2019-12-19:

Fri:

The morning was eating donuts and not seeing Adnan, meeting, and mucking around with the new kiosk.

The afternoon was thinking about questions for Chris, checking our network drops, loading a new logging program into the kiosks.

Did the shopping, saw my parents, no Gabe but I got to hold an Onix.

Then over to Sean's. Took until about 11:30 but we finished the adventure from last time. Having not killed everyone in sight they now have prisoners to deal with. I guess that's better?

Sat:

After breakfast I had 5 phone calls!!?? So I started calling people back. One was dentist guy he got his printer part in. So put it in, you don't need my permission! (Waiting to call him until before I leave for Sean's, may as well take care of two birds in the hand. Wait...) Spent 40 minutes trying to get a guy to send me a file so I could look at it myself. Some kind of map, and why not just use Google maps I hear you asking? I asked the same question. Died before the answer. (Little 10th kingdom joke for you there) Anyway, it would open, it wasn't a corrupted file or anything, and it was 86 MB so it wasn't an empty file, it just wouldn't show anything but some Russian text on the bottom. Very, very tiny Russian text. Weird. We finally gave up, it wasn't worth it.

Didn't reach anyone else, even the guy with the internet issue that had called like only an hour before. Whatever.

Checked my sites from yesterday, today.

Went out to see internet guy. He had just turned it off. I probably could have figured that out over the phone but the last time I tried it was just an exercise in frustration so I just drove there. It isn't far.

Then figured out that incognito mode makes yahoo mail work properly, what does... how??? I don't even...

Finished up my videos while I ate lunch. Did my paperwork from last month, a whole 10 customers. I'm on track to not even make the maximum amount I can put into my IRA in this business this year. Sweet!

It was raining pretty hard when I left, which had turned to snow by the time I got there. Luckily it stopped soon after and the snow didn't stick around. That would have been a pretty major storm if it had been colder from the start.

Played some games, Mizzy made us dinner, and I was the only one who brought a gift for the birthday girl. Mizzy won Cosmic Wimpout on her second turn so she can't say she never wins anything.

Sun:

Caught up on videos and then had lunch.

Took a nap with two kittens. Watched the latest Dark Materials, cleaned up a bit, checked Borderlands to see why it thought I hadn't completed the game. It was fine now so that's good. Got ready for tomorrow, all the usual stuff really.

One more week!

Mon:

Planned on getting some answers to my long list of questions today but Chris had other things he needed to do so after the meeting I had after the meeting I had, I didn't have much to do. I sent in my 6 pages of notes to the team and got back the response "yeah, don't write any of that up." Uh, okay? So the UI won't be finalized for 1-2 months you say? The whole thing is a proof of concept you say? Glad I did all that work. Focus on test cases you say? Uh, we don't even know if it'll support scan to USB yet so clearly that's not worth pursuing either. So forget it.

After lunch I asked Chris if there was anything I could help with, he said "go fix the domain controller." Sure, I know everything there is to know about domain controllers. Super easy, barely an inconvenience. Or wait, what's the opposite of that?

One problem it had was an expired certificate, but of course there a dozen places certificates can be, thanks MS, but we finally got rid of the one and I think that cleared up one of the error messages. We ran some command line thing and that maybe took care of a second. But it still won't get online, despite the fact we an only connect to it remotely, it's a virtual machine. Clearly it is online. For some reason requests going out of the machine hit some weird IP address and just stop. We left it there. So much fun I have to look forward to.

(The reason we need to do this is because we're moving the virtual machines to another building, for reasons. Instead of doing it in Q1 of next year, now it has to be done in the next 7 work days. Neat.)

So I went to see google mail guy. He insists some entries in his address book had email address, but other entries do have email addresses and why would some entries keep them but other entries not? Doesn't make sense. Also seemed to not be able to wrap his head around the fact that gmail is just an email address. Like his other two email addresses. Dude, it's just an email. There's no app. You just open Mail.

Got back here, did the usual dinner eating and getting ready for tomorrow. Three calls today, because why wouldn't there be?

So I have a job for tomorrow, a machine making a funny noise and hanging. Probably the CPU fan? One guy I didn't reach, and one person just needed the avast secure browser removed as for some bizarre reason she was hitting it instead of chrome.

Checked out mayhem mode 4, sheesh, forget it single player. And the loot was hardly worth the effort. Maybe on a boss?

Tues:

Strange repeat today of something I heard before. See, with the server thing from yesterday actually being something we couldn't have fixed anyway because it was "above" the server I moved on to testing one of Chris' things. Good practice and whatnot. Got the test plan from Diane, but a big ol' whoa mon from Don. Anyway, the machine was set up so I grabbed a card and figured out the user stuff *singing* all by myself! *end singing* I was pretty proud actually. And every. Single. Test. Failed. Apart from one. I made my notes in the test plan. I recorded movies. I sent said test plan out to Don and Diane and see what they wanted me to write up.

Don came down. "Yeah, we don't even have 100% content until Thursday so don't bother writing anything up."

aaarrrrrrrrrrrggggggggg

Sigh. At least I know better what I'm looking at but seriously, couldn't we maybe froward my notes to the developers at the very least for them to look over and say "oh, we should fix that before Thursday I know for a fact that's still an issue." Nope. Just waste my time why don't you.

Other Don, my manager Don, came to say I may (with the emphasis on may) see another small raise to my paycheck. Perhaps even as much as less than 2%. Do you know what 2% of a salary increase looks like when your contract house is sure to take at least part of it for themselves? Probably about a quarter an hour. $2.00 a day. $14 a week. I mean I wouldn't turn it down, but you know the tax man will have their hand out too so it'll be more like $1.80 a day if I'm lucky. What was the inflation rate this year? *checks google* Ah, 2.05%. Brilliant.

Went to go see freezing lady, who did not have a machine that was hanging up. At least that she could demonstrate for me. I cleaned her fan and oiled it, though it wasn't really that bad. She had a puffy 16 year old kitty that was all skin and bones under there. Kidney failure. Poor kitty.

Came back here, the usual stuff, hey is one week from today the Eve? I think it is!

Moved my vacation officially to the 30th-31st, so it'll be a weird week. One day on, two days off, two days on, 5 days off. I say goodbye to Chris, get 5 days, and then the madness begins.

Hopefully he'll have time to answer my large list of questions tomorrow!

Two calls, but one was just the guy with more info on what he wanted. Wants me to type up his screenplay. Really dude? You know you can get, like, perfectly useable PCs that you could type on for basically free on ebay. Or get a wireless keyboard for your phone and type it in that way. I mean, come on.

Borderlands! I died because I didn't know we couldn't come back during the Maliwan thing, and why wouldn't we? Why would the game suddenly change the rules this far in? But it does, and I did, and that's stupid. Bad gearbox.

Wed:

Let the information transfer begin. Much of the day we worked on setting up the new server. This allowed us to look at adding new users, taking certificates off of cards, and I got a few of my other questions answered too. Hopefully this continues, we have... five days. This time next week The Big Day will be over and all the snow can just melt away.

Speaking of snow, walked down the hall at lunch and looked out the window. I saw white. Out the window, not the fact that most of the office... you get what I mean. It was really nasty out there for a good chunk of the day. Wasn't too bad coming home though, so that's good.

Checked sites, got ready for tomorrow so we can do the challenge again. Going to look into changing my weapons up though, need more electric and maybe acid in the mix. So much for all the legendaries I carry around.

 Thurs:

No information transferred today, everyone is busy trying to get projects done before the end of the year. What a great time to loose your best employee. I looked the servers over in the morning, making sure all the passwords worked and writing the date in a spreadsheet to show I made sure they were all updated. Those "tablet" people have a server hanging around doing nothing, what a waste. Only two I think it was needed a reboot. Put the task on the calender and boom, done.

Then loaded a new release of software before lunch, so I could test the new API. Oh look, it hasn't improved since the last version 2 whole days ago. I went through it with Don and he was like, well, I guess all those things are problems, write them all up. Yes, vindicated! Didn't actually get time to, after the Thursday meeting and that it was time to go. Of course I gloss over getting the thing to even work, as Chris had been messing with it the day before to test the new server. So I had to put it back, and of course the tool to load it wouldn't work, I had to use the much (much) older version of the tool, which did. Version 2 vs version 4. It's supposed to get better with time, sillies. Not worse. But it finally worked (mostly) and I'm writing up the area where it worked better before for sure, so that's tomorrow's task. Write a bunch of bugs.

I got eggnog with rum in it! Anyone want some eggnog? With rum in it?

Then drove for about 50 minutes, traffic was slow and backed up though I don't know why, it wasn't even snowing out! Finally made it, erased her password, set up one of my wireless USB adapters I had, and we tried to get into her mail account. I thought for sure I had a new one of those things. Not so much, that I could find anyway. Weird. At least I had plenty of Old Ones. I mean old ones. Little Lovecraft humor for you there.

Finally got home at about 7:45 I think it was. No calls, thank goodness. Just the usual stuff.

So let's talk next week. By the time you read the next one The Event will be over, so have a good Event. But that's too far in the future! Tomorrow is bug writing, bank, shopping, then over to celebrate Mother Present Day. No Sean he didn't want to start late, despite the fact we can go longer now.

Weekend? Not sure. Nothing exciting planned. Work Monday, then off two days, then work two days. And then off until the New Year Cometh.

So be safe out there everyone. Have a good Event be that what it may, but don't forget time is the most precious gift of all. See you all in one weeks worth of it.