Personally, yes, I do try to fix every bug. Or at least get to the point where I know it can't be fixed (because it's really someone else's problem, we can't work around it, and we don't have enough pull to make them fix it). One reason why I've been way behind on my work. The other reason is that I'm still fairly new to the code and I'm still learning slowly. That's what I get for not paying attention to Simon when the code was in its infancy.

Where was I. Oh yes, trying to set up my ICR-Nortel environment. I wanted to do it yesterday but our database died, which happens a lot to a development database that a few hundred developers bang on each day. Today it was back up and I started my environment and expected everything to work since I hadn't changed anything since I last used it a week ago. Nope, can't log in to any of the phones. Frak.

Check the ICR, it didn't come up right. Try to reboot it, that didn't help. Lenny, who's in the switch room overseeing a Williams tech guy as he upgrades one of our servers (we don't have the expertise to really use our switches and related servers, so we use third party contractors like Williams for most everything and Spanlink for the ICR), informs me that there was a problem with the ICR and Simon fixed it, so maybe I should ask him what the issue was in case it's related. Another reason I had to be here in the morning. I'm supposed to check that the upgrade the Williams tech is doing actually works; though Lenny expected him at like 07:00 and he only got here at 10:00. Sigh.

Talk to Simon, he describes the problem. One of the ICR servers is going flaky on us, probably because we're not maintaining it. Reboot it and it should be fine. So I do that and the ICR for Nortel comes up fine. Go back and check to see if I can log in to the phones and it looks good. Now it's a little after 11:00 and I'm hungry. I didn't eat breakfast today and usually I would just skip lunch if I miss it at home, but getting to work early and doing a bunch of things sometimes makes me hungry.

Still, it is a bit early so I read until 11:30. Then go down and stroll over to the 400 building to see what they have. Roast beef with two sides, looks good so I get that and a strawberry milk and some curly fries. Comes to almost $10 and probably more food than I need, but you know me, I can eat a lot if there's food around. Wander back to by cubicle and eat while I read this book, "Once Burned" by Peter David. It's a Star Trek book, set in the New Frontier which is a non-tv setting. Captain Mackenzie Calhoun is the maverick (very much in the mold of James T Kirk) in charge of the Excalibur, along with Commander Elizabeth Shelby and a few other characters seen on the Star Trek television series (plural, serii? The dictionary says series is also the plural). It's actually a good story and I'm going to have to read the other stories in the book series, all written by Peter David I think, one of the better 2nd-tier writers out there.

So engrossed in the book am I that I finish the last 50 pages and it's now about 13:00. Got to get back to work. Open up my bug page (10 bugs) and start working on the bug that I was working on last night. A tricky display problem that actually affects other switches too, so it's well worth fixing. One thing I can say about Java on the Macintosh, sometimes it's very very slow. Compared to Windows NT it's always much slower, except in graphics where it's always slower, but not by a lot. Debugging for me is putting in a bunch of print statements, recompiling, then running the program and looking at the results. I'm getting closer and closer to the real problems and investigating other parts of the code for possible solutions when I'm interrupted.

The Symposium upgrade is done, could I check to make sure it works? Sure, and it only takes a few minutes. Everything still works just fine. I tell Simon and he's happy that there haven't been any problems. Then I stop by at the lab room where Robert is setting up a QA ICR-Nortel environment. I thought they were going to use mine? Nope, he says something about dom1151 being down and they have to set up an environment on their QA database eventually anyway. Ok, I watch him a bit to see if the settings are right and they look right to me.

(continued)