2019-01-04:

Another exciting day of work. Picked another spec to look over, then did that. That was a major accomplishment I believe.

Went out to lunch with "the guys" to Amore, attached to Wegmans. Had the cavatelli with the pork truffle sauce and it was quite good. Recommended.

Got back, er, certainly didn't do any writing. No. But I can tell you one thing- it was dead around there. Leaving there like 7 cars in the parking lot, and that included mine.

Corporate is letting us go at 2:00 on Monday, so there's that to look forward to.

Did the shopping, ate a quick dinner, and was to Sean's exactly on time.

Stayed on track very well, and got through the first two enemy encounters. The armor guards took a beating, but fell in the end as they must. Many rules were changed, so it's good we're doing this. 

Sat:

Started the day finding my firewire 400 cable so I could do a backup. It's been 14 days, I kept forgetting. It's not making my CPU go bonkers so it's either that port or the cable, I would need another firewire 800 cable to test it. 

However, my machine did reboot itself several times in the morning! Yay! Thought we had solved that. I guess not. I think it might be the video card, there's some strange graphical glitches in videos and it was strobing white a few times. It's okay for the moment, but I've ordered a new video card. Sigh.

Made up a thank you card and sent it, because Adam and Kate got me some tea for christmas. 

Cleaned up a little.

Figured out where to take my compact florescent bulb. Apparently Lowes! I have one of those near me.

Checked my sites, ate lunch, the usual videos.

Went out to set up a printer for the two book ladies. It was all set up, nothing really had to be done, but rather than try anything, get stuck, and then call for assistance they decided to not even try. *shakes head*

People, at least try, okay? Give things a shot. It may not work out, true. Heaven knows, I know this many times over. But to not even attempt something…

Then went to Sean's, as it was on the way, and really the only reason I went over there that day anyway. Had it been in the opposite direction or nowhere near? Forget it.

Played the first dungeon of Gloomhaven again. And again it wiped us out. We were actually following all the rules this time (of which there are many.) We almost won it too, Sean had one card left (somehow) but to play you need to play 2. (for reasons) But he could have killed the last guy with the last card, so… yeah.

Honestly, if the first level of your game slaughters your players, you're doing something wrong, game design wise. I mean the fact we took a small hideout with 18? guys with only 4 guys, something that wouldn't happen in real life at all, is impressive. But if the very first thing your game does is slaughter everyone, what's the *second* thing doing to do? It makes it very hard to get invested.

Plus being able to do things only once, if you do less powerful things you don't kill the enemies as quickly and your hand slowly dissolves, because you lose one card every time you rest. You have to hit hard and fast because you know it's a ticking clock, but then at the end you can't actually do anything because all your good cards are gone. 

I suppose if we didn't have 3 people willing to GM games in our group or we were beginners at RPGs or something it would be fine, but as it is the setup time and mechanics just don't have enough payoff for the time invested. At least that's what I think.

OH, and I got destroyed at Keyforge as well. You basically need to gather and "bank" 18 of the only resource in the game, 6 at a time. At most I had like 4. So yeah, I obviously don't understand that game.

Had some good pizza though.

Sun:

Got up late, had leftover pizza, and checked my sites.

Watched my daily videos. But if you think I was sitting there passively, ah ha, think again. I was ripping lights off the tree. Which is going much faster, by the way, because only one per branch is "pinned" on. The rest, once that one is released, just unwind. Very nice. But there's still a lot of branches. Doing this has fluffed the tree out nicely though, making me think I should have followed my childhood dream of becoming the best Christmas tree fluffer to have ever lived. I know, some kids want to be fireman or whatnot, but me, no, it was all about being a tree fluffer. I've never told anyone this. So I didn't follow my real passion. What a shame.

What were we talking about?

Finished up chapter 2.

Wanted the tree out of here so I finished taking off the middle portion's lights. Was watching Hotel Transylvania again, and realized something. The only reason this movie exists: *expired copyrights.* Yeah. Sony is more than happy to take your money using characters other people created, but try doing something "unauthorized" with one of their "properties" and now it's not so cool anymore, is it? 

Just think about that for a few minutes.

I'm looking at you, Disney.

Mon:

Last work day of the old year, but I certainly didn't sit and write chapter 3 and part of 4. No, of course not. I did, uh, work stuff. Yeah.

Went home early, as per the directive. Was anyone really accomplishing anything, anyway? There were less than 20 cars in the parking lot.

iMac stuff came, toiled with that. Gave me a few issues, surprisingly, but I managed to install it one way or the other. It's my old 128GB SSD from the Mac Pro, so I moved dropbox to the larger spinning drive. It's going to be sooooo much nicer to use. And having two drives in an iMac? Pretty neat all on its own.

I might work on the older one that's bigger the same way. Sell it? I don't know, do I need a 24" iMac? It has such a nice screen though!

Finished chapter 4.

Watched my usual youtubes, finished taking the christmas lights off the tree. There were tons! On the bottom there were just tons and tons.

Tues:

Happy New Year, everyone. Move those calendars.

Got up and decided to perform the same surgery on the older iMac. Wished I had a smaller SSD but eh, I got them cheap. That one went a little better than the other one, I did have to recall the whole "oh, this installer is corrupted" message was bogus, and to turn the clock back to get the last version of OS X to install. 

Anyone want a 24" iMac? It's a beautiful screen, I want to use it somehow.

Meanwhile I checked my sites and vacuumed the rug, no more fake pine needles. 

Got all the updates in for both Macs, now to find a place to put it and use to put it to. Movies? It has such a great picture, I don't know.

Anyway, did my paperwork. All of 5 customers last month, nice. Total customer count: 133. Highest: 658 in 2009. It's been sixteen years! Well, seventeen now. That's .4 jobs on average per day. I made about $7000 doing this, and after my IRA contribution, it'll be $1,572. Serious question: When does this become a "hobby" rather than a "business" so I can stop doing paperwork and such? 

Paid my estimated taxes, probably far, far too much this year given what I made.

Wrote some of chapter 5.

Watched a 2 hour Gloomhaven video. They did things differently, like there were far fewer enemies on the board. Was it because we had 4 players? They almost ran out of cards too, but none died. Hmm.

Finished chapter 5.

Wed:

Hey, some actual work got done, due to having some, uh, actual work to do. Funny how that works out.

It was drop day for the tablet stuff, so I loaded that up. Some question as to the software version of the MFD that didn't get answered until a minute before I was leaving. We'll see about that tomorrow.

Cleared out my "fixed" bugs, two of which weren't actually fixed, well done. Wrote some new ones, of course.

I may get a raise? He came by and was like, yeah, let me know. Doesn't fill me with confidence.

May or may not have written part of chapter 6.

Got my wings. Strangely despite them being mirror images of each other they look different.

[[image file="2019-01/flawinwing.jpg" alt="take these broken wings" ]]

[[image file="2019-01/wings_on_blue.jpg" alt="blue background wings" ]]

The current theory is to smear the wood filler across them both, rather than just trying to fill in the hole. If I painted it, and I would have to, it would look different. But with the stuff over both of them, it might look okay. Well, better than having a one winged angel, I mean dragonfly.

I worked on that after the usual eating and site checking.

Talked to two people, I need to call York back tomorrow.

It's thursday already?

Sean's this week on Friday to do the Monster Mash game. Also Don's taking us to lunch. Well, he's not paying for it or anything. But that's a thing.

Thurs:

Who throws out a plant? Really, I found one at work in the garbage, in a coffee cup. Still alive and everything, so I brought it home. Put it in a pot, we'll see how it does. Really, who does that?

[[image file="2019-01/whochucksaplant.jpg" alt="New plant friend" ]]

Anyway, did some work today. Though it was mostly meetings. Looked into running the remoteUI on an iPad, which worked after some certificate madness. 

But yeah, mostly meetings. And plant saving.

Came back here, I guess I've taken the wings as far as they'll go, so take a look

[[image file="2019-01/paintedwings.jpg" alt="painted wings" ]]

and here's the finished box.

[[image file="2019-01/theentirebox.jpg" alt="entire box" ]]

What's in the box? A tray and nothing else.

Got ready for tomorrow, going to be busy with the lunch by Don and then bank, shopping, give my parents a whole bunch of stuff, get back here, feed the cats, put food away, and get out to Sean's. Sheesh. Ah well. Starting the monster mash game, should be interesting. 

Saturday may do a movie night, or maybe just more Dr Who, get them out of the way? We'll see. Otherwise nothing planned yet.

Then I have a job Sunday of all days, but it's right down the street. 

 Other news, the Mac hasn't been rebooting, it just happened that one day. Did I not need a new video card? It's so strange, I don't understand what's going on. Why is it perfect most of the time but go crazy sometimes too?

So that's the first week of 2019. Hope it went well for you all, a good start to a good year.

See you next time.