Tuesday, October 12, 2010

Heh!

Arrived at the Skunk Works North Campus about 7:00 p.m., picked up info I needed, took the nice long drive to the Main Campus, where my hapless minions professional peers already had a new computer set up with the new software.

Had it talking to the far end in a half-hour.

Learned to use a new software package and assembled a whole new page'o'data; figured out how to run the thing that feeds data to it, loaded it up and....

And fizzle, is what. No live data nohow.

Went back to square one, worked up a much smaller page, tried and tried and tried and finally got it to go. Edited that up to the full page of stuff, checked it, fine-tuned (does it assert high ot low? You guess and find out), shut down, relocated the computer and removed all the test stuff...a mere ten and a half hours after I first set foot on company property. Yeah. Ten. Point five.

Better believe I am reclaiming at least one vacation day from this.

Still: I won! The highly-necessary remote control is back in business. That's pretty sweet.

13 comments:

Tango Juliet said...

Good for you! Man triumphs over technology again!

Phillip said...

Hopefully you meant the generic humanity for 'man' there, TJ, otherwise I suggest a visit to an ophthalmologist, quickly.

Congrats Ms. X, that's some good work there. I'm a computer tech, so I know what kind of hair pulling you let yourself in for. Kind of along the lines of a VPN router going down and having to get a new one up, but having no Internet to pull up the one at HQ to copy settings from... Fun times.

That little triumph when it all works feels good, though. Hard to explain to a non-techy type, but one of the best you can get. Happy vacation, hope it goes more smoothly.

rickn8or said...

And there's a backup of all this nice new configuration data somewhere handy, right??

Tam said...

Phillip,

For the record, I have never danced about in front of a computer, arms raised in triumph, yelling "Bill Gates, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!"

Well, maybe once or twice

:D

Tango Juliet said...

:) I don't think Bobbi gets too wound up about gender specific language.

She knows she's good. :)

I have to work hard every day to outflank the Redmond Fox too. :)

Flight-ER-Doc said...

Bah. Technology. It'll never catch on.

Joanna said...

For teh Bobbi: Totes OT, but I can't find your e-mail so it's either this or semaphore: Have you seen this yet?

/my semaphore-fu is sorely lacking

Stretch said...

You forgot to light a votive candle and recite a prayer in Latin before beginning. One must always drive out the evil computer spirits before installing software.

Fuzzy Curmudgeon said...

@Joanna: Wouldn't Iron Man's grandfather have been, hmm, Bronze Man?

Tam said...

Bronze Man was his dad. His grandpa was Stone Man. :)

Drang said...

Rickn8or: Did you remember to whom you're speaking?

Tam: Stony Man? Rlly?

Flight-ER_Doc: Were you so down on technology when you were flying F4s?

SordidPanda said...

Do the future a favor, document your success for other techies to follow.

Good job Bobbi :D

Ed Skinner said...

Speaking of Skunk Works, there's a nice "street view" at Google-Earth. Go to 40002 Sierra Hwy, Palmdale CA, then move 0.25 miles north (along the highway) and click into street view. Look eastward toward the big building and zoom in on its upper-right corner. A bit grainy but not a bad screen capture!