This was from the night we shipped Delphi 2007

I was originally afraid that I would say something I shouldn't just before we shipped, so I simply put this in Drafts until I had a brain to publish it. This was written the night we shipped Delphi 2007. Enjoy
----------------------- Waves on the screen as we move back in time! --------------------------
Well..it's 10:20pm and I am here at work for a second day in a row of late nights (after working all weekend) attempting to ship our product. My brain, which I thought was originally mush, has a startling level of clarity right now. I'm surprised actually as I expected to be dropping out of my chair. What's more, I am validating under a German OS. This is another surprise to me. When we first merged core and intl QA I thought I would never get used to looking at non-english OS'. But here I sit and wing my way through our set of test cases that need to be run in order to verify we have a working ISO and test file set.

I know I am rambling, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to blog right now, but I figured eh...I am sitting here watching installs occur. There isn't much more by brain could do and I am dying to write for whatever reason. I have to tell you, I never thought I could drain the power out of my little IPod Nano as I have these last few weeks. I dare say that it might be what's keeping me from dropping on the floor like my little one will do on occasion curl, up and go to sleep. It could be that the cupcake and Chai Latte are also helping my poor little sappy brain to function...who knows! But music is a wonderful thing and a good motivator when you need just the right thing.

I shall continue to ramble here....It's been interesting to watch these last few months mince through the meat grinder of time. I've watched our company make a turn around, show an enthusiasm I thought dead, and bust their butt's off with long weekends and long hours to result in the culmination of tonight. Last night was everyone pulling together and installing the latest ISO's on every OS under every language we have available to test on for Ent, Pro and Ent_Trial SKU's. That was an amazing feat. I seriously thought I was going to see smoke rise up out of my office as all of my machines ran multiple VM's on servers and Workstations throughout the day, into the evening and on into the night.

I turn now, however, and find that my installs have finally finished which means I now need to run away and get the real work done. Send a few prayers to the shipping gods this night. We're going to need it.
--------------------- Waves appear on the screen as we move forward -------------------------
Well during that night we not only revalidated our ISO images for Pro, Ent and Ent trial on various OS's on various languages, but we also had to test our new Akami system on various OS's with various languages (which is our ESD system). Anyway talk about an amazing amount of "How the hell do we test this? How long does it take to get the digital bits up that we need? Did anyone think to test this with a field test build just for fun?...ummm..."

Needless to say, QA is already starting to come up with points on contention to do things differently. Hopefully this will never happen again.