New Team

Stardate 58091.6 (09-16-2004)

Switching between teams is brain wrenching. The regression test last weekend turned up a some anomalies. The first few were easily explained by the differences in implementation of C libraries on Windows and UNIX. Been there, seen it, conquered it, have a drawer full of T-shirts. The other couple of issues took most of yesterday and today. An hour was spent looking at the 20 lines of code that are responsible, trying to find obvious flaws such as variables not initialized, incorrect values, and a few other things that might account for it. Nothing, the code was solid. Turning to the test itself, it finally hit me. The tester set up the scenario with a bunch of inter-related data. If the data does not start out in the correct state, or the order in which it run is not correct, the test would act the way it did. I rechecked that everything ran in the correct order. Yup, nothing wrong there. Checking the initial state of the data, reconstructing what went on when, and sure enough, the problem was uncovered. Next, the hour and a half explanation of what went on to the interested parties. The day is mostly shot and my brain is still churning. The bright side is that the release is now shipping a day ahead of schedule. I pick up the kids and I need to go over the spelling words with Rachel. I find two lists in her folder. I know one is from last week, and one is the current one. My brain is balking at another "what happened when" exercise. It should be something as simple as finding a date on the paper, but I can't do it. After Rachel is in bed, April calls and tells me which one I should be looking at.

Thomas has found a friend at school. He's been talking about him for most of the week, and the boy is coming over for a play date tomorrow. Thomas is excited about that. He still hates to go to EDP, but he is in a good mood about going to school. Another friend is good. Thomas's friend in the neighborhood is a boy a year older across the street. This kid tries my patience. He has been banned from coming in the house, because within 30 minutes he has every toy Patrick and Thomas own (and sometimes Rachel's as well) out. When asked to help clean up, he announces he has to go home. I've kept him a couple of times anyway, but he can only manage to pick up one or two items in the time Patrick and Thomas pick up the rest. This week he was banned from our backyard. The boys turn on the hose, and make mud. I don't mind so long as they don't leave the water running for more than a few minutes. Unfortunately, several times they have spread the mud all over the patio furniture, and the patio itself (I described a cleanup I made Patrick and Thomas do a bit ago). Monday, while April was attending to a still sick Rachel, they did it again. April told me she found Patrick in tears, desperately trying to wash the mud away before I got home from work. Thomas was grounded, but we gave Patrick a reprieve for trying to fix it. It is bad enough that I can now instantly hear the outside faucet go on. I did have them stymied for a while by kinking the hose as I wound it up, but Patrick discovered all he had to do was unwind it past the kink. Sometimes having smart kids is not a good thing.

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