2019-03-29:

Fri:

Some small excitement today. I thought we were getting a new printer in, a C8000, a companion to Vegita, the C9000 in the other room. Helped to get it unpacked, and ten minutes later Ken (the lab guy) came back and said it was actually going somewhere else and started packing it back up. No one told him, apparently, he thought it was for us. Silly lab guy! 

Otherwise I had a muffin, that was exciting right? Gina wanted actual build numbers on a bug that was closed two weeks ago for when the behavior regressed. Well, I wrote this long, rambling comment that goes on for about a page talking about various things like what a waste of time it was. But the irony was the waste of time spent reading the whole comment. It's very meta, you had to be there.

Didn't really write up anything today. I did redesign the insert for my little case I carry around so it closes better. That was fun. I just need to glue it together. Looked some spec changes over, nothing too big or great, but one of my bugs prompted a spec change or really a clarification so that's fine.

Left work and went shopping. Got stuff for soup, gonna make it while it's still cold outside, and baby, it's cold outside. Got gas, my new card works but I still only got the .03 discount not the .06. So sad.

Saw my parents, petted kitties, had dinner, even saw Gabe. 

Came back here, took care of some things and made my one call.

Got four "possible spam" calls today. Four. All from an 866 number with the same first three digits but different last four digits. Not cool, guys, not cool. I only got the occasional one on my old phone, and all from a "local" number. What the heck?

At least the phone actually says "Potential Spam" on it when it rings. That's nice. Good thing I have it muted during the day, people would start thinking I'm a drug dealer or something.

[[image file="2019-03/possible_spam2.jpg" alt="spam spam spam spam " ]]

After that I went through my book collection, as I finally went back to the Kindle instead of the sony reader I had been using to read the Wheel of Time series. I figured I would use it for the final book, as I like the screen better. So I cleaned off the Sony device, made sure I had all the books in one place, and updated the covers and metadata of them all. Took awhile, but I'm happy with the result. 

Then checked my sites.

Sat:

Went right to work on the list for today. With my parents coming cleaning was at the top, so that got done first. Did a few more book things, mainly finding the young wizard series and the Dresden Files books I didn't have. 

Cleaning also included the DVDs that had been hanging around, digitized them and put them on the shelf. Stuff to go up/down stairs had been piling up so that was taken care of. Looks much better around here now.

Did some reading, did some banking stuff. 

Went out at 2:40 to see Ellen. She was a bad girl, that's why her computer got confiscated. Silly. Set up the new one and came back here.

Checked sites, ate dinner, then my parents came over and we watched a movie, then I watched another, Blade Runner. The original one. Very odd film, has a few holes?

Sun:

Today was about relaxing. Playing a bunch of Chrono Chross, made soup, did reading, got ready for tomorrow. 

Made one appointment for tomorrow, a cleanout (i guess?) and talked to a lady who said her machine wasn't seeing her wireless but was seeing other wireless accounts. Weird. After 20 minutes I said it was probably best to call Spectrum though we did set something for Tuesday anyway. 

Mon:

Today, I made a lot of stuff mine!

At least I stayed fairly busy today. Had the morning meeting and had some cake, thanks Don. With most everything tested I made some changes to more easily track and test the alerts, and then got started putting the fax test cases back in. See, this test plan is so old it's seen the rise, fall, and rise of FAX again. So I did that as I tested it, putting the fax cases in and then seeing if they worked. Many did, sorta. I wrote a few bugs and a few documentation bugs that assumptions we made previously aren't holding and should be revisited. This spec badly needs to be reworked in general.

Got a few spam calls, and a text that verizon "Verizon Call Filter" was ending though I could continue it for just $3.00 a month! So generous. So was "possible spam" from some app or something I would have to buy? What's the difference? If I see a number that isn't in my phone address book and says the name, I'm assuming it's a junk call. I don't need to pay $3 a month to figure that out. Looking at the app ratings for the thing, it has an average of 2.1 out of 5 stars with 742 reviews so I am not the only one who is scratching their head wondering what Verizon is trying to pull here. See it for yourself.

tinyurl.com/yoa9lk6h.

Anyway, test cases took the rest of the day but I did get FAX done. I'll probably move on to print or copy tomorrow, as (supposedly) scan is being done. Didn't see much action on the (shared) spreadsheet. Odd.

Pulled some christmas lights out of the cardboard only bin because they are not cardboard. I know, it's a shock, but they aren't. They even work, or at least most of them do. I may have some replacements for those that don't, we'll see. Still, even a short string, why throw it out? 

Made a few notes for the optional rules, realized I needed to put a fatigue section relating to linking as it would work differently than normal.

Went to my cleanout job a half hour away from work. Love that driving! He had a Mac, with a whole bunch of stuff running on it I had never heard of. Where did he get all that crap? Tossed it in the trash, figured his passwords out, and on the way home found a mouse cage I need to do a little work on, a knife, a mirror, and a pan. I figured the vacuum cleaner was probably busted.

Checked my sites, had yummy soup for dinner, and called iPhoto lady, the person I really hoped never, ever to hear from again.

Didn't reach her. 

Played some Chrono Cross and then did some reading. How predictable.

Tues:

Got right to work on the copy portion of the alert testing. Giuseppe supposedly did as well, he was editing the same spreadsheet as I was, but as lunchtime approached only 16 of the 50 or so were completed. Dude, it's not that hard, what are you doing over there?

Had lunch, then had to find some other way to amuse myself as supposedly Adnan was taking Scan, despite now having a day and a half no scan results were put in. So again I ask what the heck they're doing over there? If they had just left it to me I could probably have nearly finished it today. Ah well. Not my problem. Tomorrow there will be plenty of bugs to look into.

Certainly didn’t write chapter 2, at least a skeleton of it that might become chapter 2 once I finish WoT.

Went to see book guy, he just had general stuff no real trouble apart from his yucky Frontier connection which is yucky. 650kb/s down and that's when it was up at all, which it kept not being, so I told him to call them. Nothing I can do about it anyway, is their service just getting crappier?

Came back here, put the notes in I had made, some new spells, checked my sites, the usual, then spent an hour and fifteen minutes trying to get Ellen's printer going. It kept saying it had a paper jam (when there is no paper jam) and reloading the driver didn't work. One person said they got theirs to work in a similar situation by hooking up another of the same model, then deleting drivers, and then putting it back and such. So I removed the device, thinking MS would do the sensible thing and let me download it, right? It would see that, go to windows update, and just let me get it back. NOPE. Of course the printer is XP era so HP won't let me download whatever solution they include with windows, and there seems to be no package of "here's the default win10 drivers in case something happens to them." So I was completely screwed. I'm not sure if I'm more angry at HP, MS, or myself. How could I have been so stupid, thinking MS would do something sensible? I'm an idiot.

So I left it downloading the last major update, it's Win10 all over again so I figure that will bring it back if nothing else does. It's 80% complete so we'll see if she calls me back tonight. 

Tried iPhoto lady but she didn't answer and I wasn't in the mood to leave a message I was pissed off enough I didn't need her adding to it, and you know she would have. Oh yes, you know she would. She comments on my phone message every time she calls. Lady, I don't need your opinion on my phone message. It's the same phone message I've had for 3.5 years now. Please shut up about it. I hate you.

That left me at 8:30, fed the cats. 

Looked into how to "fix" the cage, seems like the hole is where the water bottle is supposed to go. Did I miss it? Did it break? Was it in the can? Who knows. I think I've come up with a solution.

[[image file="2019-03/thesolution.jpg" alt="silicon on bottle" ]]

[[image file="2019-03/sittinginhole.jpg" alt="behold the fit" ]]

It should just sit in the hole, and the bottle doesn't need to be full, so it won't be too heavy. But there's no way a tiny mouse will be able to shove it out of the whole and escape. Looks like chill mouse has a new house! There's no way I'm putting this one at cat level over in the other room.

Got ready for tomorrow, made tea with the last of my raspberry tea. :-(

Wed:

Did exactly as I expected, went to the meeting to see the new stuff they had been working on, and then installed the new version to check what they had been working on. 

Only had 12 bugs today, a far cry from the 40 two weeks ago and the 20 one week ago. They're working on 5.1 stuff, which is not as you might think, the ultimate speaker setup. Sorry. 

That took most of the day though, because I was focusing on that exclusively and not on any chapter 3 nonsense that might or might not have been occurring.

Came back here to pick up a Squeak, and took a Squeak to the vet. He's apparently doing fine, but his teeth continue to worsen. I'll do the thousand dollar chem work in October, as I'm doing Tinker's in two month. Made that appointment. They're really pushing pet desk over there, signs all over. 

Came back here, the water bottle "fix" seems to be just fine so we'll give Chill Mouse the new cage this week and see what he does with it.

Checked my sites, the usual, then made my calls. 

Talked to a lady for 40 minutes, but it saved me from the 10:00 appointment as areoadmin finally opened so I could run stuff remotely. She had some bizarre numbers in her DNS entry that's for darn sure. But that was taken care of so there.

Then made an appointment for tomorrow, it's going to be a rather long one I'm afraid, and his message was so garbled I ended up pulling the first freeman invoice but it was his son. Whoops. But he was right there so it was all fine.

Then another 20 minutes with someone updating CCleaner. And it was 8:30 suddenly.

Just enough time to start nothing before bed.

I could do some reading though.

Thurs:

One exciting thing happened today. A very grumpy old man showed up to look at my printer. He seemed totally disinterested in fixing my power button issue, and made the valiant effort of pulling my tray 1 out to see what might be wrong with it. This proved to be the correct action because he showed me where the gear was that was broken. He then lamented the trials he goes though trying to order parts, and left, having fixed nothing. Thanks, fixing dude! He didn't even check the second tray to see if the gear was still there, acted like it just vanished into nothing. I found it, you can see how it broke, the end just broke off, so it no longer held onto the post.

[[image file="2019-03/thegear.jpg" alt="black gear" ]]

So I took it upon myself to scavenge up a replacement gear from one of the machines we're tossing, disassemble the unit, install the gear, reassemble the unit, test the fix to make sure it worked, and then asked permission to scavenge the part. Yeah, I'm a firm believer in forgiveness not permission, what do you want from me? I was pretty sure it was fine.

The power switch issue is of course beyond me but still, that's what we're dealing with here, folks.

Had the two meetings, that took some time, certainly didn't write anything, but looked hard at that software we've now finished doing the entire regression test on. Yeah.

Left work, drove for 25 minutes, looked over three machines and set up his new work laptop.

Got back here around 6:30 and did the usual eating of soup and such. 

Talked to iMac lady, she was in her car so that was 100% useless, she'll probably call me back tomorrow, oh be still my beating heart. Sounds like her drive died or something? I just hope that backup drive was actually backing it up. My last "communication" with her was telling her how to check. Did she do so? WHO KNOWS. Who cares? NOT ME.

We have come to the end of March, dear readers. Let me sing you the song of my people.

No Sean news so probably nothing tomorrow or Saturday. Looks like a movie night to me. I'll do the shopping tomorrow, no bank. Seeing my parents. 

As I got no calls today and did yesterday's saturday appointment over the phone I have those days clear, maybe I can finish WoT. I'm 55% or so through the last book.

And that's it. That's March. Monday is the first, beware of those that might seek to trick you in some way. I bet it's Fluttershy.

Until that time, stay warm out there, let your stocks rise, your enemies falter, and let all of your children be above average. See you next week.