2019-08-23:

Fri:

Didn't get right into writing Thursday night, I was trying to figure out what battery my security system was talking about so it would stop beeping at me. I ordered some batteries for my smoke detector. Seriously, what does "cpu low batt" even mean?

I did do a little writing though. Set up the battle I’m about to run, 2 against 10. We’ll see how it goes. (spoiler: Lysanias dies again)

Then work. Got though the test cases I was working on. Barely. Upgrading takes a long time, and I had to go back and forth between a few things to test everything.

One bug written. One time the upgrade didn’t work out so well for me. Crud, I forgot to write bugs in the other database for it. Because that’s a thing.

Dropped stuff off, got the groceries, came back here and had some dinner. 

Out to Sean's, we "rescued" the girl but didn't actually solve anything. The area they live in is still going to be targeted. But at least the immediate threat is over.

I have no idea what we’re going to do about a patch of wilderness that happens to have beneficial magical properties but also happens to host two nymphs who can’t move!

Wait, why does this all sound so familiar… And contemporary…

Sat:

More running around than I would have liked.

10:00 appointment to set up the printer. That went fine, she had a Mac. Answered some questions, went over how to scan. I think she’s confusing scanning in color with printing in color, because she’s working on this book through shutterfly by scanning photos she has. But that doesn’t require printing it in color, the service is going to do that, right?

Home to eat lunch, and as I had two calls I took them in order.

Then out again to someone nearby, tuned up a machine, looked at a Mac, need to order her a battery. Took her machine apart to fix the trackpad. She’s lost all four feet on the bottom of her machine and one went inside and jammed her trackpad up. Luckily it wasn’t a bulging battery as I initially suspected. A Mac user and a PC user in the same house, married to each other. shakes head It just isn’t right.

Then out again to see about transferring stuff to a Mac from a very slow PC. Like, very slow. Windows just needs to be blown away on that thing. But he wants it left up for Quicken. I hate quicken. Why does the Mac and PC version have to be so different? It’s not guiding rockets into space, and many, many other programs seem to be exactly the same between platforms so why can’t they do it?

Finally back here at 5:45 or so. Ate dinner, texted Sean, he wanted to start at 7:00 so I checked my videos for the day.

Played Halo.

Couldn't play 3 player Halo 1. Sadface. Mizzy played her copy alongside us, but not with us. Sean thinks MS could have done more to upgrade Halo 1, but he misses the fact he’s currently playing an original XBOX game on a modern system, with upgraded graphics, when MS didn’t have to give him squat. Them doing anything to get it working is above and beyond, in my view. 

Battery life seems terrible on my controller. Like, really terrible. Like, I had to plug it in while playing to keep it alive, and it still died and I had to change the batteries before the night was through. The battery pack box said 20 hours. Yeah, 20 hours my groot. It wasn’t 5 hours. I found a higher amp wall plug, we’ll see if that works out. If so it’s fine. Maybe I’ll turn off rumble? Forums seems mixed on controller battery life but it’s not the battery pack. The rechargeables I’m using get drained really fast too.

Sun:

Finished chapter 25. Hard rain.

Cleaned up the living room, it was pretty bad from all the other cleaning that has been done lately.

Watched Endgame in the afternoon. That of course took a few hours.

Cleaned up the kitchen. Ate dinner.

Went though a bunch of my CD collection to find what I can throw out. Found some stuff I didn't have on my machine? Odd. The disks, surprisingly, were still good, so I copied them over.

So yeah not much exciting but it was better than yesterday. 

Mon:

Wrote up those two bugs for the machine not coming up after an upgrade into the other system, and started the upgrade of the new machine put in place of my old one.

Had the Monday meeting.

Then got busy with the alerts and faults portion of the testing, which is clearly my favorite. Obviously. Wrote a ton of new bugs because we are either backsliding in a major way, or the architecture of the new machine is very, very different from the other machine. Had two pieces of cake. Didn't need to have them. Didn't need to mention it. But I chose to.

Got gas on the way home, but that was it.

Got home, had a nice little surprise waiting for me. Another letter from the IRS! Yes, so kind of them. Remember how months ago they needed another form because, and it was our fault, it wasn't included? Well, they've sent me another letter, requesting basically everything I've already sent them. Yeah! They're not getting any new information at all. They have my W2, because it's sent by my employer to them. They have the estimated payments I made, because they have numbers associated with it. They got page 1 and 2 of my return, as well as "any supporting documents." (Which is SUPER vague, by the way. Thanks for that.) So I just faxed them the whole damn thing again. Yeah. Here you go, enjoy. 

Also, they want me to e-file, but they won't accept this document in an email? How backwards is this? What year am I living in, 1894? 

Does this mean my return has yet to be processed? It's August, what are you guys doing over there?

Two calls. One person that wants Win10 on two machines, okay that'll be $300 I guess? And something about craigslist emails, she probably uses webmail.

Ugh, it was some cookie thing I guess. I took off a bunch of extensions too. Took a half hour, he couldn't (and she couldn't) successfully type a web address into an address bar. It's six digits and three letters. It's not all that hard, people.

Played Halo!

And Sean told me what my CPU battery message meant. 

Tues:

 Finished up the alerts, at least most of them. There are a few that have to be artificially inserted, and I don't have the cable or the code to do it.

Started on tablet alerts, the thing that is tested in every app as a matter of course. Also, won't Staples be showing these alerts? Why do we care if our software shows them? 

Had the last slice of cake. Don't judge me.

Came back, wrapped the pole in the rope as I wished. Messed the rope all up, don't know how. Lots still in a nice coil in the box, but also lots just flung all over the place. Sigh.

Also cut out and sewed the middle strip of the pac-man. So once I measure it I can see about getting the right amount of material. Of course I still have to sew the middle part onto the top and bottom. Baby steps.

Got ready for tomorrow because we're going to play more Halo, though we didn't do so until late and it went later than I wanted.

Wed:

Finished up tablet alerts. Adnan brought it more cake, what is he trying to do do us?

Wrote up a few bugs, but that's about it for 5.2 testing. The list is essentially done. Now to move on.

We should be getting the staples stuff, Lewis came in and said it was inbound, so maybe we'll have that to play with tomorrow.

Otherwise nothing really exciting. No demo today, but I did load the new version and look over my resolved bugs. Both tablet side and the portal. 

Came back here, had dinner, checked sites. Got ready for tomorrow so if Sean wants to play Halo we can. 

One call, Mr Jaw, is his machine not booting? Who can tell? I'm heading there tomorrow for awesome fun times.

We were late playing halo, I was reading comics, but we did manage one stage.

Thurs:

We finally got it! At the 11th hour, moments before I was leaving. Sigh. Ah well, I'll have all day to play tomorrow as half the group is taking off. I'm still doing breakfast though.

It's really slick, by the way. It didn't work all the way, for some reason it would start the job, act like it was going through with it, but then not finish and give an error. I'm hopeful their logs will give us some idea what the issue is. It looks and acts very differently from ours, and really shows what we should have been doing all along. If we didn't suck.

Oh, was that negative? I can only write bugs, those at the top, making the poor decisions, need to take a close look at this.

Anyway, had our meetings. Looked into copy a bit, just to poke it. Wrote up a few things, you know, it's my job or whatever. 

Mr. Jaw had a busted video card. Of course his machine didn't have the power plugs for the PCI-express card I had, nor did he have the plugs for the adapter I had, which seemed to require two ports and he only had one. I did have an old PCI card that would work, as his machine had PCI slots. No win10 driver of course, and the machine wasn't exactly happy with the Win8 driver. Also, I have no idea what I paid for this card but it's crazy expensive now? Huh?

I'll have to order a more generic, non-gamer card to replace it. And try to find a reasonable PCI card.

Came back here, ate dinner, sites. Got ready for tomorrow. Sheesh, only one more week of August. It's over. Game over man, game over!

Drew up a very crude diagram of what their ship looks like.

What's the next few days look like? Playing with the Staples code tomorrow, see where they are exactly. Then shopping, seeing my parents, and go out to run game. I think we're still on. I'll run IV, hopefully I have enough for them but I think they do. People to talk to, places to plunder, the usual.

No calls today so hopefully a quiet weekend. Would like to at least finish the inner cover of the pac man, maybe work on getting christmas gifts finalized? I need to order a part for Mizzy's and put some kind of box together for Neal's.

Figure out if I need anything for labor day, and what the 7 labors will be. Finish any cleaning around here I need to do. 

Yeah, hopefully somewhat quiet.

Enjoy everyone, see you next week.