2016-08-26:

Fri:
Mainly just poking at the software with a stick today, Senpai found some jpg files that gave him an error message when he tried to print them, kind of odd. John wrote up two bugs I had written up ages ago, well done. Nothing great in the trash either. Keyboard still working a treat though.

Got introduced to some guy from Oregon, part of the microsoft project my manager wants me to join. He's chomping at the bit at the guy is like "we might have test cases in a week… maybe two?" Ha-larious.

Apparently there's this guy over at MS that tries to break our stuff by pressing all the buttons at once and nonsense like that. Stuff the users would never do. Hey dude, before nagging us about edge cases, why not get you own house in order? Read my blog, you might get some ideas about bugs you might want to look into. Just a thought.

Apparently this is some "high profile" assignment which made me very-very-very afraid. Why am only I being involved, not the rest of the team? (all two people of them.) But I guess some other dude is writing the test cases, I just have to run them. Guess we'll see. Wonder if I'll be moved to a different lab too?

Also looked into controlling the tablet via simulated bluetooth mouse and keyboard movement to somewhat automate our testing. Didn't come up with much. Lots of ways to do the opposite, use a tablet AS a mouse, like I want to use my $400 piece of equipment as a $20 mouse. Riiiiigh.

Bank, shopping (still no cat food!) and over to my parent's house.

Back here, made two calls one guy dropping something off so thank goodness for that. Sean emailed, we are I guess still on for tomorrow if the others get back to him. Nothing from them yet.

Cut the lawn. The section where I put the new seed? Green and long. Everyplace else? Dead. So I now have the reverse problem I had before? Weird.

Ah Sean got back to me. 7:30. A bit late but okay, we started then Friday too.

Checked my sites, now I hope to finish off Thundercats. HO!

Had two episodes left.

Sat:
Two jobs, and the day did not go as I had planned. Like so many things in life.

First one at 10:00, cleanout. Fine. But his main problem was email. Windows Live just sort of stopped getting mail a month ago. It would see the exact number of messages he had "live" but it wouldn't download them for anything.
Looking at the webmail he had 8000+ messages dating back to a year and a half ago. Brilliant, well done live mail.

Do you know tedious trying to delete 8000 messages from RR webmail is? I do, because I tried to do it! I googled a better way than moving 200 messages (slowly) at a time to the trash, then deleting 200 messages (slowly) from the trash and found I could "manage folders" and dump the whole thing. In 1000 or so message intervals before it gave up and gave me an error. That was slow too. Time Warner or whatever company you are now, please fix your stupid webmail system. It hasn't been touched in ten years!

So I was on hour late (10:00-1:45) to my 1:00 which was book guy. As usual there were tons of missing pages now, and a lot of correcting I had to do. Which I did. I even found some old backups I made that put back some of the missing pages. Some, not all.

Left there about 3:30, having gotten in touch with Sean about dinner/time to arrive. He said 5:00 so I came back here for a little bit until it was time to get the subs. Having not had lunch I got a large and some pasta salad. But Sean gave me a huge pastry thing so I only managed half the sub. (spoiler, I had one bit of it for breakfast Sunday and the last bit for lunch. Pretty good stuff)

We watched a somewhat odd movie that was shot in first person perspective, and then it was on to the wanderer game. It started well, as we were working out how to help Raiuji not eat us all, and helping the guy help us, but then the actual Black Dragon game started.

It ended far too late about 1:00. Raiuji ended up doing most of the work, but I'm not sure it was what Sean envisioned. Too late for that now.

Back here I fell into bed, knowing I was getting too little sleep that night.

Sun:
And I was right. I had to go set up a new laptop for someone for four hours. Honestly, why are you even replacing the current one? It's exactly the same speed, memory, and you don't need the spinning rust capacity. It's pointless. But I did it. Tediously.

Got home, and even more fun was to be had setting up the Mac Mini and looking at the laptop I had gotten dropped off the night before. The Mac Mini I just updated, it needed nothing else (naturally) but the laptop…

Well, mbam found 1000+ things, but the fun was the LCD. It's dead. So I looked up how to do it. "Just pry these covers off," say the directions. No, that's not exactly how it should go because when I tried that I completely cracked the whole display. Fun! Plus it's a touch screen so really I would have had to replace the whole thing anyway but if she didn't use that it wouldn't have mattered. I just ordered a replacement (at least I hope it is. It seems to look identical but with HP's crazy part numbers there were some glass parts almost but not quite the same? But this is the whole upper display piece so it will hopefully fit? I'll just charge her as though it was only the LCD and take a loss on the rest. Sigh.

It's now 4:30!

Straightened up, worked on the picture book project a little.

Got a battery out of one of Heather's gameboy games.

Made a few calls, the guy I work for Sundays putting in the BSOD machine and then taking it away has yet another new machine (I think) anyway I called him. And the lady I worked for Wednesday, the one with the scam lockout, she can't print so I'm heading there tomorrow. Should be quick, nothing should have changed with that system.

Going to bed early, try and catch up on some sleep.

Mon:
Wrote up only one new "bug" today, the fact that the pages to print seems to be a 16 bit unsigned int. Found it by trying to print hundreds of copies of a document with hundreds of pages. Didn't get the number of pages I expected so I figured I would note it.

Nothing else really exciting, no news on the MS project.

Nothing exciting in the trash bins either.

After work job was quite easy, just had to plug the printer back in. Yeah, that's it.

Came back here, watched Trancers 1 and made a few calls. Going to the prison outreach place tomorrow, don't know what their problem is.

Worked on the spain book project a bit, have 30 pages done.

Tues:
Morning and infuriating. Great combination.

Woke up to find my freezer not actually doing its job and freezing things! This was somewhat troubling and I had all of five minutes to look into it before work. I pulled it away from the wall and looked at the back. It didn't sound right, but was blowing cold air out. Odd. I vacuumed the back out that I could reach and left it.

At work I did write up a few minor things, and heard the latest rumor about all contractors being forced to take the entire next quarter off! Yipes! Are we really doing that badly? Sheesh.

Came back to check on the freezer, hey presto, it's fine? Everything was frozen again and it sounded right. Weird. Took the front off and cleaned out the bottom too, shoved it back against the wall.

Why are side by side ones starting at $800 while the ones with just freezer space at the top so much cheaper anyway? Weird.

Left again to see what the prison place had to say. Stuck in traffic. Got there, they have a dead monitor, and they're still complaining about that system I fixed the power button on. She asked about a new machine, and I was all too happy to sell her mine. I'll even throw in the monitor I brought back from work. So I'll head back there tomorrow.

More heavy traffic on the way home. So I left work at 4:25, and got back here at 6:00, with no more than 15 minutes at each stop along the way. You do the math.

Got it ready to go. They didn't have much on it, I just copied it to a flash drive. My goodness this old one is slow. And of course windows insisted on updating when I shut it off, so I had to sit and wait for that. (I ate dinner)

Made my calls. Got stuck on the phone for an hour and a half because someone "couldn't open windows live mail." Well, it was more serious than that. He couldn't open anything admin related. It just sat there and finally gave some stupid error about it not responding in time. I looked it up. There was a bunch of info relating to that and .net 1.1 (very old) but one 4 page thread of more recent posts. Mostly it was just "draw a pentagram and sacrifice your first born" sort of stuff. In other words random junk. So I tried (tediously, because people cannot follow the simplest of directions) the first thing, booting in "debug mode" running sfc and rebooting again. That seemed to work, as live mail opened after rebooting again. So bizarre.

So I got no work done on the picture book project. Or really anything else tonight. Super.

I did book the rest of the week, dropping the system off tomorrow, then setting up the new machine for guy I tried to sell my gaming machine to the next day. Then two for Saturday already. One half an hour away, a printer issue yeehaw, and dropping off the Mac Mini.

Wed:
I actually wrote four bugs today. One somewhat major thing, if you cancel the job in two services your total goes from 0.00 to 0.0. Odd. Did not used to do that.

Otherwise it was just minor stuff.

Seem the microsoft project is on the back burner, but the AT&T project is going ahead? Huh? Do you people even know what you're doing over there? So now they're looking to get me on that project, again, no real details forthcoming. Whatever, just give it to me and I'll test it. Right?

After work drove over to the outreach, set up the PC, set the monitor down, went to plug it in… nope. Apparently it uses some special power cord? Buh? Why? Why would it do that? There's a clear standard, it's right there! I had taken it off because I figured I would just use the one they had and not lug it all the way over there.

So I had to come all the way back, and then go out again. Sheesh. I ate dinner while I was here, and that let traffic thin out a bit. So that at least worked out okay. Got home the second time at 6:30.

No calls! So I got to work on the picture book project. Got up to page 45.

The nearby guy tomorrow, we'll see what he's come up with this time.

Thurs:
He came up with a crappy standard PC and paid more than likely too much.

Work dragged, no new bugs written. Sigh. Set a meeting up for the AT&T project which according to the schedule won't begin until late October? UGh. At least I know one of the people I'm meeting with monday, she wrote the specs for the alerts and faults that was the largest block of test cases. She's nice enough so we'll see. The other guy that called the meeting I don't know. It can't seriouly be just me around here, can it? Please say that it isn't. I mean don't get me wrong, put me in a room with my test equipment and junk away from people I'll do work. But they're talking about active directory and LDAP and SNMP- I don't know anything about any of that crap! What the heck is this all about?

Then the setup guy, that went smoothly apart from one thing- icons on the desktop just vanished. Yeah! Narrowed it down to some asus process that had no uninstaller, some clearicon.exe I think it was called. Had to terminate that process with extreme force and just deleted it manually. Bizarre.

Got back at 6:00, had the replacement part in so I quickly reattached it to the body of the laptop. A minor scare with a cable in backwards (whoops) but the patient lived, and they came to pick it up. Whew. I gave them a break on the part and they didn't know about my little 'indiscretion' of breaking their part.

Made calls, 2 of them, just helped people through stuff over the phone, and finally got to eat dinner at 8:00.

Got ready for tomorrow, put the PCs in the car to take to my parent's house tomorrow for the sale. Printed up a sign for the gaming one, bringing that one over too, can only sell it once.

Don't need to get anything for labor day, as I bought everything in bulk last year, so there's that. Not enough checks to worry about so no bank tomorrow.

My adapter came in, so after dropping the parts off I'll swing by Staples to pick it up tomorrow morning. Probably be a little late but given my boss is actually off and we're bored to tears at the moment, I don't think it matters.

Shopping and diner with my parents of course.

So far the two for Saturday, the printer lady that's far away and… I forget the other. Let's hope I get Sunday to work on the picture book and maybe a little writing? Finally? I don't know. Nothing from Sean so probably no action on that front. 

Oh right, dropping off the Mac Mini! Stupid of me. He's a fair distance away too.

Freezer is still working good, so that's a relief.

Going to go now, have a snack and go to bed. Hey, I got yummy jelly from John, I've been looking forward to it. (I had some yesterday as well. I got a very hot pepper from Senpai so I don't know what I'll do with that. Can you freeze it? It would probably go well in taco soup. A tiny bit at a time, anyway.)

See you all next week.