An Evening with TrishI had a fairly successful day at work today; I managed to get all my bugs verified. What that means is this: We have a bug tracking system at Apple, and when a bug is written up, it goes to a developer to be fixed, then goes to an appropriate person to get added to the next test build (we generally have a new build every week), and then sent to a QAer to be verified, i.e., to see if it's been fixed, or if there's still a problem. (One interesting thing about the verification assignment is that usually there's a QAer responsible for verifying all bugs for a given slice of our product, and therefore he verifies bugs written by many people. So a bug doesn't necessarily get verified by the person who wrote it. This is different from Epic where the bug usually goes back to the author for verification. Although I'm not on the verification path for any slice of our product - someone else does that - I verify many of my own bugs anyway, and often do verification of other bugs if the usual verifier is swamped or on vacation, as was the case this week.)Anyway, we recently got a new build dude, who came in at a particularly challenging time, and hasn't quite gotten into the swing of assigning bugs for verification, so this week I got a while bunch of bugs from the last several builds to verify, plus the other guy was on vacation for part of the week, plus I'd been holding three bugs to test on a new build. And, happily, between yesterday and today I got all of them verified, meaning I either closed than as fixed, or sent them back to a developer for further work. Okay, there was one exception, which should be fixed in the next build. But, I was pretty happy to wade through it all, especially since there were some pretty challenging bugs in there in parts of the app that I wasn't entirely familiar with. A learning experience! I'm also continuing to educate myself about the extensive capabilities of our product, which is a good feeling. I can get stuck in a rut sometimes; my self-education tends to come in waves rather than continuously. Which is probably good because sometimes it's good to approach something new with a fresh mind, and other times it's good to beat on something continuously with good knowledge of how it works. So anyway, it's been a good week at work. Well, except that JP teamed up with Ray and whipped Daryl and I in foosball. Ack. But Ray brings a particular talent to the game that JP's other partners this week lacked: He's very strong at blocking the ball and making adjustments on the fly to send it back at you. If he ever learns to really control the ball, he'll be deadly. Combined with JP's kill shot, it's a tough combination.
 Tonight I got together with Trish, a fellow journaller I've read for a few years. I probably started reading her back when I read Scott's journal, about two years ago. She is, shall we say, a little explosive in her journal, living in an environment she's not too fond of (the middle of nowhere, California, struggling to finish college so she can move away), and is not shy on-line about expressing her frustrations with things in her life. It makes for a rather refreshing read. Trish is considerably less caustic and more laid-back in person. She doesn't put many photos of herself on-line, so I had this fuzzy image of her, but wasn't quite sure what to expect. I commented at one point that I'm somehow expected her to be "shorter and feistier", to which she said, "Shorter? I'm five-foot-eight!" Well, okay. Heh. Due to her work schedule, Friday evening seemed like the best time to meet, and due to rush hour traffic, we jettisoned our original thought of meeting in Santa Cruz. Instead, she met me at my apartment, and we headed out to dinner. Trish is another Mac partisan, so we also swung by Apple and drove around Infinite Loop (the main building) for her to see. She was very impressed - took a photo of Building 3, with the giant iMac poster hanging from it - and wondered how she could get a job there, maybe as Steve Jobs' shoe-shiner or something. Yes, she's a big Mac booster. (More likely, it sounds like, she's going to leave California, as she's lived here her whole life.) We drove through the Stanford campus and had dinner at Pluto's in Palo Alto. If I haven't mentioned Pluto's before, it's a slightly unusual dinner joint which serves salads, sandwiches, and "smashed spuds", as they call them. Pretty tasty food without being too fancy. We browsed the Borders Bookstore there (I bought the brand new For Better or For Worse cartoon collection), got some ice cream for dessert, and generally hung out for the evening. It was a fun evening; it's nice to know someone else I can just hang out with. We contemplated getting together sometime to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which I haven't been to since my trip out here last year. We had a fun time chatting about stuff (including the requisite dirt-dishing on other journallers!). I enjoyed it. Oh, and Trish was suitably impressed by my comic book collection. Really, really impressed. I was a little taken aback at her reaction, actually. But, I must admit, that's one thing I really like about my collection: It is a pretty good collection with stuff worth reading, and I wish I knew more people who would be interested in reading some of it.
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