After being unemployed for six months, I started a new job on Monday.  I have a 3-month contract-to-perm position at Bag Borrow or Steal.  The company rents out handbags and jewelry to the fashionable who don't want to be stuck with a bunch of out-of-date bags or don't have the money for full-price.  So far I'm really enjoying myself.  I'm the only QA person and I have a lot of work to do.  There are some big projects coming down the pike.

This is my first time working as an independent contractor rather than through an agency that takes care of my taxes.  I talked to our family accountant before I took the job to find out how much I should charge to cover all the taxes and still end up with the same take home pay.  I have to put 37% of whatever I make into a savings account and then file quarterly with the IRS.  I went into my credit union today and had them add a savings account called "Taxes" so I can keep track of it all.

Please keep your fingers crossed that this works out for me.

I started a six-month contract at Geospiza, Inc. on November 26th.  My job is to write up test cases for the core program, Finch.  I'm working for Jim Hancock again who hired me at CVS.com and then at Washington Mutual.  It's nice to work for someone who knows my work and likes it.

Geospiza is a small company, about 24 employees, and everyone's been great to work with.  They're planning to hire a couple of more programmers in January and Jim is looking for a performance tester to fill out his team.

I'm still working on George's socks.  At least I'm on the second one now.  I spent weeks not working on them and then found that the needles had come out while everything was sitting in a bag I kept shoving things into.  I finally got all the stitches back the way they were suppose to be (I was in the middle of the gusset decreases) and am now knitting the foot.   I said for the past 3 weekends that I would finish this sock over the weekend.  This time I think I'll finally be done over the Labor Day Weekend.

I'm still knitting the sock continental (pick) style and my stitches are getting much better.  Practice, practice, practice.  I mentioned below that I was knitting a scarf continental style.  Well, I've decided I hate the stitch pattern I was using and I'm going to rip it out.  It's been great practice, but I wouldn't want to wear it.

I got a big shelving unit for my basement studio.  I'll try to get some pictures of my basement studio/office up in a day or two.  I think I might get another of the same kind of shelving unit as the present one looks good, but I have lots more stuff.  We have a very large house for just the two of us, but it's always messy.  I think this is mostly because we don't have the right furniture for the storage/display of what we have.  I wish we could afford a professional organizer AND the furniture/storage they would suggest for us, but since that would be prohibitively expensive, we'll have to muddle through on our own.

My contract job is probably ending Sept 14th.  RealNetworks isn't extending my contract as they're changing their QA focus yet again.  I'm ready to move on to another company with a different dynamic.  I can say that I've really enjoyed the people I've been working with, but it's not the company/position for me.

I should get home now before George starts worrying.  Bye for now.

For the past few days at work, I've been reading a book called Learn Microsoft VBScript in a Weekend.  I checked it out of the Seattle Public Library as it's out-of-print.  I really need to learn VBScript for use with Quick Test Pro (QTP); however, the book focuses on VBScript for HTML pages.  I wish there was a book out specifically about using VBScript with QTP, but no one has written one... yet.  Meanwhile, my website might get a little more interactive.<g>

I am having fun typing up and running the sample scripts in the book.  In a couple of days, I should be writing scripts from scratch.  That will be interesting.

I've been very busy recently.  Ended up working both Saturday and today as we're in a crunch to release a product.  It's been a case of fix one bug and introduce two new ones.  At least I get paid time and a half since I'm a contractor rather than a salaried employee.  I've been having trouble sleeping so with this on top of it, I'm really tired!  The product needs to be done by Friday EOD and I have a couple of other products to test so this will be another busy week at work.

Meanwhile, I felted the second basket and it's looking good.  I hope to finish crocheting the third, smallest basket and get it felted tonight so I can take the set to show off at Tuesday's knitting class.  I still need to re-do George's sock toe, but I might be able to do that on the bus to and from work.  Then it'll be time to come up with a new project.  Any ideas?  More socks? A knitted felted bag?  Another Faroese-style shawl?

I got some advice from a co-worker in another department and went out to the Mercury Support Knowledge Base.  I used a GetROProperty command to get the encoded URL and feed it back to the script so that I always have the URL created by the run.  I've also figured out how to parameterize the starting URL so I can change country, language, etc for our international purchase paths.  I'm feeling very good about my progress with QTP and VBScripting right now.

The purchase path I'm trying to automate in QTP takes the username, user type and password from the sign in page and obscures it in the navigate to URL upon clicking Submit.  I need to grab this URL and parameterize it to include the latest entered info as right now my recording just wants to return to the recorded URL.  I finally found the URL string I needed.  Then I lost it.  I had made a lot of changes to my script, and rather than doing the smart thing of saving the changes with a different filename before restoring the original file, I just went back to the version I had started with.  Argh!  At least I now know it's possible to find this so on Monday I'll keep looking.  Wish me luck, okay?

I finally got my test machine at work set up properly using Ghost images and spent the rest of the day playing with Quick Test Pro (QTP).  QTP is used to create automated tests by recording the actions and entries of a website or application user.  The recording is then modified to allow for parameterization and such. 

I got so involved in what I was doing that I completely lost track of time.  I find that happens often when I'm really interested in what I'm doing... suddenly I look at a clock and hours have gone by.  Between that and the buses running slow, I didn't get home until nearly 9pm tonight.

I started a 6-9 month contract at RealNetworks on March 15th.  I'm working in Ecomm QA for RealArcade so part of my job is playing games.  So far I'm enjoying the work and once the large wave of projects is over, I'll start automating some of the basic verification tests using Quick Test Pro.