Katie's pre-K class had their end of school party today where the students performed songs and dances that they'd learned for the assembled parents and then settled in for snacks and time on the playground, giving everyone a chance to chat. It was good to get a chance to talk more to Miss Barbara and Miss Sue, Katie's teachers for the half-year she was in class. We were also able to fill in some blanks for them, such as when I explained about daisy_knotwise and I being amateur musicians and improv comedy performers and mentioning how Katie already knew to ask for a live microphone.

"Oh!" Miss Barbara exclaimed. "That was what she was asking for the other day."

Yup. We're raising a little ham.

With any luck, Julie will be in their class in the fall. We'll see how it goes.

I checked in fixes to several bugs today -- one that was potentially bad, one that was a pre-existing condition, and one that was minor. I also checked in a bug for another programmer's pre-existing condition that he fixed.

There is serious danger that we might finally get to the end of this project.

If so, there will be much rejoicing.

(If not, we will eat Robin's minstrels.)

My office chair has been getting a little cranky lately. Given the amount of time that I've spent in it, that may not be a surprise.

I told daisy_knotwise that I wanted to replace it, so on Saturday, we headed over to Staples to look at some chairs I'd seen online, because buying a chair without sitting in it is a recipe for discomfort.

I found the most likely chair and tried it out. It was ok, but not wonderful.

And then I saw the other chair. I sat in it and its two sibling models and decided that this one was going home with me.

Except that it wasn't in stock and had to be ordered from the warehouse, so it arrived here on Tuesday. Katie and Julie, seeing the big box, were going to give me no peace until it was assembled, so assembled it was and then hauled upstairs.

So I am now the proud owner of a Tempur-Pedic TP9000 chair that is apparently a Staples exclusive. My old desk chair has migrated to bedroom for Gretchen to use when on the computer there.

And I am, so far, quite comfortable. :)

I knocked off work, went downstairs and fired up the grill, and daisy_knotwise, Katie, Julie, and I had steaks for dinner on the patio. Then it was back in the house where Gretchen finished the lovely carrot cake with the coconut pecan frosting which was subsequently festooned with candles that were suitably lit and extinguished by the combined efforts of me, Katie, and Julie.

Presents were opened, little girls were played with, and now it's time to get them to bed.

This is a good way to spend the evening of your birthday.

I found and fixed one more bug today that I introduced when I refactored a bunch of code that had failed. The uptime tests are running pretty well.

There is some serious danger that we might arrive at the end of the road here.

If so, there will be much rejoicing.

Having fixed a problem with files getting stuck in memory over the weekend, I loaded up the new build and started taking memory dumps. They suggest that there's a handle leak from calls to StgOpenStorage and StgCreateDocFile. Since I'm watching the application and am reasonably certain that the files -- and their associated storages -- are actually getting closed, this is a bad thing.

I sent the dumps off to Microsoft support today and we'll see what they have to say.

Work is going to make me insane. If it hasn't already...

Katie has been agitating to go with me to a Cubs game for a while now. Through the oddest of luck, I had a spare ticket for today's Cubs/Sox game, because among the people I called, I heard:

I am out of town running the Nebula Awards

I am on call for the NATO summit

I am doing something with my wife

I have to drive my son to the prom

I'm going to a drumming workshop

My wife is going to a drumming workshop and I have to watch my son

I have to work on a project that I'm behind on

My wife is not going to the drumming workshop and I'm going to a Pacers game

I'm going to a Capricon meeting (which I skipped)

I'm out of town

There may have been others -- I've lost track.

So Katie and I went to the game. Katie proved capable of going to and from the ladies restroom by herself. The fact that it was at the bottom of the stairs for our section helped.

However, I don't think she watched a single play of the game, because there were an almost four-year old pair of mixed twins, boy and girl, directly in front of us. Much entertainment ensued.

As did:

A large unsweetened iced tea from the McDonald's across the street

Peanuts (which I mostly ate; Katie mostly sucked salt off the shells like her mother)

Cracker Jack (which Katie mostly ate)

A tiny Cubs helmet full of soft-serve vanilla

A plain hot dog

Leftover cotton candy and popcorn from the twins in front

I would not have survived the game without the twins in front of us.

The Cubs didn't survive the game anyway, losing 7-4 in a game not nearly as close as the final score.

We probably won't try this again for a while...

I'm starting to suspect that my problems with my application are related to Microsoft's MDAC (of which there are a great many different versions). I disabled our database communication in an older build so that I'm not using the MDAC and it is running just fine.

The new build -- where I've enabled the Low Fragmentation Heap as requested by a Microsoft engineer -- has just crashed. We don't know why, of course, but it was using the MDAC to export data to the database.

Keeping life entertaining...

At this point, I have very little idea of what's going wrong with the file loading in my project. Maybe it is memory fragmentation, but that seems odd, because the older version of the project without any of my changes can run for five days or more, but my code fails within a couple of hours. You'd think that the old code would fragment memory too. (I think a great many things. Some of them may be correct.)

Unfortunately, right now, the test suites are failing to run in any reasonable fashion, so I'm going to have to wait for the QE guys to figure out what's gone wrong with the configuration, as the test suites belong to them...

It is amazing how empty the ballpark becomes when your relief staff gives up a grand slam to Hector Luna in top of the ninth as the finale to the process of converting a 3-2 deficit to a 9-2 deficit.

On the other hand, it was easy to get into the men's room and onto the bus when the game was over.

I fixed a couple of different things that were loading too many files into memory at once. There's still something that's yanking a bunch of files into memory, but I haven't been able to figure out what it is yet, so I'm searching the code for the file loads to see who the guilty party is.

This would be simpler if the fellow who wrote the consolidation logic were the one required to fix it, but that is not the case.

Today, I found out that the consolidation code didn't do nearly what it looked like it did from inspection. Comments would have been ever so helpful.

At least, I now know why my revisions to the code didn't work the same way.

Mother's Day went well. Katie brought daisy_knotwise dry toast and milk for breakfast. This would have been more useful if Gretchen hadn't already been in the shower, where -- as she informed Katie -- "the toast would get soggy". But toast and milk were eventually consumed, cards were presented, and we finally departed for lunch.

After lunch, we went to the park and watched little girls run hither and yon. Then it was back home, where Gretchen and the girls planted flowers while I ran loads of laundry through the washer and dryer.

Later, we grilled steaks and dined on the patio, the weather being suitable for a change. :)

Now, very dirty little girls are in the tub getting less dirty.

We'll take this as a success.

At least until bedtime. :)

I went to Sam's Club and the Jewel to pick up groceries. Between them, I got fresh bananas, strawberries, green beans, lettuce, and apples. (Ok, the lettuce was pre-cut and in a bag, but that way we get more than one variety of lettuce and/or veggies in the salad with no fuss.)

My mother, for all of her virtues, was not much of a cook. Some of that was due to growing up in the South in the 1930s and 40s when prosperous households had a cook, which her mother did. Some of it was due to the ingredients that were available when she was feeding us, sometimes on Guam which was not exactly a hotbed of agriculture. (I still don't particularly care for milk, having spent many of my formative years confronted with milk that was reconstituted at a dairy on the island.)

Strawberries, for example, came out of a can from the freezer, were mostly thawed, but still contained random ice crystals, and were spooned over sponge cake shells from the grocery store to make strawberry shortcake.

Today, strawberry shortcake starts from fresh strawberries, sliced and sweetened with a bit of Splenda, then ladled over fresh-made, still-warm shortcakes from the Bisquick recipe, and finally topped with some real whipped cream from a can, because some things are both convenient and good. :)

I am happy to be a locavore for things that are actually available, but I love being able to get all the things that travel here from around the country and around the world.

I found and fixed one (maybe two) memory leaks in our code today. I am happy to say that neither of them were in code that I wrote.

It looks like there may be a massive memory leak hanging around though. That's not in code I'm familiar with at all, so I have called for help. We'll see how that goes.

I've made the locking change from last night and am testing it. So far, so good, but it's hard to tell when you might get to the failure point.

We'll see what develops.

I think I may have figured out at least one of the things that's going wrong with the long project that I've been working on.

Now, I just need to figure out how to fix it without breaking anything else.

*sigh*

The new mixer arrived today while I was at the Cubs game. I unpacked it when I got home and found that all of the parts that were supposed to be in the box were there. Then I powered it up and it came up on the initial screen asking to know what it should do about word clock settings.

Good. That sounds like a factory-fresh mixer. :)

UPS picked up the mixer today on its way back to Amazon.

In theory, the new mixer should be here tomorrow. We'll see how it goes. :)

If Spider-Man lost his last close living relative, would he be dismayed?

We got a babysitter and headed out to see The Avengers yesterday with samwinolj and Bonnie. Overall, it's a good movie, but felt to me like it was less than the sum of its parts.

Let's discuss things in a reasonably spoiler-free fashion. You have to consider that the only film in this canon that I've seen was Iron Man, which I liked quite a bit. Then little girls arrived, so I haven't seen any of the other films (although DVDs of Captain America and Thor lurk downstairs somewhere). Thus, to the extent that we're relying on plot elements introduced elsewhere, I'm adrift.

That was mostly ok. Apparently, the main McGuffin comes from one of the other films, but I can get by that. And I know enough of the history of the comic-book Marvel Universe that I can pretty easily follow what's going on and spot the changes and the resonances.

I miss Hank and Jan from the original team, but I can understand why you'd end up replacing them with Hawkeye and the Black Widow, especially given that Bruce Banner seems to be filling in as the resident biochemist here. And I really enjoyed most of the character bits. I especially enjoyed it when the Hulk met Loki. (This may reflect how things are going at work. It's hard to say. :) )

But I have a problem with the fact that Loki seems to be an idiot while Nick Fury seems to be playing a much deeper game than I would ever give him credit for.

It was great fun to watch. It just feels a little empty somehow.

And that's a shame.

The new mixer came yesterday. I got a chance to play with it today, and it looks to be very nice, although it will take a while to learn how to use it well.

Unfortunately, the disks with the software were missing. Given that many of the settings on the mixer weren't at factory defaults, it looks like this mixer has been sold before and returned. I probably wouldn't have noticed if the disks were there.

But I have. So it's going back for a replacement because of the missing parts. And we'll see what shows up next time.

*sigh*

I was up until 4 AM working on this project for work, sent an e-mail explaining the status, and that got woken up at 10 AM by the phone ringing to ask about the status. Needless to say, my response was less coherent than it might be.

OTOH, I'm making progress. I think.

Today was open house at Katie's preschool. We got to see where she'll be going for extended day kindergarten in the fall as well.

Julie was rather nervous about all this at first, but started to thaw pretty quickly. Maybe we'll be able to get her into half-day preschool a few days a week next fall. :)