bank controls. Sheesh! What a re-write. The guy is supposed to be on vacation in Wisconsin, but he stopped off at the Chicago office and now the boss has forwarded his latest revision to me. Originally, I had committed to having this work done by the end of this month. Ostensibly, we have customers who desire the changes by then, to accommodate a roll-out of a bunch of our controls on their lines. They're going to upgrade their old controls at the time. Of course, when I agreed to have everything before August, the specification was much smaller! Today I find out that three more items have been added. Fortunately, I have been told that the customer would rather accept new controls a bit later, with all of the new features, than have fewer improvements and early equipment. Okay. Now that I don't have to meet the end of July deadline, I can accommodate a bigger scope of work. Hey, I don't really mind, but I don't appreciate them adding a bunch of junk every morning while attempting to pressure me into agreeing to the same deadline. No dice. They need to figure out what they want and give me a specification. Actually, this is one of the better specifications that I've ever gotten here. Usually, they expect me to do a lot more mind-reading, which is not the best way to develop software, but that's par for the course.