2016-10-28:

Fri:
I have a new kitty friend!

[[image file="2016-10/oliver.jpg" alt="kitty" ]]

To take the day in reverse, my parents were telling me about a cat hanging out at my sister's house, much like a certain Squeaker I could name? And it was pouring out today like crazy so she was soaked. Heather then texted me with a picture and "hey want a cat? She's really nice!"

So I went over there. She has a bit of a runny nose and is kinda sneezy, but she's nice so far. I showed her to my guys while in the carrier and they didn't really freak out, so that's a good sign.

She went looking around the upstairs a few seconds and then was like, "okay, I go downstairs now right?" Unlike a certain Tinker I could name that was perfectly happy to stay up there during his "quarantine" period.

So hopefully once she's checked out and introduced everyone can get along and she can boss the two boys around.

Before that I went to my parent's house, and before that the shopping and bank.

Before that was work, and we found out doing a copy after simply loading the software makes it crash certain models. Whoops? Sort of important I guess. Chris was doing his own thing and I was running the test case I had before on the special builds, to see what had changed. There seems to be no nicely packaged "release notes" to let us know what they're working on.

At the end of the day I got the new CWW, which cleaned some things up. I only got an hour with it, mailed the guy some concerns.

Super rainy today. The parking lot was totally flooded, it was a good thing I brought my flippers and snorkel. It's still raining! You know Mother Nature, you can spread it out over a whole year, we don't need all the rain we were supposed to get all summer in one day.

So that's it. Checked my sites, checked up on my kitty, made a bunch of calls. Talked people through stuff, I actually have nothing for tomorrow! I know! Crazy right.

Sat:
Well, RC (rescue cat) is doing fine. Still sneezing up a storm (it's still raining out) and you can hear how stuffed up she is. But she's mostly content to stay upstairs. I've visited with her several times, but only the last time did she try and get down. Good appetite, my guys get a quarter of a can of food each but she ate up a half at dinner time. She's eaten some crunches too.

Uses the box okay, so she seems like a totally ordinary house cat. Who lost her, I wonder?

Played until the end stage in Warcraft III and wrote the next chapter of Susan. The next one will vary wildly from the official episode. Some people want revenge!

Cleaned up a bit, though I could have done that tomorrow. Got one call all day, which woke me up about 8:00. Thanks, dude!

Sun:
So today dragged a bit. Knew it would.

In the morning I did some more Warcraft III, wanted to see if I could do the last level without losing the human settlement. Didn't manage it, but I did hold out longer. There must be a strategy that would work.

Started the expansion.

Visited my as yet nameless kitty. Haven't come up with a better name than Dory. I wanted something that invoked being rescued from rain or coming in out of a storm. Maybe a rain goddess? Overcoming hardship to start a new life? Something like that.

Her sneezing isn't much better.

Ate lunch, made sure the house was ready, and the guy came a little after one.

He left at 6:30. He can't say I didn't warn him. I copied the drive over but it wouldn't boot. Oddly the little info window didn't list a partition type, even said it wasn't partitioned. Huh? So I formatted it again, then stuck both drives into my machine and did the copy that way. It was faster, and putting it back made his machine faster. Whew.

He's going to mail me a check? What, was your checkbook just too heavy to carry with you? Sigh.

While he was here I wrote part of the new Susan chapter, but not all. Got up to the fight with the dudes that want revenge on her. I was just getting the "map" out to put them in place when he said it was done the first time. Then my machine was tied up with the copy for the second. (he was standing around part of the time so I couldn't exactly go back to it.)

But he finally left, and I could eat dinner and go make my one call I got over the weekend.

So I have two jobs for this week, tomorrow and Tuesday. I plan to get to work early and stay a bit later to make up the time I miss bringing Dora in tomorrow morning. At least they can see me pretty early.

Time to get ready for bed.

Mon:
Busy day. Turns out my new girl kitty is a boy kitty. Whoops. Not calico, more of a tiger stripe pattern the vet said. Time to come up with a new name. (Looked his pattern up later, he's a classic tabby. Oddly, Squeaker is a Makeral tabby. Thanks, internet!)

Anyway, passed all the tests and I got some antibiotics to give him. Haven't attempted that yet, it's "take with food" and I had already fed him. So I'll be doing that in a bit.

Got him microchipped and everything, so I guess he's mine now. Still quarantined until his sneezing stops though. Poor kitty.

Got to work just about the time I expected, a tiny bit after 10:00. Got to work.

Finished up the web service stuff now that a bunch of the bugs I had pointed out were fixed. He said more should be coming soon, so we'll see, we'll see. Just sort of plugging away, it was pretty quiet in the lab today.

Left at the normal time, I'll make up the time tomorrow, went past my house and a little bit further down the street to see what was up with the guy's laptop. Oddest thing. Mouse would move okay, it hasn't hung, but it wouldn't accept any inputs. Keys, mouse button, nothing. Plus if you pushed the power button, it went to sleep so fast (SSD) that it didn't get to the 5 second timer to do the forced shutdown.

So I got the bright idea to turn it on and hold it, and that killed it, and rebooted, and everything was fine.

Came back, saw my kitty and ate dinner.

Played a little WarIII, got ready for tomorrow, and made my couple of phone calls.

No new appointments, just fixing a problem in 20 minutes that time warner couldn't in two weeks, and telling a guy (again, I think) to stop giving money to random people that call on the phone.

Giving Marco (his new name?) his pill wasn't too bad. Doesn't like to be held all that much I think, but he didn't bite or scratch or anything. Or froth at the mouth or speak in tongues or begin summoning the very agents of the underworld to cause me eternal torment. He totally could have you know. All cats can. It's just their amazing restraint that keep us all safe.

Anyway, one pill down, 11 more to go. Popped it right in and then gave him tuna and whitefish with actual tuna flakes on it. Hopefully that makes up for it a little? Feel better soon new kitty.

Tues:
Now that was a long day. Let's not do that too often, k? Okay then.

Got up at 6:00 to get to work by 7:00. Quiet all round, Senpai didn't get in until after 8:00. Then I left at 5:00. Not much else to test, actually, but I did poke around in the code for the new button and found the code behind the button actually worked. So I was able to test that. New bugs written. Oh, I have 17 bugs written actually. Average seems to be about 50 or so per year, given the people that were hired 8 or so years ago have that many in their time. So I'm well on my way to getting this year's "quota" settled. And I have 460 some test cases now.

Made sure I had results for the latest build given how tricky getting a build was, I had versions all over the place. Turned on filters and got everything with the same words for ease of looking at.

Straightened out the lab a little, actually documented the procedures I've learned and put them into the filing cabinet which I labeled with "instructions and spare parts." Kinda wish the guy that had worked there for 8 years before me had done something similar but that's fine, just fine. I can do it myself, it's no bother.

Left for my 5:30 appointment which was the frontier equipment. Which was new, oddly, but it wouldn't respond to a ping or give me an address when I plugged my laptop into it. But suddenly it responded when I power cycled it. Gee, what else could it be… hum, nothing comes to mind.

Got home, (I had eaten dinner before I left work) made my one call. Someone who lost their address book a year ago has once again lost it, so I'll go over there.

Visited my kitty, gave him his pill. He doesn't like it, but he doesn't get angry about it either. I guess he knows about biting the hand that feeds him? Wants to come down, is meowing at the door more. Sorry kitty!

Tomorrow it'll be a year I've been back to Xerox. I made it a whole year! Wow. So employment. Much relief. Many dollars. (Not as many as I made before though.)

Wait, why would it be on a wednesday? I was just reading last years blog entry (odd, flooding in the parking lot, and bitterly cold after that. Seems like a new trend?) I started on a monday, wouldn't it be the 24th or the 31st that was my start date? If it was the 26th it would have only shifted one day, so that doesn't make sense. Weird. When I don't have a kitty I'll go look and see if my original notes list a date. But I put it on the calendar… weird. My first emails that I have saved are from 10/28. Ah, looked on last year's calendar and the 26th was indeed a monday. Weird. That mystery is solved.

Wed:
And another one is solved, it seems. "Queso" wasn't dumped at all! Some flyers have gone up around where my sister found him, depicting my newest kitten cat. Only took them five days to realize he was gone and maybe do something about it. Consensus with the parental units was he had a new home, and that was that. I agreed, as a responsible pet owner does not let their cat just be out there. There is death out there. Did I mention he had a tick attached to his face? Soaking wet, always hungry, and more than willing to just walk into someone's house? No collar, no microchip, no cat for you!

So not Marco then, I need the name of a famous (male) individual that left one life for another. Fictional or otherwise. Could even be a cat! From a Disney movie, perhaps? Such as, I don't know, Oliver and company?

I had considered the name Oliver because of the rain connection, I mean we see him come out of a rainstorm the very first thing. But he wasn't orange, so the visual aspect wasn't there. But Squeaker doesn't look like a small plastic duck, so that isn't a requirement.

The more I think about it now, knowing more of his "backstory" the more I like it. Oliver's just looking for a place to belong, just like mine. He gets taken into a "gang" okay mine is a bit smaller and some dude in a limo isn't after me for loan money. Doesn't have to be perfect, the name Oliver evokes a lot about him. I think I've found my name! His name. I've found, the name, for him.

Onto the work situation, got the dry run of the AT&T demo out of the way. Should go well, I hope? Ironed out a few things, figured out what I needed to know and have handy.

Got a new spec for the config report, so made those lines into test cases. There's been some changes in the cloning but then they changed back? So I don't know what's going on there but they may need to change.

Another meeting to prioritize what I've already found, and just general cleanup stuff though the day.

Did one after work job, outlook had for some reason decided to turn off the iCloud add on, so his calendar wasn't getting updated. And I had to do voodoo (who do?) to get the contact list back. Bizarre stuff.

Back here, talked to my mother about my kitty, ate dinner, made my one call but it was internet so I told her to call time warner. She presumably did I haven't heard back yet.

Thurs:
Oh look, my favorite substance glistens upon yonder roof! By the sparkly nose of Rudolph there's snow on those peaks. Horrible, horrible, yucky snow.

[[image file="2016-10/2016firstsnow.jpg" alt="yuck" ]]

I haven't even been able to pick up leaves once, there aren't even any by the road. I am not pleased, mother nature!

Found out we got new daily builds so Chris tried it on one machine. I should have waited, as it totally made the machine useless! Couldn't get into it anymore, so we reloaded them back to the one good build we've had so far. Otherwise generally going over his test results, finding some more CWW oddness, the usual.

Rainy and nasty.

No after work job so I just came back here. Ate dinner, checked my sites. Petted Oliver. His breathing sounds better and he didn't sneeze once while I was visiting so maybe this weekend we can at least do an initial meet and greet?

Not many calls today, York and the lady I went over doing attachments with. Predictably she is having trouble. What a shocker.

And a guy emailed me about setting up his new Mac. Just plug your time machine into it and let it set itself up, honestly.

My goodness it's been one call after another around here. Remember the lady with the simple request of attaching something? And we went over and over it, she wrote stuff down? Well, she called. Can't tell the difference between looking at her documents folder and looking at her desktop. She swore up and down she was looking at documents, but when I told her to drag the freaking thing to the desktop, oh look, it shows up in the attachment window. So you were looking at the desktop all along.

So I have to go there and give her another lesson on, I don't know, looking at her screen? (40 minutes)

Then the guy I just worked for called. The iPhone/iCloud guy? Said he was getting some kind of error message on his phone despite it working perfectly like a day ago. He spent (he said) four hours on the phone with Apple rather than just calling me, and now his phone is… wiped? Or something? Who knows?

So I have to go back there and get it working despite having just gotten everything working perfectly just yesterday.

Then someone still using AOL desktop!! called. He's not even on the internet at the moment but has a "bad back" so he can't manage to unplug his cable modem. How do you put your pants on in the morning, then?

So I have to go there and do that.

Then the lady I do the book covers for called. Something about google images not expanding when she clicks on them? Seems like a bizarre issue to me. But I had her download Firefox and that works, so I just told her to use that. (30 minutes)

I know for a fact it's not a full moon tonight so why are all the crazies out?

So I have Mac setup guy Sunday, and 3 for Saturday, and Mon-Tues already booked. Weeeeeeeeee. (Yes, I'm working Halloween, not that it's that big a deal...) Say, wonder if I should wear my Pikachu costume to work?

No word from Sean, and it's going to be nasty Sunday so hopefully it's dry enough Saturday to get some leaves up by the evening?

I have all of one check for $27 so that's not worth going to the bank for. Naturally I'll still have to go shopping tomorrow. Then to see my parents. The plan for the day is look the specs over, as they've been put into a different place than I thought. (My old project manager gathered them up and put them nicely in place for us. I miss her.) So I'll go over them all, see if anything has changed. That will probably take most of the day.

Then look forward to a fun weekend! So fun. Fun.

Have a fun weekend yourselves out there. Real fun, not fake fun like I'm going to have.