2019-01-18:

Fri:

The usual poking at things at work, met briefly with Mitch about the "security" issue with the smaller keyboard shown by the printers. 

Certainly didn't write part of a chapter and then get stopped because it's a combat, no I was working the whole time.

Wrote up two bugs, one just more stuff that doesn't look like it should, (the scrollbars specifically) and one incorrect time out message.

Did the shopping and would have gotten to Sean's just barely on time but there was a lot of traffic due to an accident so I was 15 minutes late.

We stayed on task, the knocking wasn't the rest of the party, but my "handler" but they were close behind. I'm out from under his thumb and the party is scattered to the four winds, and only a brave or foolish soul can bring them together again. (little dragon ball reference for you)

Tomorrow is a go, so we'll probably get through beating up the two armored suits but they do have a bit more firepower so it might not take as long.

The christmas tree I made is FAR too large, what the heck? I'll have to scale it down a bit.

 [[image file="2019-01/sidebyside.jpg" alt="Oh christmas trees" ]]

Sat:

Got up fairly late, went right out to the 10:00. Her laptop that 'wouldn't start up' started up just fine. Her ancient XP desktop that 'couldn't get online' was online just fine, her date was just wrong. The machine thought it was 2004. As well it should, being a crappy old dell.

Came back here, checked my sites, watched my videos.

Ate lunch, and went to see book guy.

He just had a few minor things, and is sort of going downhill. 

Came back here, worked on the battle.

Then over to run game. We got further than the other group did, defeating the next two rooms, so go them!

Sun:

Got up late and finished the chapter.

Checked my sites and watched the usual videos.

Played some El Shaddai, strange game about an angel in jeans and leg armor. Weird. Strange visual style as well, but we'll see how it goes. Sean lent it to me. Wow, playing Xbox again, feels weird.

Got ready for tomorrow, made two calls, so I have one job for Tuesday.

Mon:

Got busy finishing off the script for SNMP testing for the audit log, round 2, fight. One more value went into the script, the other two I had questions about? Not supported on this platform. Sigh.

Upgraded my MFP after some difficulty, some of my own not remembering things. But it worked in the end. John is tearing the lab apart to make room for more machines. We only have three testers now, why do we have like a dozen machines in there? Weird.

On the way out I picked up what I believe will be a very excellent 24" monitor, which will replace my 20" monitor. You find the best stuff in the bins, my family knows that. I hooked it up to make sure it would work, and it did, but I'll put it through the real paces tomorrow. #excited.

Saw my parents, gave my mother the catalog I printed and discussed the tree.

Came back, checked sites, ate dinner.

One phone call, just a question. 

Then worked on the tree again, what did I do wrong to make it so large?

It's very strange, even the pictures I took, which I scaled to 7 inches and made sure were straight on, it's still almost twice as large as it should be. 

I scaled it down to 2.5" down from over 3.5" or so, and improved the geometry in general. I'm actually much happier with it, the back looks better, and the bottom part of the front, while not spectacular, is much better as well. It's also like half the cost. Sigh.

Well, I need to do a Sean gift (yes, I know it's a tiny bit early but that's how it goes) because I always try to get more than one thing from them at a time because if an item is $5.00, paying $5.00 shipping seems a bit silly.

Tues:

Had a meeting to go over a new spec, Kathy thanked me for responding to the previous spec change with "approve" because apparently I'm the only one who does? *sigh*

Anyway, we got through half the spec. Couldn't understand the guy a lot of the time, his being Indian and actually in India probably didn't help. Some people on the phone come through okay, others do not. He was one that did not. Pity he was running the meeting. Anyway, we'll probably have to have another meeting to get through the second half.

Otherwise, my monitor is working out, seems to be just fine so I don't know why someone tossed it. Silly someone! It actually pivots, in case you want a 24" vertical monitor. I tried it, but it seems a bit much, despite how useful that can be for documents.

Had some cherry pie, does that count? Wrote one bug, the only bug written today I might add, I went through and found some more warning messages in other languages that were not correct.

Nothing else exciting, but tomorrow we get new software so we should have some new bugs to write!

Oh wait, I did look over some old bugs I had "info requested" on and closed them out because they had been fixed. Except for one.

Went to the after work job, she really didn't have any issues so it went fine, did her backup and such.

Back here I ate dinner, the usual sites/videos, and talked to a lady for an hour about why turbotax wasn't installing. Turns out the message was correct, she was trying to put in 1803 (I think it is) and it was just stuck at 87%. Is it really stuck? CPU usage for the process was 20% and she only has a 1.3 Ghz processor in that machine. So who can say. She has another machine so I said "maybe get the download copy and just move to the better laptop you have." If it doesn't move, that is. Along with other suggestions like rebooting after 24 hours or calling MS to see if they'll help her for free.

And then it was basically time for bed.

Wed:

Pretty exciting stuff today, oh did I say exciting I meant the other thing. 

Rather than fix bugs, we're still implementing new features, like doing document conversion on the tablet instead of the cloud. Uh, don't you have only 2 more weeks? I personally have almost 200 open bugs in the list. Don't you think you should, I don't know, look into a few of them?

Of the four of mine they did fix, three were actually fixed. One changed to be about as bad as it had been, and one resulted in two more bugs being written. In total I wrote 4 new bugs, a documentation bug that they implemented in what I believe is a childish "well, if you want it exactly like the VBS that's what you're going to get" sort of situation, and one new feature request. I mean if we're going to be adding new features at the very last second, let's add them correctly. We know the customer needs a PDF, and the tablet is now taking care of that. Ergo, let's start the conversion process when they select the file. 

Actually, I wonder why we didn't do that before even with the cloud solution? Very odd. And didn't we do the cloud thing because of the licensing cost for the engine? What suddenly changed at this late stage that we can skip that? Very weird.

Anyway, generally looking the "new" stuff over (there wasn't much, it was all behind the scenes type stuff) and writing bugs.

Came back here, checked the sites, then played some El Shaddai.

Thurs:

Started the day off right! 5:45ish AM the phone rings. The lady who sent her cell phone in to be “fixed” apparently got it back. Woohoo, he said, with no feeling or emotion. And that necessitated waking me up? Really? You didn’t have it last night around 6:00? Really? You only got it at 5:45 that morning? Thanks. I’m not getting there until Saturday at the earliest, so calling me at that hour did nothing but infuriate me. So good job, maybe that’s what you wanted to do? Mission accomplished. You’re a sh***y human being.*

Lay in bed for an hour and got up for work.

Went in to work, certainly did not write up chapter 13. But I did have a meeting, that went on, and on, and on.

I got assigned the new payment app spec to make some test cases for, so I did that. The rest of the day, and only got about half done. 

Why are we adding new specs to a program less than two weeks from 100% content that is over three years old? It boggles the mind.

Did have another meeting, it’s the day of meetings, what a joy.

Excel crashed at 3:30 trying to copy and paste something into a cell, the level of polish in this program that’s been around for, oh, thirty years now, is something special to behold. I decided that was that, and just waited around for it to be 3:50 so I could leave. Hey, I could have been working that 20 minutes. But if Excel is going to crash and make me lose work I’ve already done, I don’t see why I should. Talk to MS, they made the crappy thing.

Went home, did the usual sites visiting and movie watching.

Worked on Sean's next christmas gift for an hour, because I had an hour before calling Miss Early Morn.

Gave her Saturday at 10:00, then played more El Shaddai.

Let's look to the future. Tomorrow I'll hopefully finish up the new test cases.

Then do the shopping, I'll go to the bank though there isn't much to do there, then see my parents. 

Then it's off to Sean's for the monster mash game.

Saturday it's Miss Phone and maybe some snow? Possibly having my parents over for a movie, we'll see about the snow situation. And that's the week. We're halfway through January so I hope your resolutions are coming along fine. Don't forget about the eclipse on the 20th.

See you next week.

*shabby