Elf needs Friday, badly

casirafics has brought to my attention that the fine gentlemen over at Penny Arcade have been turned on to the awesomeness that is my B'ys of Great Big Sea. (Or at any rate, the Gabe half of those fine gentlemen, if his last post on the site is any indication.) This delights me beyond all measure. Great Big Sea love continues to spread!

And that was a nice bright spot with which to end my Friday workday, after the way several other things this week have gone. The political events this week have already been expounded upon at length on my Friends list, most notably by solarbird here and by pecunium on several recent posts. I'm not going to go into it in depth here. Suffice to say that I am deeply disgusted at the passage of the torture bill. And that I take only marginal comfort in the knowledge that both of Washington's senators voted against it, and that I did what tiny part I could by urging them to do exactly that.

Today was annoying on the grounds that I'm finally eligible to sign up for insurance via the Times, and I've done that, except that last night I came home to find that we'd received the wrong insurance cards in the mail. Which meant, or so I found out this morning, that I'd filled out the wrong option on the form. Grr. So I had to check with HR the minute I got to my keyboard, and ask them what I could do to fix this. Fortunately, since it wasn't October 1st yet, they went ahead and let me fix my form. And they promised to get me cancelled on the wrong insurance and signed up with the right one. But still, it was annoying.

And I'm still not quite stable again on the thyroid dosages either, which isn't helping. I think I'm coming to realize, based on what's happened earlier this year, that the way it seems to work for me is that I'm good at 150mcg for the longest time, except then I get a little too high and need a brief jolt back down again, and then I'm good for another long stretch of 150mcg. So now I'm trying to figure out if I can work out some kind of a schedule of 150's most of the time and the occasional 137, to see if I can stabilize myself at the proper level.

Also, I have a huge bruise on the side of my leg because I hit it against the rim of the bathtub. Ow.

Tuesday through Friday miles: 14.85
Miles out of Hobbiton: 1410.55
Miles out of Rauros Falls: 101.55
Miles to Isengard: 382.45

Meanwhile, this one's for the webgeeks

The professional webgeeks, that is. As y'all know, I'm QA for the Seattle Times now and affiliated web sites. That means a whole heck of a lot of web presence. Right now we have no formal site regression procedures in place, and this really, really needs to change. I have a two-pronged goal here: one, set up what is essentially a site BVT, and two, set up a full-fledged, in-depth, bang the hell out of each and every functional aspect of the site functionality pass. These goals are going to have to come in stages, though. First we have to write the test cases, and then we have to figure out how many of them we can automate.

This is where you all come in. I'm looking for recommendations for web site testing tools, things that will do the grunt work of verifying links, check for missing graphics, that kind of thing--and ideally, also, let you focus the scope of what you're looking for so that (say) if you're testing all the links on seattletimes.com, it doesn't wander off into testing anything that's not part of that site. (We do have tools that are supposed to do this right now, but they're unreliable and frequently have to be double-checked manually. Not helpful.) For extra bonus points, an easy to understand UI, ability to save stuff out into readable log files, and ability to set up custom scripts/macros/actions without having to have huge gobs of coding skill would be bonus.

Commercially produced software would be fine, as would solid, reliable open source products. Hit me with your recommendations, people!