2020-02-06:

Fri:

I wanted to do 2 things today. Load a 5.1 release and see what testing I could get done to get it off the list, and quickly do an upgrade the "official" way using XDM for USDA.
Not only did I not accomplish these things, the printer in the back doesn't work anymore and I have no idea what to do about it.

I can't seem to load 5.1 on our fake 5.1 hardware, it gives me "bad dlm." So I went back to the 8155 machine figuring I had that loaded with a 5.4, right? I'll just make it 5.1 then. Nope. It was off to begin with, then wouldn't take the dlm. Nor would it boot at all, at that point.
I tried other software versions. Nope. I tried the "back door" method of recovering it. Nope. Won't take the password.

Meanwhile I was trying XDM which didn't want to cooperate. It should be fairly simply. Put the printer into the system, give it the file, tell the file to go to the printer. Easy, right? Nope. Fails. Does it say why? Nope! LOL. Tell you why something didn't work? Why would we do that? In fact there seems to be no traffic to the machine at all when it supposedly makes the attempt. Nothing. How do I troubleshoot it doing nothing?

So that happened.

Did the shopping, saw my parents, then contributed very little to game. Not that there was action to speak of anyway...

Sat:
Did a list of things, starting with going over to the guy down the street and turning his router on. Yeah, it was that simple.
Plugged his phone in, tried to figure out why his splitter wasn't working, nothing too major.

Came back, and in no particular order I:
Wrapped dad's gift.
Cleaned up around here.
Transferred a VHS to DVD (wow those were the days)
Talked to two people, one to verify tomorrow's appointment (he didn't want today) and barbara to move her mail from POP to IMAP because she was "getting duplicate mails" or whatever.
Ate lunch.
Checked sites, videos.
Checked the camera the guy gave me, he said it didn't work but it worked just fine for me. Should I offer it back to him?
Set that PC back up now that had received more parts. (SSDs)
Did some more farming in Borderlands for gear.

Then went to the movie with my father at 6:00. It somewhat redeemed the last two, but they should have been able to stand on their own.

Sun:
A little more farming, didn't get the exact gun I wanted but realized I already had a similar one?
Checked sites.

Went out at 2:00 for the iMac guy. Could not believe how slow it was. Honestly could not believe it. My 2008 machine could run circles around it. Bizarre. Good old spinning rust I guess, SSDs really spoil you. I'm surprised Apple even sells machines with those anymore. They need to be discontinued already.

Back here for a bit, then out to see the big game. Glad to see the team that hadn't won the Big Game in 50 years win the Big Game. Good for you guys!

Mon:
Slight redemption of last Friday. At least I made it to partly where I was trying to get on that day.
The upgrade test went fine, apparently I had a feature turned on that made the upgrade software tell the printer to download the upgrade. Rather than, you know, just pushing it to the device. That's a newer feature, and the older software I was using probably didn't support it. But I turned that off and wham, it worked right away.

Then set up a device for a bug fix test, it kept rebooting but I guess that was normal, it worked in the end. All that for one bug. Well, it was fixed so that was that.

Then got to work on the major problem. Actually made progress getting into the machine, I finally found the password to it. The directions were even written, though they were called something I wasn't expecting. Wouldn't have made it easier Friday, I still didn't have the password. With that I started the download and waited. More than an hour, because that was right at the end of the day. It was still chugging along (I presumed) so I left. Hopefully it's up and running when I go in tomorrow. It was odd, it chose a weird release and on top of that the color product despite being the black and white only product. I had to redirect it to something sane. Very strange.

Stopped at the guy's house who called me about "the crash" but it was just one of those popup things. So he was fine.
Came home, ate dinner, sites, talked to a lady about windows update (again).
Made my other calls, though the one I had I didn't reach because it was busy for over an hour. (What, was she on her dial up modem or something?) Another person called me, her machine "is slow" (gee wonder why?) so I'm going out there tomorrow.

Worked on my plot for next week.

Worked on my character for this week. At least my "backstory" such as it is.


Tues:
Here's today's backstory. I'm back to where I should have been with my story Friday. Here it comes.
Walked in and found the printer still just sitting there where I had left it, so clearly I had done something wrong in my attempt to get it going again. I pressed on doing the same thing and expected a different result. However, this time I paid a little more careful attention tot he prompts and saw that the server name it was going to pull the recovery image from looked a bit odd. Or to be more precise, half there. The first half was there, but it looked too short, so I filled in the full name of the server, and fed it a D5.4 release I knew worked because I had run it before.

This worked.

The machine booted, and apart from the software version being 000.000.000.000 it seemed fine. "Fine," I thought to myself. "I'll just downgrade it to D5.1 and it'll fix that issue." It started digesting the file, rebooted, worked some more, then decided, you know what? I'm not going to finish. Sucker!

So I, armed with my new knowledge of making this work started over, with the 5.1 release I actually wanted. This worked, thank you, and I was set to start testing. Finally.
And test I did. I ran two whole tests with different cards, basically running most of the cards we had in the place with a certain reader, then switching between three cards with two readers. Yes, this is my life now. Oh, and all those cards are expiring within a month. True story.

Started on the third test, which only had a little to do with cards. I need to use a test tool and see if some values are returned. They are... if you log in without the card. With the card though, uh, no values returned. Very odd. I was poking at that when I ran out of time. So that's where we are at present. I think there are 4 5.1 tests done so I'm at 2.3 the way through? Not bad, not bad at all. Hate stuff like that hanging over me.

Went to the cleanout. Her machine was pretty slow, at the end I took the cover off to make sure the heatsink was okay. It was sooooo tiny! Most have been one of those "laptop in a desktop case" jobs. So stupid. It was a fraction of the total case, and had this little bitty fan sitting there cooling it. I put the cover back on. "Ah, that explains much," I thought to myself. Not even an SSD would help all that much when it's a 1.2ghz processor.

Came back, videos, sites, dinner, no calls and the number was still busy so that's all to the good.


Wed:
It was Christina that figured out my snafu with the string values from yesterday. Apparently I put in some wildcard characters because in my mind, wildcard characters give you more options, not less. Our printers disagree. Taking the wilds out made it work perfectly. Up to the "convenience" method because of course we need six different ways of logging into the printer. Honestly, we don't even need one way. It's a printer. It sits there. We don't need to log in to everything. But I digress.

Looked into that. Chris never covered it, I don't think we have any servers that run it, and even if we did I would have to start from scratch because Christina hasn't done anything with it either. Super.

Oh, and apparently Boston is still on the table. I'm not doing tablet stuff anymore, you pulled me off that, but now I have to go and do Staples' testing for them? Are they that bad? Is there really stuff I can do there which I couldn't do here? (If I were still testing tablets?) It's not definite, but it shouldn't even be on the table.

So that was about all for today. Looked in the only other 5.1 test but it's another convenience thing, upgrading the card readers attached to the device. I might be able to get away with just plugging one in, I don't think it has to be all set up. We'll see, I guess.

Came back here, there's some nasty weather coming for the next few days so hopefully they're wrong about that. Meanwhile, checked my sites, made my calls, helped them both over the phone so I get to come home tomorrow as well, and watched the Maleficent movie Sean gave me.

Thurs:
I got away with just plugging it into the device. And then realized, hey wait, this feature doesn't even exist! I later learned it never made it into what I was testing so then why wasn't it moved to a later number? Ah well. I did manage to do another test with that reader just using a tool to verify it reported information about the reader properly. It did. Test over.

Then I worked on stupid Celiveo. For most of the rest of the day. It just won't install. I'm supposed to get an icon on the printer to release my jobs. No such luck. I loaded another of our little boxes (we have 2) on a device that had already been set up but it was giving me errors all over the place. Finally realized it needed the LDAP server info updated. Then the web interface was blank, we all know what causes that I ran into it a week or two ago if you'll recall. You do? Good. So I cloned it to another configuration and went to the meeting. When I got back I tried it again because I wanted to see the error it was giving at that point and, uh, it worked? Wha? That shouldn't have fixed anything, if anything it should have been more broken. Very weird.

So I know the server is okay, I did manage to release a job. But the newer machine? Na uh. Not gonna do it. There's no good log I can look at either to see what might be wrong. Is it us? It seems similar to the equatrac problem I had some time ago where it wouldn't install either. Very suspicious.

Came back here, there was some snow but not a lot. Did the driveway, more will come tomorrow they're saying. Then the usual. Sites, videos, petting kitties.

What's the plan for the next few days? Probably write up the inability to install as a bug and scrounge around for something else to do. I've basically wiped out the d5.1 list, d5.4 is too far out, and my USDA stuff won't be available for a bit. So we'll have to see. Naturally we'll do the shopping, drop stuff off at my parent's house (they're working) and go over to Sean's. If I think I won't get killed, weather report says it'll be nasty Friday night.

I have a 10:00 saturday, need to do the paperwork for last month, work on a Valentine's gift, we'll see what else pops up. The 10:00 guy just can't get online, and was unable, after 10 minutes, to unplug his modem. He went away to do it, I waited in silence for 10 minutes, hung up, he called me back a few minutes later. Really? You can't unplug something? Okay. How did you plug it in then?

First week of Febtobor gone. Oliver had three attacks I saw, and I'm still learning just how much we lost with Chris leaving.
Stay safe out there everyone, warm and cozy somewhere.