Thursday, January 19, 2006

Mama, I'm comin' home

Once again, I'm writing this on a plane, this time flying back from Washington. As I look out the window, I see what I think might be Andrews Air Force Base, judging by the google map I looked at yesterday. We just entered the clouds, so now I can't see anything. I still don't know what caused the nervousness I felt before the flight down, but I was fine before today's flight.

The testing didn't go well on Tuesday, and I was working until 10:45pm to fix all my tests up. Wednesday went much better -- all four of my test suites had run to completion with no failures by about 9:30am, so the rest of that day was spent working on unrelated stuff and answering questions from the validation team and the evaluator. The evaluator, Daniel, was an interesting guy - lives in a suburb of LA, and seemed quite proud of being Californian. Dude loves to talk about himself, and is very open with personal stuff - like the fact that the gyro sandwich he had for lunch on Tuesday kept repeating on him all afternoon. Thanks for sharing that. It's one thing to talk to relative strangers about your kids (we all did), but did I really need to know that his 11-year-old daughter weighs over 100 pounds ("chunky but solid"), and has started "developing" already? Apparently she's into a B-cup now. Now, I don't have daughters so maybe I just don't get it, but do other fathers of pre-pubescent girls go around talking about the size of their daughter's boobs?

He also dropped a couple of names here and there - mainly people that I'd never heard of but that the validation team had. He did once refer to himself as "the godfather of perl", and that "Larry" (presumably he meant Larry Wall, the creator of perl) was a good friend of his. "Haven't seen Larry since his in-law's 50th wedding anniversary" he says. Okay, so you know Larry Wall, we're all very impressed. Sheesh.

We're flying over St. Catharines now (just saw Niagara Falls from my window a couple of minutes ago -- cooooool), so I'm going to end there. No, it didn't take me the full hour flight just to type the stuff above - in the middle I wrote up a detailed report on the testing. That's probably all confidential stuff, so I won't post it here.

Yup, the fasten-seat-belts sign just came on. Time to go.

Update: Flight time on the way back was one hour, 7 minutes and 4 seconds.

Another update: If a girl is "developing", is she still considered "pre-pubescent"?

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