Seven years ago today, a change was made in my life on an official level.
It was a change I hoped for, shortly after we met.
We’ve faced various challenges over the years and emerged together on the other side.
I have never looked back.
I cannot imagine how my life would have been different if you hadn’t come into it.
Lauren I love you.
Happy Anniversary
Well a few things actually.
First off, finishing the basement has kind of hit a speed bump. A big one. Basically my procrastinating tendencies kicked in. So after this craziness of this weekend (Congrats Dave and Hill) I’ll be getting back to work on things – and yes, I know there’s still no pictures showing on the basement progress page. I blame wordpress.
Secondly, I went and broke down and finally got myself a Facebook account. Between friends at work, friends online, and friends here at home I figured I held off long enough.
In World of Warcraft I fill the role of a resto shaman. On top of that I am the healing lead for my raid. One of the hardest things to do is to determine if the healing is effective or the right healer is assigned to the right job.
Right or wrong these are the general rules I use:
• Single target healers on direct damage (boss) damage -aka Tanks: Discipline Priests & Paladins
• Instant cast or AoE healers on the raid: Shaman, Druids & Holy Priests
Now there are situations where a fight gimmick really encourages a particular healing type. However a skilled team can get around that.
So I got my self an iTouch – the idea behind this will be to give my self more ways to access this blog.
So right now I’m sitting in a comfy chair with the sox vs phillies on while waiting for our sat night gaming session to get started.
And have fallen behind in posts.
Well it’s going to be a while before I can get myself back into a regular posting habit.
Here I am, on the eve of a 5 night trip to Aruba, with some excelent news to share.
I’ve been sitting on this post for a couple weeks.
One day when exiting the trainstation, I thought someone was handing out packs of gum, as advertisers are known to do from time to time. It wasn’t until I got into my car that I noticed that the card wasn’t a cupon but an invitation to join an online church, managed through the new XBOX 360 social network. I’ll give em credit that it’s an inventive use. Makes me wonder what other groups are using the XBOX 360 or Sony Playstation 3 to reach out to others who may not otherwise hear their message.
It’s amazing the difference a day can make sometimes.
Projects that were giving me headaches are getting the final OK, company paid training opportunities have appeared out of nowhere (and look to get approved), and a carrot has been dangled in front of my nose with respect to my 2008 year-end review. I can’t talk about it till I have more info sometime in March I think.
A couple of weeks ago I had queried my boss about training. Training is expensive and our budget this year is very small. I asked “if I was willing to pay for the training, travel, and stay out of my own pocket, would the time spent at training be considered vacation time or be billable as a working day.” The returning answer was basically, no matter how it’s paid for, it would count as a working day. He then followed up asking me if I had anything in mind. There are a few big QA Confrence that I keep getting mailings for. StarEast (Orlando) and StarWest (Vegas) so I brought these up, there’s also a week long course that I hope will be offered in Boston in the Fall (it’s offered in Tampa in 2 weeks). It was pointed out to me that it wouldn’t be politically good for me to attend either of those confrences paying for them myself. Thinking about it, I can see the potential conflicts it could cause, some may think I’m going ‘too far’ beyond the call of duty. I’ll table those two confrences for now, and hope that the week long session comes up north here in the fall.
With a post every workday. That fell apart this week.
Just been busy at work.
I’m a Software Quality Assurance Specialist. This means that for my day job I look at business and developer requirement docs, develop a testing strategy, and since I run solo on many of my projects I also execute the tests. I have training in various automation and load testing tools, though don’t get to use those tools anywhere near as often as I would like.
It feels like there is a big issue across the software industry, where QA is considered a roadblock to release. Developers feel that if they are doing their job right, then why do you need QA. This isn’t true. QA is not a roadblock to release, but a tool to ensure that the release is what it is supposed to be. Studies show that people are less likely to see their own bugs, and it is very easy for developers to implement what they think the business wants, and the business might agree to stuff on paper, but in actual implementation the business might have envisioned something different.
Quality Assurance should be involved shortly after a requirments doc is created. The sooner someone from ‘QA’ is looking at the project the sooner bugs can be found. That’s right you can locate bugs before anything is even coded. You can write tests (at least testing frameworks) before there is actually something there in front of you. And the sooner an issue is caught, the better it is for everyone, and the cheaper it is to fix.
I dream of one day being able to work for on a video game, to add my expertise into the release product of something that will bring joy and entertainment. You never know what the future may hold.
I don’t wish to be a software tester. Yes there is a difference. In small teams like the ones I have been working on my entire carreer the person who performs QA tends to also be the person who is the tester, but in larger environments like those I believe exist at Microsoft or hope exist at Blizzard-Activision, you have two teams one performing QA the other testing based on the direction given by the QA team.
It’s cold out, the harsh bitter winter sun tried to blind me on my morning commute as it always does.
We have more snow on the way this week. I hope it hits and hits hard causing cancelations for a free day off.
Work is no better, nor any worse than last week.
I really just don’t have all that much to write right now. Nothing to gripe about, which should be a good thing.
Tomorrow’s another day though.
A certain bastard asks, “…are you going to post some RP about your Mains on this blog or what?”
Well I might. You never know when something will strike.
This has been a rough stressful week, so I don’t know if I can bring up a tale around Ghaar my shaman. But I’ll do my best.
This week’s Anna’s Friday Five-Hundred is called Alleyways.
“Someone is walking through a back alley in a Major City, and they are mugged. What happens to them? What happens to the mugger?”