Diamond Day

Tonight is one of my Diamond Club nights at the Mariners and I'm quite excited about it. The plan I bought had a set number of games (15) and offered no choice in which ones. But, they did an excellent job of picking. There's a big gap in August which only one game but when I looked at the team schedule, it turns out, they really play much of August out of town. So this means that for June, July and September, I have about a game a week which is perfect. I'm already thinking ahead to next year... Will I be able to buy one seat? Will I get a seat choice? hmmmm

The Fitness Tracking Bakeoff is going well. Misfit keeps misfiring on their servers which does not help their cause. Fitbit does not track in a way that my health plan likes to reward so if it wins, I'll be missing out on maybe $25 a year in Amazon credits. Interestingly, they each recorded exactly the same yardage for my swim this morning. Misfit says I swam 87 minutes and Fitbit says I swam 67. (Fitbit is correct there.) Misfit says I burned doubled the calories of those that Fitbit records. Fibit tells me my pace. Misfit does not. Fitbit has both customer service and several different very active user communities. Misfit has a couple of never active user groups and absolutely totally tone deaf useless customer service. I think Fitbit is winning. So far. But, it's really only day 2 of 7.

The big news in my world today is brought to you by UPS. I get so many things delivered and a lot of them are via UPS. Like all the other services UPS has long had a way to sign up for special notifications but I was never eligible because my address tells them I am a business not a home recipient. But today they have a redesigned web page AND finally they allow me to sign up for tailored notifications across the board. And if I want, on some packages, I can even pay $3.50 and get the package a day early. I cannot imagine using that a lot but once in a while I sure can. And I love having the option. So kudos UPS!

I was even able to log into my account and see that the yarn I ordered will arrive next Thursday. And I haven't even gotten a 'shipped' email from the store yet! I do love tracking.

I have a shirt to assemble this morning. And there also may be some laundry done.

My tweets

• Thu, 13:16: Taping up my sewsewdefmag pattern - there is something so satisfying about doing this. Plus they… https://t.co/cRx1Bar7rK
• Thu, 15:23: Hey @itsmachupicchu isn't this amazing? We need to find a Seattle skyline comparison. https://t.co/ncO34iAhJg
• Thu, 16:11: VERY excellent digging there and yeah maybe not the drama but wow. very cool. I love it. https://t.co/YDXzsqqU7L

Continued

After essentially working for myself, it was heaven to get a real job at a place with a steady paycheck and fabulous benefits and people to tell you what to do. It was still early days at Microsoft. January 1997. It was barely 20 years old and had fewer than 20,000 employees (they have 120,000 today). It was still the wild west in so many ways.

My job was in the Microsoft IT department. Because the company was built by geeks, it was a while before they even had an IT department and then it was only to have somebody keep count of computers, not actually do anything with them. But, of course, geeks are the worst at managing computer resources - hardware and/or software - and have the least respect for anyone who does. So even 20 years in the Microsoft IT department was treated as future road kill.

They had a big push to improve their image within the employee community and decided that communications was the way to go and they hired me to do it. OKDOKEY! It was an interesting job, to say the least.

The head of the department was a great guy who also happened to be a Sikh - full turban and all. He was also hilarious. And he smoked. So he would join those of us in the department who smoked when we'd take a break outside and we got to know him and a lot of interesting Sikh stuff.

The corporate systems at Microsoft were pretty much held together with chewing gum. The company was run on alpha level software. We were our own testers. We ate our own dog food. And it was not that pretty. We, of course, used, Exchange for email but it rarely worked well or long enough to get an email sent. So people would write an email, send it and then call the recipient to see if they got it. Seriously.

And then there was a now famous Bedlam DL3 incident. Someone in Exchange ops had created a testing mailing list, put everyone in the company on it and called it Bedlam DL3 and did not hide it. One day someone found it connected to their mail and decided to clean house so they sent a note saying 'take me off this list'. The note went to everyone in the company and within seconds, many people responded with 'me, too' and each of those went to everyone in the company. It was under an hour, I think, that the entire system crashed and died and with it any means of communicating to the employees. Everyone had voice mail but the system was not set up for mass sending plus all the phone numbers were... in Exchange.

We had a problem. It took 3 days to get the email system back up. 3 days of 20,000 employees in the dark and executives on the warpath. It was bloody.

Our offices were in a suburb called Issaquah which was great for me because the commute was long but really easy. It was about 30 minutes from our office to the main headquarters in Redmond. For two days, my job was to go into the office, get briefed by my manager and the head of IT and then get in the car and drive to Redmond and report to the executives in Building 8 and then drive back at lunch, get more info, and go back with an afternoon report. It was cutting edge non-technology.

The cleanup took about 3 months. We got t-shirts.



Another vivid memory from those days was the time my manager decided we needed a team building outing and insisted we play golf. He was the only golfer in the group. He divided us into two teams. The team I was on got to the golf course first. The team he was on arrived in a van about 5 minutes later. They announced their team name of the Turbanators except we were all laughing too hard to hear it. His team was 3 white guys and 1 really white (blond) girl and he had wrapped an official, real Sikh turban onto each one of them. It was one of the funniest things I ever saw. We laughed all damn afternoon. Oh and I won high score!

To Be Continued

Toile success

When you want to test a pattern before you cut into good fabric that you don't want to screw up, you make a toile or a muslin (pronounced Muslim if you were a contestant on last season's Project Runway - Tim set her straight fast). Generally it's made out of plain muslin fabric (which is a cheap plain woven fabric). But it doesn't do much good to make a toile out of woven fabric (no stretch) when your real fabric is knit (stretch). So I dug out all my knit scraps and made a top of many colors! Generally you toss out your toile when you are done or use it for scraps. NOT this one!







As you can see, I am clearly delighted. I love the top and the pattern it's perfect. And I have some great fabric that I've been saving that will really work excellently.

Plus Flickr was down so I loaded these pictures up to Imgur and it worked quite nicely. hmmmm possibly I now have a nice photo plan b...

It is hard not to grab an afternoon snack on game days. But, I want to save all my hungry's for the ballpark. Still 2 hours til time to leave.