2018-11-02:

But really, why should they?

What we did do today is work on a rather curious issue relating to IPv6. We is of course Chris. I helped! By, uh, not breaking his concentration with a lot of idle chatter.

Yah, anyway, the feature works perfectly on firefox, you can get to the page and to the remoteUI. In IE you can get to the page, but the remoteUI gives an error. In chrome… you can't get to the page. Huh?

Otherwise I finished that model and did not, repeat did not work on chapter 15. That would be wrong.

Got food stuff, deposited checks, and saw my parents. Got a text at 4:00 from Sean if I wanted to come over this week. Way to leave it to the last minute I guess? That's fine, just fine.

Came back, checked my sites, and had far too many phone calls today for reasons. The afternoon one changed to morning, and I'm picking up a system that's stuck not updating or something? That's on the way home at least. So I should have after that free.

And that's that!

Played some FF8, gonna fight the Tonberry King!

Sat:
But not before I fought the HP, and lost.

The day started well enough. Checked the play guy's laptop over, it had a few things but nothing out of the ordinary.

Then I headed to the second one. Which I realized I hadn't made notes how to get to. I thought it was north of xerox on Phylips road but it was south. Finally made it. It was running funny and I finally ran the diagnostic on it. HD failed immediately.

So I took it and since the first guy didn't want the SSd yet I put it into the laptop. Mistake. Immediately got a SMART error. Sadly I had the drive since 8/20 which as the mathematically inclined among you will note is 60+ days. I could only return it to newegg after 30 days. So I tried to call HP. They do not have a support number on their site without jumping through hoops, and I couldn't jump though the first one because it said the serial number didn't exist. Uh, it exists, it's right here.
So I googled it, and found the number. I called it.
What I wanted to hear from HP was "What is your issue?"
I would have then said "I have a brand new SSD, the machine I'm putting it in says it's defective. Here is the message: BLAH."
To which they would reply: "I'm really sorry our product is crap, sir! I'll put a replacement in the mail TODAY with a return label so you can get that junk back to us. I will need your credit card number."

Was that even close to what I got? No. They were more worried if I was calling from the US or Canada (as if it mattered) and giving me the run around. One person even claimed the warranty was only 90 days, but it clearly says 3 yrs on the box. I finally ended up at some multipoint.com email address and he transferred me to them and there was a fax machine on the other end. So I gave up.

But it doesn't end there, I left a one star review on newegg and ordered some replacements. And guess what vender isn't getting any of my business ever again?

That's right, HP!

So I can't work on the laptop so I checked my sites and at least got what files from the old drive I could, because it's so much easier getting them from the Mac than trying to fight with the windows permissions model.

Got the ring! It's… shoot, it's not good in many ways. The texture needs to be more detailed, it's too fat and too big… But at least I can see what happened and how what is on the screen got translated. I'll study it later, probably tomorrow, to see what improvements can be made. I'll have to do paperwork too, it's sitting there. Don't want to get two months behind, after all.

Went to Sean's, no Other Sean at the last minute so we did my game. Finished up the tail end of the bear quest, and introduced the feuding fairies quest. Went in a different direction (of course) but that's okay! That's part of the fun for me too, don't cha know? It's going to be a combat instead, so I have to make something fun for them to fight against.

We stayed on track pretty well but I left pretty early as well. When I got back I made a chart for FF8 edilons, so I could be sure to spread out the stat bonuses equally to all characters.

I'm such a nerd.

Sun:
Got up and did more FF8 in the morning. Want to sort of get through it and play a FF7 mod that just came out. I suppose I could just stop playing, it's not like I really like the game and I broke it as I wanted so… I don't know, just don't like leaving things undone I guess. Despite the many times in the past I have done so.

Did some reading.

Cleaned up the house a little.

Worked on the ring v2. Just with what I've done from 2-5 I am much happier with how it looks. My first version had three problems. 1) The texture, while it probably would look great like in the picture I was following really really really really close up, as a ring you can hardly tell it's there. 2) The head was too small. I think I made a good sized snake head for a real snake, but you need to see it's a snake. 3) It was too thick. It would be uncomfortable to wear.

I made the head more central rather than off to the side, and made it much bigger.

[[image file="2018-11/snakewithoutoverlay.jpg" alt="snakehead" ]]

The scales I made a diamond shape (I found a snake pendent it looked fine on) and made less of them, so they'll be easier to see. And it's much thinner.

[[image file="2018-11/snakesunday.png" alt="diamond" ]]

That I think fixes all these issues. At least at the high level with design #2. I still have detail work to do, the head is just blank at the moment. I have to keep in mind I'm trying to "suggest" things like snakeskin not model every scale on the snake's body.

Here's the old ring

[[image file="2018-11/oldsnakefinal.png" alt="previous snake ring" ]]

Here's the redesigned ring

[[image file="2018-11/snakemonday.jpg" alt="flatter snake" ]]

Cleaned the mice, gave ChillMouse his new, larger, enclosure. Hope he appreciates it. How come he hardly ever uses the wheel but the other one is in it constantly when awake? Weird. MysteryMouse also does backflips. He'll stand on his little branch thing, jump up and twist in midair to grab the screen, walk across it, and jump down, landing on his feet. I should try and get a movie of it but good luck with that.

Did my phone calls. Ordered a few things for dentist guy. Ordered a laptop for Don from my high school days as his laptop died. He already bought one, the sod. $600. I told him to take it back (it wasn't out of the box) and I would find him one that was faster for less than half the price. So I did. SSD for the win, duh.

Mon:
Quite busy at work, I knew I needed to do something with all the bugs I had discovered so I, as directed, made up the spreadsheet to hold the translation issues and the UI issues. Then we had the meeting to talk about the spreadsheet and if that was the best way. The decision was to talk to the developer lead and see what he thought.

Meanwhile, I had lunch, then got the screenshots for the bugs to put into the spreadsheet just as an aid to finding them, along with the directions on how to get there. Then wrote up the miscellaneous bugs I had found, all ten of them. That took about the rest of the day.

Came home, still cold and rainy by the way for the third day in a row, and got to work on the snake again. As you saw before the texture on the tail wasn't done, so I got that fixed, and started on the head. I'm leaving it smooth for the most part, one of the rings I'm looking at did and it looked fine. I did figure out how to put an image behind the thing so I could get the eyes and nose in the right places. I'm fairly happy with it, I think it'll look a lot better than the first one. As well it should.

I spent 45 minutes on the phone with a lady somehow unable to trace a single cable from the back of her cable modem to the computer. We finally managed it, and it was plugged in, so I told her to call Spectrum. Which I should have done 40 minutes before, honestly. Then guided Ellen in how to send an attachment. Again. "Oh, it's such a nightmare."

Uh, no, a "nightmare" is if you come home and your house is in flames, or you wake up to find a man with a gun in your bedroom, or you are forced to test the same software for three years and it never really gets better. Wait, not that last one, but you get the idea.

Having to click the mouse a couple of times and actually remember something doesn't even slightly qualify.

Anyway, here's the snake so far, I don't know, does anything else even need to be done?

[[image file="2018-11/finalsnake.png" alt="Snake Done" ]]

Tues:
Another fine day of working, working and doing nothing but working. All day.

Not working on another Blender project, no sir.

Met with Diane, who was actually at work for a little while, and showed her the IPv6 stuff. Wrote up the two bugs for the spreadsheet. Did a little testing on the crappy work center, once I finally got it loaded. Our wonderful incomplete file transfer error bug reared up once again. Oh, and I tried to get out C405 working but I think someone did try it already. The drum was there and made no difference to the error. I wanted to test it, it doesn't need to print after all, but whoops, the error covers the screen and you can do nothing. Great.

So I picked the work center and poked at that a bit. Naturally it's fine.

Went out to see the internet people. Her router and computer are within arm's reach of one another. Why, by all that is holy, did it take 45 minutes to trace the white cable from the one box to the other? I know you're not blind, you saw me arrive perfectly.

Anyway, windows had shut her ethernet port off "for reasons" so I deleted it and put it back. That fixed the issue. Windows. Wow. Such programming.

Back here I checked my sites, had more yummy soup (almost gone sad face) and watched more blender tutorial videos.

Oh yeah, called my Wolff overlord. She was like "nothing will change" and I was like "as I expected." And then she proceeded to list how much everything would change. I was like "what?"

Like they offer a health care plan! And a 401k! And ticket discounts, and for some reason interest free loans on buying PC hardware, because that's a real cost right there. She was going on and on and I was like, lady, you had me at 401k. My last place didn't offer me squat, where have you people been? So weird.

So to say I was a bit dazed hanging up from that call would be a bit of an understatement.

Looked at my model, I'm very happy with it for only being a few hours work, but the face… oh my goodness the face. Well, it's not a big deal, if anything it'll be a year before it's needed.

Wed:
Any big news today?

Nope.

Sorry to disappoint. There were some interesting things that happened though.

I checked my coat pockets, and pulled out what I thought was my flash drive. I thought that was a bit odd, I didn't notice it missing from my keyring? Welllllllll it's a little more complex than that. Turns out I must have originally bought a 128GB drive, put it in my coat, and then somehow forgot about it. And then bought the same drive in 64GB. Am I stupid or something? Yes, yes very possibly.

Went through all the hoops for the contract house transfer. Just a web form, but I needed to provide references. Uh, okay, but I've worked here three years it's a little late for that.

Happy Halloween!

A little late I know.

Got the order in, so I got the laptop done.

Oh right, work. Uh, the usual, certainly not playing around with blender. I had watched up to the face in the tutorial I'm watching and he did it with straight up vertices not sculpting. Well, I had tried with sculpting before that and this was where I had left it.

[[image file="2018-11/potato_head_1.png" alt="my face is melting" ]]

A face not even a mother could love. A blind person touching that face would recoil in horror and never speak to that person again.

So I tried it the other way. I did it a little differently, he did the eyes and mouth, then built everything around that but I thought, if I'm doing things from the side, and I'm doing things from the front, why not just extend that concept and trace all the contours of the face, then fill them in with geometry? And that seemed to work! The hair, as you can see, was another problem.

[[image file="2018-11/this-is-horrific_1.png" alt="please kill me" ]]

I settled on another method, this guy has stand up spiky hair which I had to look up to see what it exactly was because I can't visualize anything.

[[image file="2018-11/tulip_head_1.png" alt="tulip head" ]]

Of course this is the tutorial face so far.

[[image file="2018-11/the_competition.png" alt="Why does everything hate me" ]]

I don't know, his looks more like a doll with a porcelain face rather than a person. I'm not saying mine looks like a person, it's supposed to be an manga style character, but still. Naturally I'm not that satisfied but I'm more satisfied than I thought I would be, coming from what I was! Short of doing it all over I have no idea how I would improve it, or what I would do differently to improve upon the technique so there it stays I guess.

Another model tested, we should get a new build with one bug fix tomorrow. Mitch wants me to do all the AT&T stuff, again. For like the 30th time. Give it a rest, if they've screwed it up, tough. Serve them right. I mean, I'm happy to do it. Happy.

Back here I made my calls, made the appointment for tomorrow. Answered the door. Once. A "kid" much too old but with a sweet fursona and tail. Very well done, I was pretty impressed.

Only one more month of my retainer every day, thank goodness.
Two months until 2019.
A couple of weeks until Turkey Day. Where has this year gone?

The ring shipped! Pretty excited, we'll see how V2 goes.

Chill mouse is running in his/her wheel a bit more. Hope they're enjoying the larger cage.

My bathroom plug doesn't work anymore. The little press thing just pops out. Ordered a new one. Sigh.

Thurs:
Got through the AT&T testing, took all day though. Of course, an hour or so was taken up by stupid TLS 1.0 not being on, which of course breaks cloning unless you jump through all the hoops we did before. Because I was using the lab server it hadn't done so, naturally I had forgotten in the meantime.

Went to the meeting, asked about the testing, and had some candy. All in all an exciting day.

A lonely one too, nobody came into my lab at all. Huh.

I guess they just hate me.

Dropped off the laptop, then had the bright idea to go get cat food and such today, rather than tomorrow, saving me time. So I did. The laptop people were only 5 minutes from work (when going the right direction) so I just got on 104 after that and zipped down ther.

Got the laptop in so I worked on that. It has two drives! Huh. You can RAID them together too, oddly. I left one in there for a backup.

Otherwise reached a few people, so I have, er, next week mostly booked at this point. Monday is taking Tinker in, then Tues and Weds I have stuff already. But nothing yet for Saturday.

No Sean but then, that could be at the last minute like last time. I need to get that monster ready!

Worked a little on the model, finished his head and neck not that it looks as good as the other guy's. Still better than that potato head I had originally. I wonder if I can make it look even better? I mean even accounting for the difference between him being a guy and having a completely different hairstyle, something still seems off. I don't know, what do you think? Maybe the hair is just too tall? But that style is pretty tall, right?

[[image file="2018-11/tulipwithneck.png" alt="guy with neck" ]]

Rainy still. Going to continue.

Looking forward the usual tomorrow, I have no idea what I'll do now, maybe a look over of remoteUI in the newest build. Shopping, only have three checks so probably no bank. Seeing my parents, and coming back here.

That's about all for this week. We've sprinted into Noremember so don't forget the whole clocks thing Sunday. Stupid clocks thing.

See you next week.