2016-12-16:

Fri:
Seems like only one day was needed, I got the new test cases written. Didn't even take all day, either. I think the changes to the feature will make it easier to test, but I still have questions about how to test certain areas, or even if they are testable.

Quite cold today, went to the bank and shopping. Then saw my parents for dinner.

Home a bit before 8:00, a couple of calls returned and didn't reach one guy. Thus far nothing for Sunday! Yay!

Checked my sites, answered email, and it's basically time for bed.

Only somewhat looking forward to tomorrow, supposed to be quite nasty through the night, so there could be a bit of snow to contend with. Not to mention all the running back and forth I'm going to have to do.

Sat:
Not as much as I expected, thanks to some quick thinking.

Went way down 96 to set up the new laptop, it went fine. With a half hour to go I knew that maybe I could just go to Ethan Allen on the way to the next one and save myself having to go down there in the afternoon.

So I did. I figured it would be something simple/stupid as it's windows, their problem was not getting on the internet. I took off an expired McAfee and an old windows 8 start menu replacer (it was win10) and rebooted. It worked!

But now I'm worried. Seems there a bug in windows update that's messing people's DHCP up? So maybe it'll come back. I've gotten two calls about that same issue just today. Nothing I can do, go talk to MS' crappy programmers or whatever.

Then to the (now) third one. An endless loop of it trying to do a repair. Well, I got it booted to the tools thing and ran chkdsk. It repaired some stuff, but that didn't help. Poking around and looking stuff up I slowly began to realize that wait, this machine has two drives, and the larger one is sort of, uh, blank. Pulling it out started it booting into an older version of windows, it must have been the drive from her old machine? But the new one? Still empty! Whoops? How the heck did that happen? The hardware tests (quick) that I ran all say the drive is fine, but can it really be trusted? Not without a lot more testing. I'll just replace it with an SSD.

Back here, ate lunch. Then dropped off the Mac. They paid cash, of all things. Huh, okay, guess I can just save it, it's only 3 weeks until I can put it into the IRA.

Then back here again because I had already done Ethan Allen. Checked my sites and had a kitty on my lap.

Then out to Sean's where I met two new people. Adam and Kate. Both very friendly, and Kate was shockingly… nice actually. Not only did she manage to ask me open ended questions to get me talking, she seemed genuinely interested in my answers.

How in the heck did she do that?

Was also generally helpful, upbeat (apart from when she made what she considered an incorrect choice of which mech to deploy in scythe) and has a good singing voice.

Weird.

Didn't do too awful in Scythe but didn't get anywhere near the top score, then we played Red Dragon in despite Sean wanting to stop around 10:00, it WAS already 10:00, and the game didn't finish until 12:00. Whoops? Didn't win that either, but I lasted longer than I usually do.

But we were all winners because a good time was had by all. Right? Sean wants to run a Pyre game with them. Has the Stan/Sean combo been… replaced?

Sun:
Got stuff done around here. Did the cleaning, put the latest stack of comics into the library program, took two junky PCs apart, started the HD analysis of the laptop, took out the suspect drive and installed the SSD into the desktop. Started the long and arduous update process.
Booted the laptop up with Linux to check the whole "hanging" problem, didn't really see anything of the sort. (Oh, the 3 hour HD check came back clean.) What a shock, it must be windows.

Snowing.

Watched some episodes of Elementary. In the meantime, the win8 machine has decided there are 216 (I think?) updates, but that it can't actually apply any of them. Huh? So it's started the search again. Perhaps in another few hours it will once again have figured out the 200+ number. Another triumph, MS. Well done.

Talked to a bunch of people, but luckily did not make any new appointments. I have Mon/Tues booked so adding Wednesday at this point would really depress me.

That took from 7:00 to 8:30 and I got ready for tomorrow.

Mon:
And then tomorrow came, and it was today.

Wrote two bugs, one that the native behavior of the machine and the office depot behavior of the machine differed by 90 degrees when making a copy that featured a reduction. (gripping stuff, I know) And the second a momentary interruption in service owing to a black screen during certain operations involving an empty scanner glass. This one is infrequent. You take what you can get.

Otherwise had thoughts about the backgrounds and weaknesses for a possible Pyre character and made a few notes. All in all, quite a boring day. Oh yes, and there's some major storm happening in India so our code is going nowhere at the moment. Again, can't really complain about the cause.

Missed most of the traffic over to my after work appointment, but it still took me about a half hour. I did no work there, because her brother had apparently just died either last night or early this morning. Naturally she called me, for all the good it did either of us.

So now I get to go back there. I can't really complain too much, give the reason.

I can complain the win8 machine has yet to update itself. When I arrived home it had again found the 200+ updates and again, gave some stupid answer about not being able to find them or something when I told it to apply them. I then rebooted, but they all apparently failed. I will attempt a third time, then give up and just give the machine back to her.

Also, can someone explain to me how the machine thought it was tomorrow, in another time zone, and correcting both those errors still does not allow it to sync with time.windows.com? I mean, really, MS? You can't even make a time server work? I can understand not doing it in XP because maybe the server it pointed to broke down. (Maybe it was running windows?) But this is fairly recent. I should not have to mess with the servers to find one that works.

Watched more Elementary, thank goodness copyright expired on the Sherlock stories so you could use the name, CBS. I'm sure many more old works will be entering the public domain soon, so others can do the same. What's that? No? Huh, odd.

Tues:
Not much to tell, no new code to test and honestly we've beaten this app up pretty well. No one is writing bugs anymore. But I did what I could, and what's going to fix it is design changes at a low level, which we of course don't "have time" for.

And the cycle continues.

Bought some stuff to make a dish for the christmas party on the way home. We were all basically ordered to go by our manager, which was odd reading. Everyone was asking everyone else if they were going, strange.

Once here I ate dinner, then the guy came and I set up the new laptop. It has exactly the same processor, only sightly more RAM, and a ton of space she won't use. Why exactly are you replacing this machine again? Because it's exactly the same as your old machine- because technology stopped moving forward some years ago. Get an SSD if you want a "like new" experience.

But whatever. Made a few calls, no new job for tomorrow so I can cook up my stuff and be ready for Thursday. More Elementary, of course.

Wed:
More of the same, but we did get a new weblet today. It had four fixes, and I verified them. I sure did. I even wrote a new bug, can't believe someone didn't try that already. Strange.

After work I went and got the chocolate for the candy making this year, can't believe I was at Wegmans yesterday and totally forgot it. Okay, I can, it happened.

Came back here, started the sausage and beans for tomorrow. Gonna be so good!

Several calls, still two people unreached. Booked tomorrow and have two for Saturday. They're talking about wanting us to work this weekend too, so I promised them Sunday. Yay.

Worked on solidifying plot threads for the saturday game, should I run it.

Thurs:
Mostly the party today. We did get new software, if you can call it that. Right before the party he wanted it loaded, so I did. It popped up a message "hi" and when I went into anything it went black. So much for that.

Party was pretty fun, it was pretty bitterly cold out. Nasty as we went into the evening too.

Came back here for a bit, then out. Answered questions, tried cleaning her printer (didn't help) that sort of thing.

Came back, made sure the laptop was working ok after I reloaded it, and it seems to be.

Then started on the other one that had been dropped off. Setting up a laptop. The old desktop had an SSD, so this one is going to feel reeeeeeal sluggish in comparison. Hope you know what you're getting to!

Snowing like crazy, getting up early to blow the driveway out, then go over to my parents with the bi-weekly "gifts." Then into work, then out to the bank, shopping, and over to see my parents.

Saturday is totally booked, lots of running around because everyone lives in the opposite direction as everyone else. Haven't heard from Sean, so not sure if I'm going over there or not.

Then Sunday most likely going to work, again. If we get something we can actually test, that is.

Anyway, going to get ready for tomorrow and get to bed early.

Stay warm out there, and note it's only like 9 days away now.