May 13, 2020

8 Weeks of working remotely, and all’s well

I am now at the 8 week mark of working remotely, and I have to say, not only do I really like working from home, I would be fine if we kept working this way. I have really adapted to this change and much prefer how my day is now structured. Not being stuck in traffic has given me back 2 hours of my day. Every day. I take multiple breaks during the day to take a short walk around the house, or stretch, or lift a set with the kettle bell, or use the resistance bands. When the sun is out, I can eat lunch on the deck. At the end of the day, I can exercise and be done before I would normally get home. I am probably more productive than I was before since I really can't be interrupted. I know my automation project gets new features each week. I can't be late for work or a […]

May 12, 2020

Still playing Godville after all these years (10 to be precise)

Huzzah! Happy 10th anniversary to Godville! My goodness has it been that long? And when I look at my stats, indeed it has. My little hero is 8 years and 9 months old. For all that time he has been slogging it out, battling monsters and bringing glory to my name. Except for the times when he's caught drunk in the tavern. I can excuse that though, I would have done the same thing. So, congratulations to the great folks behind Godville. This really is a game that runs 5 days a week on my work machine. My little hero sits in a dedicated window on my screen, and keeps me up to date with all his adventures. I'm amused by his little puns. I appreciate the sculpture of empty beer bottles in my likeness as a tribute. And during these trying times, I love his eternal optimism. Now, if we could just improve his battle skills in the arena.

May 9, 2020

The JixiPix extravaganza of plugins

While experimenting with Affinity Photo and Designer, I wanted to create some effects for backgrounds and buttons. These would be something for desktop wallpaper, and messing around with images for Slack and email. As well as unique login images for each of my Macs. This lead to a slew of tutorials on adding effects using Photoshop. While most everything translates right over, I ended up discovering something a hundred times better and it integrates right into Affinity. A company called JixiPix, has taken all the work out of building effects by hand by developing a slew of plugin tools. JixiPix has tools for creating effects that look like watercolors, oil painting, chalk drawings, cartoons, pastels, crayon, colored pencil and dozens of other styles. They also have plugins for adding rain effects, snow, grunge, tint and many more. There is an amazing variety of choices and they are all extremely well priced. They can run as a stand alone app, or […]

May 8, 2020

QA Regression Suite coming together

My automation project is progressing faster than I expected. I added the code to check for results, added code to count rows, and removed all the hard coded values I put in place. The QA Execution Profile is now in place with the correct data values for that environment. I even swapped some of the String values for Lists so multiple values could be checked in a single pass. I cleaned up the navigation code so the tests can either click the links they need, or they navigate to the correct location then call each other in the proper order. I have just put together the QA Regression test suite and have been testing it against the site. It contains 21 tests, chained together, that run from start to finish. With everything running together, I made a few adjustments to my data values, picked some better customers to work with, added a couple of checks to make sure objects were […]

May 7, 2020

Getting (mildly) creative with the Affinity Suite

After watching the excellent Lockdown series by Affinity, I have taken up the digital paintbrush and have been playing around with Affinity Photo. Getting a behind the scenes look at how professionals use the product was just what I needed. I am no artist, and no expert. But after seeing some examples, dozens of pieces came together and I understood how to approach a couple of simple tasks. My use of masks and layers was slightly incorrect and seeing the different tools in action was eyeopening. It has been an extremely fun learning process. I am still only doing simple things, but things make so much more sense now. Having a tool is one thing, seeing the right way to use it is another. Once you see the proper way to outline an object, or use a gradient, or combine layers, dozens of possibilities open up. Not only do I recommend watching their tutorial series, I also recommend picking up […]

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