2019-06-14:

Fri:

Finally got a system that worked, by trading mine for it. Ah well. I suppose it’s a valid way of doing things? My grandmother would buy a new car when the tires went bad. (I’m joking… or am I?)

Prettied it up, put my stuff on it, done. At least for now, I don’t have the “special additions” that will go inside later. *evil laugh* It is faster than my old one, thank goodness. Maybe I can come in to work and get my PC turned in and have outlook ready in less than five minutes now. One can dream.

Finished up the tablets just in time to go. Need to check a few (for reasons) but the bulk of the work is done. They’re boxed up and ready to be, uh, put on a shelf somewhere.

Banking, shopping, parents, Sean's. No big surprise there. I did put money into my IRA and bought the certificate. Almost 3% interest? Nice! Much better than .05% I must say. That should earn me more than a thousand dollars in 4 years, rather than basically nothing. I’ll take it. 

In the dungeon again only 1 room really cleared, but we made it to the next level down, so that's something I guess.

Sat:

Checked sites, cleaned up around here as my parents were coming over. I mean I would have done it anyway but perhaps not as well.

Ate lunch, then went out to jobs. Oh dear, this is where the weekend takes a downward turn. Did I say turn, I meant spiral.

The 1/2 hour away guy was fine, needed to be connected to his wireless. Had other stuff he couldn't demonstrate, but some he could. His laptop wouldn’t turn on, but he had it in a drawer and he said he got it at a garage sale for $20 so someone obviously doesn’t know the value of hardware but I suggested a new battery as some laptops need that to work. Who knows how long it was sitting in that drawer or how good the battery was to begin with. We tried various power supplies, but the light didn’t even go on when it was plugged in. I think it’s dead, Jim.

Got to the next place right at 3:00. Didn't really find anything, at least recuva didn't show me anything in the list. I've never really had any luck getting deleted files back. Backups, people, backups. So I had to reload everything. She had found quickbooks CD so we did manage to get that back into place. It was just tedious and her machine did stuff so freaking slowly. (Finally turned windows update off, which I had done before, but it went back on? That was really dragging it down. Good old Win7.)

Got back at 6:15 which is a total of 3 hours there getting her PC back in shape. Stupid awful slow piece of junk.

Had a bit to eat and then the movie happened.

Sun:

Got most of the garage cleaned. 

The "to throw away (or otherwise get rid of)" pile grew quite substantially, and I can see the floor and even the corners of the garage. Huh. Most anything else left in there will have to be moved on the day, though hopefully some of the cardboard won’t be coming back. Things are against the walls, you can walk in there, it’s a sight to behold.

Ate lunch, checked sites, looked at moving more things to Dropbox as they're now charging me $20 more a year but doubled my space.

Did some reading, more organizing my drives so I have more stuff on dropbox. I'm still only using 6%, so doing all that would have bumped me up to 12% still a ton. Maybe I should put my music collection on there as well… At the very least as another backup. It’s about 100GB so it would take a bit to get up there. I suppose I could just flat out move it, then tell iTunes the new location. It could work.

Then the spiral came back.

Talked to iMac guy for 50 minutes. His machine doesn't always boot it seems. But it does the second time? I ran everything I could and at the end he suggested reloading OS X. Whatever, I told him how to do it. He didn’t call me back Monday (spoilers?) so maybe it worked?

Got ready for tomorrow and went to bed. Wonder what I'll actually do tomorrow, with the tablets done I'm back to having nothing. 

Spoke too soon. At 8:30 I got another call. Getting a printer to work and syncing with iCloud. Given all the bad information I got, this was a slog though windows town I would rather have avoided. Given once I got correct information, putting thunderbird back was the work of seconds. I'm pretty sure crappy McAfee is the cause of her printer issue. The HP software won't see it, windows will see it but won't load a driver for it. And she doesn't have the password for crappy McAfee. Really. A password. So I can’t check the firewall because I can’t open the stupid piece of software to check the firewall. So she gets to call Spectrum again and try to work out how to remove the dang thing, and she said she was on the phone with them an hour to put it in. (for reasons?) (snickering noises)

Finally got off the phone around 10:00. Thanks for that. Went to bed. Was not really pleased.

Mon:

Didn't do any writing in the morning. No honest, but I did make some notes about what I want to happen next. Didn't get assigned anything at the meeting, odd. Oh, popped the RAM in too, I should get the last piece of the puzzle today so that can go in tomorrow. (Spoiler, I did) 

Messed about, ate lunch, and went back to the old stand by. Poking it with a stick. Wrote two of the er, only two bugs for today. Nice.

Out of work I called BSOD lady (who I needed to see to give her the card reader) who answered. She said 5:00? Fine. Of course she didn't get there until 5:30. Sweet. The spiral continues downward, what a treat.

The BSOD message referenced her wireless card, for some odd reason, so I updated the driver and ran it for another hour. No BSOD. Hey, the message was useful? MS, say it isn’t so! Can I go now? No. Of course there was more. Email passwords (again). Showing her the card reader. Petting her two pups. Apparently one of her pups like to eat things, like plastic bags, and lint. I know a cat like that...

Only one of these things was enjoyable.

Finally back at 7:00 I had 4 calls, where before I had only 2 when I left. (I had gone home to eat dinner) Thankfully one was a hangup, one was her calling to tell me she would be late (duh, I'm in your driveway) and one was canceling the other because she got her printer connected. Nice, no calls after all. 

There were no calls after all.

There were no calls after all.

There were no calls after all. 

There were calls before

There'll be calls again.

There is calls next week,

and perhaps next year.

There are calls that we share

but I make you aware

There were no calls after all.

Oh, sorry, got sucked into small world for a second there.

Back here I checked sites, videos, got ready for tomorrow, did a little reading, and went to bed.

Tues:

Putting in the second SSD took a bit of cable contortion, those connectors are just so dang big! Of course, when we switched from PATA to SATA I was all like “look how tiny the connector is” so really, it’s all relative.

In any case, got in shoved in there and the cover closed, so it’s good to go. Nice seeing two drives again, and moved my “personal” stuff over to it as before. *sigh of relief*

Then got to work!

What of it there was to do. Investigated a thing or two, and you know I wrote two of the two bugs that were written today. You know it. One minor thing and one thing not adhering to the spec now that know what it's supposed to do. The machine shouldn't go to sleep, only "low power" mode but seems to go to sleep! Bad machine! Bad!

The new dual machine is working out great, it's all customized and looks cool, I have the moon on one monitor and the Earth on the other, both rotate, my desktop is clean, my various gauges are monitoring stuff. Hey, if I have to use a PC I might as well make it as un-PC as I possibly can. 

Came back here, tried to connect with a lady over the phone but she's running XP and it's a real snail of a machine so finally I just told her how to put the password on the machine. She was more worried about someone stealing the thing. Uh, an XP tower? I don't think so. I told her she would have to encrypt the thing somehow if she was worried about that. XP passwords mean jack. To be fair, Win10 passwords mean jack as well, if you have the hard drive OS X will just go ahead and read it, permissions ignored. So why bother? 

Anyway, that took far too long, then I had supper, watched videos, etc. Wrapped the gifts for the happy (I hope?) couple for Saturday, worked on what I want to say, no calls so I talked to no one thank you very much. Looked into FF7 Remake stuff that dropped yesterday/today. Looks pretty nice, but is it really going to be PS4 only? Odd choice. I suppose a PS4 isn't that expensive, but still, I don't want to buy 1/3 of the game. It's coming out to be only Midgar. That's dumb. You released the game all at once the first time, do I want to take the chance you'll just not do any more? It could happen! I don't now.

You can skip ahead to Wednesday, this section is going to be my concerns for the remake based on the trailers we’ve seen.

1) Jessie hands Cloud a materia “for saving her life.”

[[image file="2019-06/hugething.jpg" alt="hold my balls" ]]

By the way, it's huge! How big is this stuff? It's supposed to be the size of a marble, after all you can equip it on gloves. Here's one equipped on Cloud's sword, see how tiny it is?

[[image file="2019-06/howbig.png" ]]

Now in the original game you could buy materia in any corner store for a nickle. You don’t give someone something “for saving my life” that’s a nickle at any corner store. Does that mean materia is going to be scarce? Expensive? That’s fairly terrible because materia combos were what made the game so fun in the first place.

2) Everyone seems too competent in combat. 

[[image file="2019-06/whatisthat.jpg" ]]

In the original it was turn based, so everyone sort of moved forward, did their attack, and a number showed up. It was abstract. As you leveled your number went up. This is how it should be. But now Cloud (and the others) are darting around the battlefield pulling off flashy combos. Uh, that’s late game stuff, not early game. Remember, in the original story Cloud is, at the beginning of the game, just throwing off his Mako poisoning. He should be weak as a kitten. Okay, he claims to be from Soldier, but that’s a great story point. The others could be all like “he was in Soldier? He seems pretty weak if that’s the case.” If he’s doing all this flashy stuff right at the start, where does he go from there? How does he improve? Sure, his numbers go up, but if I see him smacking some dude with a sword as big as he uses and the guy doesn’t go flying or get cut in half there’s no immersion. I can imagine him getting better in the original even though his animation is the same because it’s abstracted away. Now I can see exactly how well Cloud is hitting with every blow from start to finish. It doesn’t make sense. Where’s the progression in skill?

3) There seems to be a lot to keep track off, given all your characters are running around all over the place. Am I focusing on the action or my HP bar? HP bar it is!

FF7 concerns over!

Plus Borderlands 3 on Xbox One, if I want to play with the others in that game. Which maybe won't even happen, who knows? Ah well, never mind.

Wed:

Mid week, and as usual a new build to play with. Bugs to close out, and new ones to write.

And write two I did. I've now written all 6 of the 6 bugs my team has put in this week. Good effort fellows.

Nothing much else exciting, honestly. 

Cleaned up the rack, I'll paint it. PC is good. No job, one call Mr. Wired Jaw but his problems mostly seem to stem from Spectrum? Whatever. Tomorrow I have to call that lady again, hope she can connect me faster than she did before (that is to say, at all) and get through her questions quickly. It’s a different, newer, faster PC so hopefully there won’t be any problems so I can get her questions answered quickly and then get out to Wired Jaw. 

Reading! Another book down, two to go and I’ll have read the entire series again.

It’s so weird, Dresden goes on and on about how he could have been rich using his powers and how powerful he is despite being exhausted after two or three spells. Thing is, if you can get money from wizardry, and I don’t see how you can given what it seems it can do or at least how you use it, why don’t you? You couldn’t have been gumshoeing it up 24/7 the past 10 years the series has taken place. I mean Molly was a kid and now she’s in her twenties? That’s a lot of time. But you’ve barely gotten better at magic, use no new spells, have no new items made. (Just variants on old ones)

You must have had some time. Why do a little of this “oh I could get so much money” to get a bit of money? Why does the detective business preclude it? I mean we first see you in your office reading a book, for crying out loud. You’re always behind on your rent, so I know business isn’t that good. 

Also, why not run two ads? One as a wizard, one as just a regular PI? You have the PI license, you just have extra skills to draw on that normal people wouldn’t expect. Just put your name on the door, it doesn’t have to say “wizard” you just get results, and the people paying you won’t care how. It’s bizarre.

Thurs:

Got my next task from my SE overlord. Look into specs that have been updated and update the test cases to get ready for the next round of testing. In reality there weren't that many. There's a lot of stuff in WIP, which seems dumb. Clean that folder up, will you? Anyway, I took this to mean "get all the test cases ready" so I just did that. So tedious. The reason we aren't using a database is???? But no, a zillion Excel sheets sounds easier, let's go with that.

Gave my old laptop back, huddled up in my jacket because the lab is still freezing, had a cookie, figured out my schedule for the next few days, and it was time to go.

Yeah, with needing to buy breakfast tomorrow, the stuff for the salad, then Sean's thing Saturday and Farther's Day Sunday I'll be pretty busy this weekend.

Came back here, talked to the ladies about LibreOffice and her crappy old WordPerfect for 40 minutes. Then out to Jawman. Didn't really have anything wrong, but mbam found a few things so whatever. 

Tons of rain on the way home. It was just pouring down, for real though! Got home at 6:30.

Checked sites, ate dinner, got ready for tomorrow. Got part of Sean's gift in, it's not exactly what I thought. But I guess that's on me, for not reading well enough? Maybe I could rig up some kind of switch… (Should get another part tomorrow)

But that aside, tomorrow up early, breakfast, as I'm at Wegmans anyway I'll grab some salad stuff, and get to work. Not sure what I'll do there, as I finished the test case effort, but we'll see. Bank, shopping, probably seeing my parents but they may not be home? 

No Sean news either, but I'm going there Saturday anyway so probably nothing tomorrow.

Then Saturday making the salad, making sure I know what I'm going to say, and heading to Sean's around 1:00.

Then Sunday maybe having my father over for video game playing and a movie in the afternoon. I can clean up in the morning. 

Whew.

Hope your weekend goes well, and the weather cooperates for whatever you have planned. June is about half over, it might reach 70 degrees here this week, life is good.

See you then.