2017-10-27:

But then when isn't that true? Even when it's the most mundane of things.

Fri:
Surprisingly, much success to report today.

The first begins with ThinPrint. Having the queue paused (so I could see it) kept the job from actually showing up. Because that's how it works. But when unpaused, the job was rejected. Well, I had tried previously to tell it "use this user" as part of other troubleshooting but was always told "password wrong." Asked Chris about it, he said "put the domain in front."

I hate windows.

Anyway, thanks to the suggestion by the thinprint person and Chris, it came out. Yes, the freaking page I sent actually printed. After how many weeks?

Did another service, had a donut. (Don't judge me)
Looked the payment icons over. Boy oh boy do we need work in that area. Oh, and using a credit card and checking out from a certain place crashes the whole works. Whoops?

Looked though the Unity asset store some more, for reasons.

Went to the bank, store, and got the laptop from Mom's house. Decided to just stay there, save myself 40 minutes of driving, and cleaned it out there. Only 800+ things I think it was? Did the usual. Oh, and she got scammed by the "driver update" people, I see that all the time. Where does that thing even come from?

Came back here, banged my head against the wall trying to make a simple two color bit of text scroll on the screen. Following the tutorial I got these HUUUUUGE objects, no really, my game board shrunk down to this tiny little spec. And there still was no text inside it.

Tried it another way. Didn't work.

Tried it a third way. Success! You can add text to it, and it scrolls. Amazing. Only took hours.

Made my calls, though there was only one. A Mac laptop making a funny noise and not updating anymore. Whoops. Take it to apple.

The other was just film guy letting me know he dropped his latest "masterpiece" off. He's still using his crappy SD camera, with stupid tapes. I have to sit here and actually "VHS" them into the computer.

Dude, you want to make these stupid, boring little movies? Learn video editing yourself. It's not like he does a ton of them, I haven't done one in years. But still.

Maybe I'll start that, and my paperwork finally, at some point this weekend. Maybe.

I'm just happy this text chat thing may finally go someplace.

Sat:
Got it working in the morning. At least half working, the stuff on the right shows up. I just have to put the routines in for the left side now. This proves it works though. It comes in one letter at a time, it scrolls down so you can read it. It works!

Went out for my 9:00, the monitor lady.
It wasn't the monitor at all, as I expected. In fact, it was just stupid PC tricks as usual. It was making a very odd clicking sound I found concerning so I unplugged everything and plugged it back in. Hey presto it works again. How about that?

Back here I worked on the right side of the text string showing up properly in the game. Got that going, worked on what I would need to do for the "script" system, working through the lines of text to make them interactive.

Went over to iMac guy. Got his epson printer back. Astonished it still worked, quite honestly. Got to sit for three hours and tell him how to do everything I had told him the last times we got together all those years ago. He retained it well, unable to draw a simple box and fill it in with a color without me carefully directing his every thought just two hours later. Bravo sir, well done. Is this really the best use of my time? THREE HOURS. I could have implemented my chat scripting system in that time.

But then I hear you asking, "and what would therefore have been gained?" Touché, good reader, touché.

Finished up Sakura Angels, not all that great, sadly.

Then watched Young Guns, a movie my father had loaned me. Was I supposed to be rooting for the main character? Because I found it difficult to do so, given his nearly unhinged propensity for murdering people in cold blood. Oh, and it's trying to be historical? That's okay then. Honestly, you want to see what "open carry" means for a nation, just watch a western. Less guns = good, people.

Wrote up a few scripts for the scripting system. Have to have something to load before I can wrote code to test, no?

Got the boss berates you system up and running at least.

Sun:
Got the chat system working. Nice! Now to come up with some HAlarious scripts, no?

Left for my 11:00, dropping off the PC.
That went fine, and he actually needed the little wireless adapter it came with. How about that?

Came back here, ate lunch. Put the latest stack of comics into the iPad. It updated to use a newer dropbox API and now it crashes when it opens. Great.
Did my paperwork for last month. Better late than never, right?

It was such a great day out I put the christmas lights up. Yeah! Who's going to stop me? Right, nobody.
Except fate itself. Went to test them, found a bunch that aren't working. Looking at them the metal contacts are rusting out, and of course if one goes they all go. So I gave up trying to figure out which ones were bad, as the string that did work was flaking out on me while trying it. Probably disturbing the rust? So I just set it up a bit differently for this year, and I'll get some more after christmas this year. Target should have the same markdown Kmart did, right?
Oh, and the nets both have a corner that doesn't work. Sigh. I put both of them on the holly bush, it should be fine.

I mean I've had these lights for years, but what's the point of LEDs that last forever if the tiny metal pieces that carry the electricity rust out? Grr.

Then tried to do Mr. Movie's movie thing. Final Cut does not want to cooperate. It opened once, wouldn't see the camera, lost half its windows, then hangs when it tries to open again. HUH? And then textedit won't open after that. In fact a bunch of things won't. I can't seem to find the original installers for it, which is odd as I keep that stuff. I found version 4, but I have version 5. Where did 5 go? I have the serial number document for it, in the same folder as 4. Did I erase the wrong one long ago in history? "Acquiring" a newer version, install it and see what happens. So weird. Stupid movie guy. And you should see his "notes." Scribbles more like.

Got ready for tomorrow, getting up an hour early so I can leave at 3:00, get to the ortho by 4:00, and then the vet by 6:00. Not looking forward to tomorrow.

No calls all week though, that's a plus.

Lost my space pen downstairs. Where could it have gone? Did the cats play with it?

Yanking bulbs has left a rather large blister on my right thumb.

What the heck? It's been the absolute worst afternoon!

At least upgrading the software seems to have made it work again. Whew. But these notes are terrible!

Mon:
Got up in the darkness, the deep dark, to go to work. So I went to work!

Did the usual poking at things. Two of my "favorite" services, with another one to go before basically everything has (once again) been tested on the latest version.

Wrote up some more scripts while I was sitting there. I'm up to 15 now I think it is. 15 - 18?

Left at 3:00, we did the whole wand in the mouth thing. Because thanksgiving is 4 weeks from now, (yipes!) I get to wait 5 weeks until my next appointment. Which gets to be a full install, to use a computer phrase. They have to take the current guides off and put new guides in. Yay! The torture device!

Got back with plenty of time so I checked my sites. Went with Oliver to the vet. No answer as to why he's the sneeziest or thirstiest cat ever. Checked for diabetes, but with a human tool? Does that really work? Huh. I guess some mysteries remain. Said he looked fine otherwise.

Came back here, made a couple of phone calls. One took care of over the phone, the other I'm going there tomorrow. It's just up the street, so that's fine.

Got my library program working again with an iPad update. Even managed to jailbreak it again, not that I did much with that before but turn off the stupid lock screen. Did so again!

Guess it's time to totally allow analog video transfer to take over my machine. Yay.

Huh, the lock screen thing didn't work. Guess it's too old. Time to look for another one.

Is one of movie guy's tapes blank? That seems… odd. The others are okay. Though there are huge stretches of blank tape, thanks for that, dude.

Tues:
More poking at the software today. Got a few odd results, probably won't be able to reproduce it but I wrote them up. Might as well, it's my job or whatever. Finished the least favorite test cases, the alerts and faults, so at least that's "done." I mean "done." I mean DONE. There, that's got it.

No Sean this week, he says John is not available.

Wrote up a few more dialog bits.

Went to my after work job. A HD cut into a 60GB piece and a 400GB piece. Companies still do that? Weird. He opted for an SSD.

Came back here, started the transfer. Got another tape into the project and then tried the final tape. Yeah, it's screwed up all right. Called him but didn't reach him. We'll try his camera, maybe? It just shows up crazy on the display, but it's the tape for sure. Stupid tape. I'm betting the camera in his phone was better than the one used to shoot this "masterpiece." Darn it, there I go again.

The next work on the game requires a whole new scene. Scary. It's the store. How to begin? I guess I could work out what it'll look like? Programming it should be much easier than the main scene, now that I know how to drag stuff around and such. Yeah, need to know what it's going to look like.

Worked on that. Started a little 3D project to see what it might look like. Yes, I'm a terrible 3D artist just like I'm a terrible 2D artist. But maybe I can hack something together?

Wed:
I'm a bug writing fiend again. Thank goodness. For now the endless tedium of testing everything we had tested before a million times is over. I got an android 7 tablet and build of the updated apps to go with it. And boy howdy are they buggy. 9 bugs written today, and that was just a half day of testing. Nice!

Dropped the laptop off, no trouble there.

Came back here, checked my sites, ate dinner, worked some more on my dispenser area. My goodness it looks terrible. How can one person even construct something so hideous to look at? I admit, it does take a certain someone.

This is what I have, so awful!

[[image file="2017-10/store_nobuttons.png" alt="so awful" ]]

It's supposed to be a sort of dispenser machine with a touch panel display on it that shows you the current store inventory. Then you can scroll it and it'll show you your inventory, and you can sell things back you think you won't use. My guide was just a boxy thing, but mine takes the boxy look even further. Is all that really conveyed here? But honestly I have no idea what to do in order to "fix" it. The blue floaty thing is your "phone" and where the chat system will show up. That will at least be clear when text starts showing up but it too looks like a third grader came up with it. Curse you, art!

No calls, except for the guy right at 9:00. The guy with the 700Mhz machine running XP still. Half an hour later I had gotten his atomic clock working (with the last server it can actually talk to). Doing anything with the man or the machine is a struggle.

Thurs:
But what wasn't a struggle was writing bugs today. 8/20 for me, not bad, not a bad little day. Stuff is broken that really shouldn't be. I mean, we just changed OS versions. Maybe they were working on stuff behind the scenes? I don't know. Anyway, I'm only about half way through the service (had a bunch of meetings today) so I'm sure there will be plenty more where that came from.

Came back here, ate dinner, checked my sites, worked on the "praise" system. Your boss can now "praise" and berate you. Nice. It's not so much praise as bosspeak, him taking credit for how great you are or saying how he'll likely be able to buy another boat because of all the hard work you're doing. Boss stuff. Anyway, that works. Also fixed a bug where if three dropped and were about to teleport out, if you ran your mouse over them the glow would stop. Whoops. Fixed.

Made my one call, going over there Saturday morning. And I've emailed book guy we'll see if he gets back to me about 1:00 this Saturday, as there was no way I was going over there last weekend.

Got saving/loading the game to work. Sweet! I mean the code that's there now works, but will the method I've used for keeping track of the data work? I think it will, it's not that much to keep track of. With that I might be able to start implementing the store over the weekend.

Looking to the future it's the (usual stuff - parents) again this week, as they no longer wish to see me and "accidentally" are working at the co-op. I kid! I kid the parents! But seriously, they're not going to be there. So bank, shopping, and back here. I will stop, though if I stopped in the morning to get rid of my garbage I wouldn't have to go back. I think that's what I'll do, actually.

Sunday seeing iMac guy as usual, as he was busy Saturday. Will he remember how to draw a square? Odds are… no. It's bizzare. Here we have a guy making his own games (learning Unity and C# as he goes), writing novels, I know how to use Blender, photoshop, Indesign, excel, word, livecode, etc. I've 3D printed stuff. Don't forget basic editing of movies in Final Cut Pro. I know PC repair, built my own gaming rig, the list goes on and on. They're all just extentions of each other and seemingly with a bit of online help are no trouble. (I mean my intro to indesign was 5 minutes of Sean showing me a little about it.) BUT can't do art to save my life. (Or talk to people, but that's a conversation for another time) Then there's this guy who is a supposed artist; can't draw a square using a computer. Seemingly can't even think through the logical steps needed one by one to select the tool he'll need to even begin. 

Makes you think, huh?

Further into the future is the end of October… already. Halloween I hope will be nice and spooky for you all, and I'll see you all next week, the first week of November. The end of the year is in sight.