2016-09-02:

Heh. Extra.

Went to Kmart, got some stuff, and then the normal shopping. Saw the cute cashier I haven't in a couple weeks.

Then over to help pick up the sale a little and have dinner with my parents.

Back here I made a few calls, booked one more for tomorrow not too far out from Sean's so at least I'm not making a 40 minute trip from my 1:00 then back here then back out that way, so I have three and nothing for sunday.

Hopefully I can do more of the picture book project then.

Put the battery into the one gameboy cart, seems to be holding up so that should be fine. Checked my friday sites, put my timesheet in for this week. Got ready for tomorrow, and now I have a whole half hour before I have to get ready for bed. Whatever will I do with so much time on my hands?

I took a walk. There's a nice circle around here I found from walking puppies at various time which takes about a half hour to get around and back. There's a house for sale on the way, on the one side is the expressway, and on the other is the bay. Wondering if the two would somehow cancel each other out, I looked up what they wanted for it.

Just a half million. Yeah, easy right? $3,000 a month and $12,000 a year taxes. For a house that would have constant road noise. Weird.

Sat:
A very long day. Out at 8:30ish to set up the Mac Mini. The TV he bought didn't have VGA so instead of the adapter I ordered I sold him an HDMI cable. But that was just the start of the trouble. Having no 400-800 firewire cable I plugged them together with ethernet, and tried to do the transfer. Last time I tried this it worked flawlessly. This time it gave me nothing but trouble. Given the state of the machine, and his house, I'm actually not surprised. The whole place is filthy, in a state of disrepair and he doesn't seem to actually be working on making it better. I thought he was, but it's either preceding so slowly as to be invisible, or I was just mistaken.

Anyway, took his old one apart and got the drive out, it decided to do the "I'm copying but really not" trick from the PC. It sat there supposedly moving files and when I rebooted there were no files! I had to copy them manually. So bizarre. Then his printer wouldn't download/work, and I found out he somehow had the enlargement 1200% in firefox, and 8000% in thunderbird. Yeah, no wonder nothing was on the page.

So I was an hour late to the woman in Marion and her issue was she was putting the wrong wireless password into the printer. Nice. Job.

That done I spent an hour trying to get it installed so the stupid "HP Solution Center" would see the stupid thing. I love this piece of software particularly because it says "can't talk to the printer. Nothin I can do. Bye." (Or something just like that) Not, oh, put in the IP address, or let's try these things together, or "I can ping the printer I know it's there maybe the firewall?" Anything! It's just *shrug* bye bye.

Amazing.

Picked up a nice chair on the way back home though.

[[image file="2016-09/mynewchair.jpg" alt="chair" ]]

So I then went 40 minutes to the other side of the earth, spencerport, to get the files off her dead laptop. Was only about a half hour late there. At least that worked out fine, and I cleaned her machine up a little.

And finally to Sean's house with no Other Sean so we played Scythe again which I won quite handily. I got to the factory first and got a card that let me pay hearts to deploy either mechs or buildings, which I did in between getting more hearts so my total stayed the same. Then I upgraded my capacity to get hearts and just spammed that up the track. Victory! And the people loved me. (The virtual people, not the people around the table.)

Also played a bit of Mario Kart.

And finally home about 1:00. Sleepy time!

Sun:
Got a few things done today. Up to page 80 done in the picture book, that's a bit more than half I believe.

I looked at where I had left off in the Susan story, and made some notes. No actual writing though. Did make the latest corrections.

Cleaned the house a bit, set up the new chair.

Allergies were crazy all day, weird.

Watched the rest of the Trancers movies. They were interesting, I guess.

Talked to one of my most favoritest customers for 50 minutes, joyful.

No appointment calls though, so I have nothing for tomorrow. Huh.

Mon:
Slightly more exciting at work today. The scan services I was checking out were acting quite peculiar in the morning. Do a couple of dropbox jobs, crash the print engine. 5 minute reboot later, do it again.

And Google was giving me "scan failed" and "site unavailable" and all kinds of nonsense. Odd.

Had the meeting with the lady I knew and the guy I didn't about AT&T. Useless, quite honestly. I thought it was going to be, I don't know, informative? He just went over the documents I had already read. Bizarre.

And apparently it is going to be only me. If you don't realize how bad an idea that is, you haven't been paying close enough attention. Not only have I never used any of the devices they're using (so I don't know how they're supposed to work so how can I break them?) there is yet no documentation pertaining to that. I've never used the web service which is quite complex, and just having one person testing seems extremely dangerous. One person can miss things. Stuff can be overlooked or assumed that would not be when more than one person is testing. There are two much more senior people they could have chosen. I don't get why I have been.

Not that I won't put the effort in and such, it just seems like a backwards way of going about things. "Let's take the least experienced person here and put him on a project, alone, he knows nothing about." Brilliant!

But the guy wanted me to "start writing up a test plan" or some nonsense given I have basically nothing to write against. But I started writing test CASES which I hope is what he wanted? I had the bright idea on the way home to look at the old Staples stuff, see if there was something tiled "test plan" in there I could look at.

I'll email the lady in the morning and see if that's what he had in mind. You might think "why didn't you just ask him directly" and if you are, again, you haven't been paying attention. That's about the most impossible thing you can ask of me to do. One to admit ignorance and make him think "maybe he's not the right person for this" (which is probably correct, see above) and secondly I just can't speak up about stuff. Anyone that knows me will tell you that.

So am I glad I have work? Sure. Do I wish it was better defined and I could just come in and start testing stuff like I did on the Staples project? Yes.

Back here I checked my sites and did some work on the picture book. Made my two calls, both printer issues oddly, but walked them through it so I made no new appointment for tomorrow either. The one lady said she would send me a check, so that was nice.

A few more pages in the book, and it's time to get ready for bed. (I'm up to 102 of 149)

Tues:
Guess I would have to say I'm feeling a bit more confident today. The "test plan" was basically just an email, nothing formal.

So I wrote up the rest of the test cases, though that may be too generic as I got an actual spec today. It's very incomplete, the numbers are all XXXs but at least it's a place to start tomorrow.
And I figured out what the heck machine I'm actually going to be testing on. It's right in our lab, and I thought it was going to be one of the big machines over in the other lab, so I was over there looking goofy as I confusedly wandered about looking at all the machine names.
But they were right there! Neat. They're $3,000 machines, but hardly bigger than the ones I have here at home. I mean they can do a lot, don't get me wrong, but why does AT&T want such tiny machines? Odd.

I went over to it and was immediately jumped upon by the lady sitting there. "What are you doing with this machine!?" I replied "Technically, Sue and I have this machine reserved the rest of the week, so…" She changed her tune then. "Oh, I spoke to Sue and she said I could use it. Do you need to do something with it?"
Wow, switch to decaf lady. Anyway, I just wanted to look at it, and basically it's just a scaled down version of what my machine would be without the staples hardware bolted to it. Has the same webpage control and everything.
As it's a "consumer" grade printer the manual was online, so I spent some time reading that, which answered a bunch of my "how the heck do I do this" questions, also contributing to my feeling a bit better about the thing.

Don't have access to the bug tracking thing yet, apparently some part of it is now unsupported so they can't make new accounts? Buh? Just switch to JIRA already!

Came back home after work to resume the picture book project. Worked on that after my calls to, I'm at 122 so getting very close.

Going tomorrow to see about a second monitor no longer being picked up by windows. If she has a second video card for the thing it's dead. Strange. That's almost to Sean's, which from work is going to be delightful to drive to.

Then Thursday, well, you may recall two weeks ago on Monday when I did two people down the street from each other? The one that had no actual issues at all says her machine is "booting to black" again which I seem to recall but didn't note down in the blog what her actual issue was. It was something really stupid and simple, I recall that much. Wait, maybe a mouse issue? Like her screen was going off because the mouse wasn't being recognized? So it just faded to black really fast? Yeah, maybe that was it. I'll call her tomorrow and see if that's the case.

So tomorrow's plan is look into making test cases from that one document I got (there's not many, like 25?) and… that's it. No idea what else.

Wed:
Not much else, as it turned out. I did get the test cases made, and I got a visual document that gave me a few more ideas for one area. So I wrote up a few from that. Did more poking around both the printer and CWW software I'll be testing, but I feel neither more or less strongly about the project as listed above.

John got a whole PC out of the trash so he set that up for doing tablets.

The after work job was quite easy, took longer to drive there. I just reseated the video card. Done.

Back here I finished up the picture book, and made my evening calls. The lady for tomorrow called, and I remembered the lady with the "going black" before was the one with the unplugged USB hub (Okay I didn't remember it I look it up.) So that didn't help this lady. But she had called to change it to later, 6:30. Ugh.

So I am now going two places tomorrow, as the lady with the BSOD while using firefox isn't that far away from work. But I'll probably regret it.

Checked my websites, going to start getting chilly in the evenings. 60s. Fall is coming.

Need to do paperwork and send in my estimated tax stuff. Always a joy.

Not enough time tonight. But at least there's no more scanning to be done.

Thurs:
Nothing new on either project today, sadly. How can I be on two projects and still have nothing to do? Odd. I did do a bunch of copies and then scans to verify that at certain times "garbage" was still getting into the log. It was. But only on copy. So odd.

The big garbage bins are gone, so no more goodies out of there. *sadface*

Figured out how to remote into the UI of the printers, which is actually pretty neat. Some kind of Java wizardry, meaning at least some of what I'm going to be doing can be automated? We'll see.

Did the two job afterwords. The first was just cleaning her machine out. Oh, 1,700 days since you last ran Mbam? That's interesting. Plus tens of thousands of temp files, good, good. Stopped her firefox crash at least. Hate stupid spinning rust drives.

Then over to the other lady. Who actually does have a real issue- her LCD seems to be shot. It turns on for a second and then dies. Plugged it into HDMI and her TV and the machine worked, so I hope it's not the little inverter board or whatever it's plugged into.
And yes, I hate changing LCDs but I cracked hers open and it came right out so I can get the part number and everything, it wasn't bad. So I brought that home to do.

Got back a little after 7:00. No calls, thank you. Researched the LCD, called her back about the cost.

Did my estimated taxes, and got my school tax bill in the mail so I did that.
Checked my daily websites.
Got ready for tomorrow.

Still to do: paperwork, and the reload of the Vista machine.

Tomorrow: Go early and leave little gifts for my parents, then work. Bank and shopping as normal, then back to see my parents again.

Saturday- one job, the guy who bought the machine and returned it after my BSOD machine, he has questions. Have to wash the deck off, see if there's anything else I can do before labor day.
No Sean invite yet.

Then hopefully my paperwork, and getting this Vista system started.

Maybe writing Sunday?

About time to get ready for bed, so I'll leave you now. See you all next week, for probably more of the same.