Quake DifferentIt's been a moderately eventful few days. For one thing, the director (I'm not sure if that's her actual title; I think it's not, but for simplicity that's how I'll refer to her here) of our department at work wanted to have one-on-one meetings with all of the QAers. I had mine yesterday morning. It was fairly informal; she wanted to know if I had any concerns since the head of QA left last week, and I said I didn't really have any related to his departure, because I didn't really work closely with him. Most of what he did was hidden from my view, although it was surely useful. She also asked if there was anything making me think about leaving (there isn't, and I'm tied to Apple until March, anyway, or else I'd have to pay them back all my moving fees!). And otherwise I just made a few comments about the group, and generally said that I felt things in QA were going pretty smoothly lately.And then today we learned that the person we interviewed earlier this week for the QA lead position has accepted the offer, so sometime in the next month my boss will have a new boss. And probably she'll want to have her own one-on-ones with us after she starts. So that will be interesting. It'll also be interesting to see how things change - if at all - after she starts.
 All of the stuff that I shipped from Massachusetts - Christmas gifts and comics books I got on my vacation - arrived this week. A lot of stuff! Although slightly less than I had remembered. Still, I do accumulate an awful lot of stuff over time. It's amazing. And my birthday is on Sunday. I'm having some friends over to celebrate it, mainly because I dislike spending my birthday alone. (I forget what I did for my birthday last year; I was still a little shell-shocked from my trip to interview with Apple.) I found a place to order a cake or cakes from: The Prolific Oven in Palo Alto, as recommended by Whump. I've eaten pastries there before and thought they were fine, and Bill seems to think highly of their cakes. Now I need to decide whether to get one large or two different medium cakes, but my philosophy on cake is that as long as there's enough for everyone, having leftover cake is not a bad thing.
Speaking of Apple, I got my account for Apple's iTools on their Web site, and the iDisk feature seems very cool indeed. It really does behave just like any other disk, only it's out on the Internet. And you can create an alias to it on your hard drive and open it like any other disk (except that it requires a password to get to). Pretty handy for shuttling data between work and home, if I need to. (Like, taking notes for my journal, I suppose!) If you're a Mac user (and have OS 9), you should check it out. And, of course, I'm now rawdon@mac.com, although I just set it up to forward the messages to Contact. Other e-mail addresses I have are rawdon@apple.com, rawdon@eecs.tulane.edu, and my still-not-yet-defunct old address rawdon@msn.fullfeed.com. However, it appears the mail forwarding for my rawdon@cs.wisc.edu address is no longer working. Ah, well. And, Apple seems to be a real Internet company now, since our stock seems to be taking those daily four-to-ten dollar swings. In the last six weeks we've ranged from 88 to 117 dollars. Wow. Well, hopefully it will get up in the 140 range over the next year as some investment firms seem to have targeted us.
We've been playing a lot of Quake 3 after work lately. Ben pointed out that the frame rate (basically, how often the screen updates as I'm moving around) on my machine seemed rather low. So I turned down the resolution in a few areas, and it really made a big difference! Suddenly, instead of these wild swings between a good game and a lousy one, I now finish respectably nearly every time, and have started winning some of our contests. (And it's especially satisfying to win a match by one kill through killing the person I'm competing with.) Tonight as we were starting to play, the aforementioned director passed by my cube and stopped to watch us playing. I think she was slightly appalled (and slightly amused) at the game, which is in fact rather bloody, and we go at it with such, er, gusto, I guess you could call it. But, she's pretty cool about it, I think. She did recently says she'd prefer that we not play before 6 pm, but that's okay with me.
Finally, this morning I worked out for the first time since before the holidays. I did pretty well on the weights, but jogging was pretty pathetic. Clearly a three-week layoff kills my endurance. But after my vacation I think I'm prepared to rededicate myself to it for another six months.
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