My recollection of the times gets a bit hazy now but it's probably about 14:00 now. I go back to my bug and work on it for half an hour or so, once again making a little bit of progress. Another interruption. Robert has the QA environment set up but it doesn't work. Run it for me, so I can look at the trace files. Seems to be a problem with the ICR.

Go to the ICR, looks fine. Start up my environment and try to log in, hey it stopped working. Try to use cti_test, a utility that connects to the ICR directly so that I can see if it's an ICR problem or a problem with my environment. Still can't log in. Look at the ICR, some sort of error with a helpful peripheral error number 13577. No clue what that means so I look around for an explanation. Unfortunately the ICR programmer's manual only lists the ICR errors, not the specific peripheral errors (understandable, since each switch, what they call peripheral, has it's own set of error numbers). Search around the Cisco site for a half hour and can't find anything.

Now what? Desperation, reboot every server. That doesn't help. Frak. Let me test some more with cti_test. I can't log in to two of three phones (figures that it's the third phone that works). Why? On a hunch I try to log in using CTC with its test tool, ctc_test. Oh ho, there's a problem here too. Hmm, for some reason I think of the Symposium testing I did today. Symposium is not a nice server in that it has the unfriendly habit of keeping a resource even after you've logged out of it. Sure enough I can still use ctc_test going through Symposium to access the problem phones. Shut down the Symposium link and check my environment and it all works now.

But the QA environment is still not working. They use different phones, which I didn't use when I was testing Symposium so obviously they have a different problem. Good grief! What could the problem be? Go back to square one and look at their environment settings, checking with our web page that tells people the exact settings to use (one problem with software that deals with hardware, or server software too, lots of arcane settings that have to be configured just right or it doesn't work. And many times when it doesn't work the application doesn't tell you why it's not working.). Aha! One setting is wrong. Fix it and try to log in again. Success! Whew, that took like two hours so now it's 16:30.

Wow, I'm tired. I think I got like six hours of sleep and it's finally catching up to me. A bit of a nap would help so I queue up a couple of A-Teens CDs on my PowerBook, put on my headphones, and go to sleep on the foldout couch thing that I borrowed from Dave years ago (and someday I'll return it :-). I listen to music to drown out the noise of people, which is more distracting than music to me, although it's still hard to get to sleep with music playing. But I probably get a half hour of sleep in an hour and I wake up feeling better and it's now 17:30. People are starting to leave Oracle and have been leaving for over an hour. I know that the traffic home would be another long commute so I'll wait until 20:00 at least. No matter when I get here, I'm unlikely to leave before 20:00. I'll get here early if I'm forced to but since I'm not being forced to go home I can wait for traffic to die down.

Meanwhile I happen to be scanning through my calendar and I see that your birthday is Monday! Darn it, why didn't my calendar program remind me? I seem to have turned off that reminder so I turn it back on. Oh look, your birthday is coming up it tells me. Helpful. Come to think of it, Shannon's birthday is this Saturday (and strangely enough, his wife's birthday is on Wednesday). I sent out an email to see if people thought a barbeque would be a good idea. Some lackluster responses and then silence for three days. So I send out another email that we will have a barbeque, but this time I'm not going to try to organize who brings what.

Anyway, I have to write to you now and send the letter tomorrow and it will still be late. So I've spent the last couple of hours writing this (occasionally being interrupted and taking frequent breaks to play a little computer card game I have on my PowerBook). Yeah, I'm a slow writer and I'm not going to reread this so there will be errors. Oh well. Happy Birthday again. I hope I didn't bore you with my narration, you always want me to describe my life better. I'll see you when you visit us next.

Love,

Kevin