Time to Start Talking About QA...

QA,  or "quality assurance," has been coming up a lot in my conversations, job-seeking - and naturally, thoughts - lately.  Poor QA! No one wants to do it: companies, as a whole, don't always invest much in it and individuals themselves don't necessarily seek it out as a career path -- at least, that's what it feels like.

At the end of the day, QA just ain't that glamorous.

It can be somewhat philosophical, though, and seems to me worthy of inquiry (yes - inquiry into a type of inquiry). QA can be seen as an excellent example of a posteriori knowledge -- and, by virtue of that, reinforce arguments against a priori knowledge, and can even be used in the case against solipsism.

I'll delve into what it all means in the next couple of posts, so stay tuned.

Tonight is a Three-Kitten/One Old Cat/One Young Dog Night

It has been incredibly busy on my end of the world these days -- yes, being unemployed can mean being productive, just not in an office for a company. Being an unemployed project manager means you're juggling multiple projects, even some with conflicting priorities. In a scrum environment, I'd be my own product owner, scrum master and Team, all rolled into one.

So I've been busy.

Now, to add to it all, friends of mine found a litter of three (most likely) feral, newborn kittens. I knew immediately that they couldn't have been more than 48 hours old. A quick Google search confirmed this, as they still have their umbilical cords. My friends didn't know what to do, except to call me: "She'll know what to do," they said. And, generally, they'd be right.

I've never had the sole care of newborn kittens, however. It's moments like these when I thank the stars there is a such thing as the interweb. I am now a baby kitten feeding, eliminating, disinfecting, nest-making machine.

The tasks themselves are not only time-consuming and physically draining, but is also daunting on some intangible, karmic kind of level. Newborns abandoned by their mothers generally have a high mortality rate: they don't have the benefit of the immune-system-building goodness that mother's milk provides; they may have any number of bacteria or parasites without anyone knowing yet; they may simply fail to thrive...

The responsibility is nearly overwhelming. So I focus on one task at a time (i.e., boil water to clean bottles; warm up the milk, etc.) to keep things in nice, small do-able pieces. It turns out that hand-raising newborn kittens can be an iterative process, too.

How I Learned to Ululate for My Dog

Instead of pointlessly screaming my dog's name throughout a dog park, whilst hiking, etc., I ululate for her.

The story of how this came about is: one day, we were in an urban creek – this means that it's a small creek just off a road in a residential area; the road frequently has cars driving on it. She'd met another dog in this creek and the other dog turned out to be a runner – he was younger and so happened to be in the flight instinct stage of his development. He decided it was time to jump out of the creek and run as fast as lightning (he was a border collie mix) out into the street; my dog followed. I had intended on calling her name, or saying something else that would prove equally ineffective, but my tongue got twisted in a moment of frustration and nervousness and a sort of ululation came out instead. And, as soon as I'd done it, two dogs appeared in sight, happily bounding back to me.

So, despite the fact that it makes me sound like the crazy dog lady (or a relatively old, short, brown, non-breastplate-clad poor man's version of Xena), I now ululate whenever my dog goes out of sight and I want to recall her - and it works. Sometimes it works so well that I get an extra dog or two: bonus.