2020-03-19:

Fri:

We at Xerox are at the level 1 of caution out of 4 levels. Five in reality I guess. But 5 is just we're all dead, so.....

The first level of caution is certain people (there's a list) can work from home but don't have to.
The second level of caution is that those people have to work from home. We people that actually do the work should stay away from each other and snort hand sanitizer on a regular basis.
The third level of caution is




While the forth is



So situation normal. We had our meeting about that, and I wandered around looking for something meaningful to do that day.
My major contributions to the day were moving a heavy box to one corner of the lab instead of right in the middle of the freaking floor, and moving my printer for USDA away from Christina. The box I've been wanting to move for ages, it's full of heavy rubber cord protectors in the shape of a ramp that you can walk over. It's a huge box of them. We'll never use them, I don't know why we have them. I got one out once and it's used over in the other section. That's it. So I took all the things out of the box, moved the box, and put all the things back in the box. Much better.

Yeah, nothing else major to talk about I guess.

Did what shopping I could, never seen the shelves empty before, and the CVS parking lot is usually empty. Weird.
Got gas, and went to see my parents and sister. Thanks for everything!

Back home I put stuff away and told Sean I was ready, so we finished up Halo 5.

Sat:
Went out at 9:10 to see about this laptop that really had no issues that I could see. She said maybe icons were missing but didn't know which ones. She had a BIOS message about her battery she didn't tell me about, was it so hard to say "when I turn my laptop on I get a message that reads "etc." on my screen? Was it? Was it?

Checked sites, videos, as normal.

Came back here, called the guy who called me at 8:58 last night. He was missing a folder from his dock, I guess? He said it was named images but we couldn't find it. Was it named that? Did it ever exist? Who can say.

Ate lunch.

Puttered around until about 2:30 when I left for Sean's. I was considering buying Borderlands 3 for PC because it just came to Steam for 29.99 and I knew with the very neat save editor for 2 one would probably be made for that game. Plus if not there's save state sites to get certain gear and such. At that price, how could I refuse? (very easily, I hear you saying) But my SSD is filling up, wondered if I should get another, maybe a bigger one, or just a standard SATA one or what. Then I remembered the 2TB drives I pulled out of my Mac some time ago that are 10 years old and still just sitting there. I got them installed (it was a tight fight given the length (that's what she said) of the video card) Made them a RAID in case one fails and started moving stuff over to them.

Game was fairly simple, just another perspective on the card based one with Stan. Dave never showed, silly boy. We also watched a murder mystery movie.

Came back, moved a few more things over, got Borderlands 3 downloaded and played it a few minutes to see how different using a mouse is. It's pretty different.

Sun:
Mostly watched some of Star Trek Discovery that Sean lent me. It's okay.

Baked a pie, I missed pie day but eh, I have lots of pie now. One more bag of berries left, is it spring yet?

Cleaned a bit, another half hour of BL3, talked to a guy about getting him a laptop, and dentist guy was just using the wrong password. (What a shock)

Got ready for tomorrow.

Mon:
I wasn't ready.

Here's a fun nugget to chew on. My total Mutual Fund contribution since 2015 has been $17,500. My current mutual fund worth: $17,122. Huh, that seems smaller, one of those numbers is smaller than the other and I really don't want to see it that way. All my gains for 5 years have been lost, and I've lost money? What?

Anyway, rewind to this morning- parking lot was empty. It was fairly empty when I left too, people are really taking that "work" from home deal seriously. I mean "work from home" my finger must have slipped and put the other quote down too early. Too bad this is a typerwriter and I can't go back to correct it.

Got in, still couldn't figure out what to do so I looked at the tablet stuff. Yeah. Wrote 6 bugs. Weird how I can just casually swipe through some screens and write more bugs in one morning than the other two have all month. So weird! Why do you think that is? Gina emailed me all excited: "I saw you entered bugs! Are you testing the tablet again!?" Had to tell her no, that was a one off. Some serious stuff too, that wasn't there before. Like half the screen in French and the other half in English, settings remaining when you went back in after checking out, all stuff we squashed a long time ago. But it's baaaaaacccck.

In the afternoon I got saved! No, I didn't find Jesus (he's already my co-pilot) some new software came in early. It wasn't for the products I thought, and the card reader said CAC but it's prox? *shakes head* anyway worked that all out, signed out the four machines and got them loaded up for tomorrow. Started one test on one, looks good so far. It was pretty funny, I walked in to see why the one printer wasn't responding (it was reboot cycling so I had to kick it in the head and reload the software totally, thanks whoever left it like that) and there was nobody else in the lab. I was literally the only one in three separate labs for an hour. Boris is always there, at least. He seems never to go home. But no, not there. Nobody was there. A little spooky.

Anyway, all three of the others should be good to go, they're loaded up. (It took so long because they're the "older" product and very slow to upgrade. And I was fiddling with the one machine, took it to a release before this one to see what plugging the card reader in would do.) The test tomorrow should go fairly quickly.

Came back here and my mother pruned my holly bush back. Maybe she can get some of them to grow and have her own.

Then it was eating time and watching more Star Trek and making calls. The cat lady I replaced two keyboards for now says her power button is not working. And I got a replacement optical drive for the laptop I just sold the guy so on the way home from the keyboard lady I'll stop and put that in.

Tues:
The fall continues, as today my mutual fund account stands at $15,678 a loss of $1822. How does it say I'm up $636? I'm not, I'm still in the negative. Weird.



That's quite the downward curve. Thanks Obama! Oh wait...

Tried to do the card reader test today, but of course I ran into some obstacles. I can log in okay, it knows who I am, but try to do a scan to home and it tells me the path is invalid. Try to do a scan to email with encryption and it tells me I have no certificate. But add the email address with the search function and it's happy to encrypt it. Somehow the names are different, like "zadmin" and "Admin, Z" have the same email address but somehow the machine thinks they're different. Then search stopped working. What?

In any case I logged into all the printers so we know the card reader works on all of them, I just have to figure out why it isn't completely working. So we have something for tomorrow.

Are we at level 2 over at Xerox or not? Still haven't gotten a straight answer on that one. Parking lot is still empty.

Went to see about the power button, it really was the button. There's like a little brass dome over the thing in the picture, and it's not there anymore. Weird. Then went over to her neighbor who had no issues at all. Gurrr

Then went to replace the optical drive in that PC. It was making a weird noise, and it didn't work, I'll give him that. Sigh.

Then back home, dinner time, checked sites, and a bit more Star Trek.

Wed:
We worked out most of the problems... er... someone else worked out most of the problems with my card reader setup. John did it remotely, and Christina helped me figure it out as well, as multiple things needed to be done in order to bring it into line. I had to turn on a secondary "pin" which is really a password, and turn off the usual LDAP querp that I typically use with smartcards. Because why wouldn't the settings be totally different?

Anyway that took the morning. Of course there was the brief USDA meeting as well, still no software there because they are still integrating the new voice api they licensed. And they can't figure out how to download the weblet to send to me anyway. So that's not ready.

Finished up the test by using my new-found knowledge to hook the card reader up to the machine I was struggling with at the end of the day yesterday. Test went fine, as usual the actual test takes only minutes.

(Oh, and I couldn't search the address book as I had before because I wasn't logging in the same way.) It was a mess. But to keep it from being a mess ever again I documented everything that was done and all the settings I used. (Thanks Chris)

That took me to about the end of the day, certainly didn't do a bit of writing, no of course not.

Other news, we're still all freaking out about viruses, Sean has even canceled gettogethers. Well, maybe we can do game online?

Stock market continues to plunge, you don't want to know how much I'm down now. Honest.

Should be warming up. Almost 70 on Friday? Rain, but okay. Wait, high of 67 and low friday night of 26. Yipes, that escalated quickly.

Came back here, finished up Season 1, no calls so that was nice.

Got ready for bed, and did some Mass Effect.

Thurs:
Got stuck beating a crap ton of robots up. Sheesh, throw a few more robots at me why don't you? That brings up a good point. Why did these ancient builds build things like this? Why a cavernous space with a death field in the middle? People build stuff for their own comfort and convenience, and these ancient aliens would be no different. There would be a control booth, somewhat near the entrance, that had a big "ON/OFF" switch for their machine that terraformed worlds. Not a mile of treacherous cave interior with death water at the bottom of it. I'm just saying.

Difficulty spike, much?

But not at work, where with Christina's help I figured out the email thing. Turns out we can't log into SNMP as administrator. As zadman, the lowly worker bee? Sure. But it doesn't accept The Person In Charge Of It All. Very weird.

That was the major victory of the day, and basically nothing else was accomplished. We had the meeting (that everyone was remote to for some reason) and I looked into some new things on the charts. We have plenty of VersaLink work coming I think April 10th? Or May? He kept going back and forth, I have no idea. Soon-ish? So if we're all allowed to go outside at that time we'll have plenty to do.

Came back here, no calls, checked sites, youtube seems to have reset and doesn't show my usual videos. Did that once before too. Took forever for them to start coming back. Weird. Ah well, nothing of value was lost.

Let's look to the future, as it's about that time. Warm tomorrow? 70 almost?
No idea what work I'll do, I'll find something. See what I can get at the store, no bank because it's closed not that I have all that much to deposit at the moment anyway. Seeing my parents.

I don't know if we're doing anything online or what day it will be. Curse you Covid! Sunday is tax day, so I'll go over to my parent's house then. Otherwise hopefully fairly quiet. Sitting in the dark. Alone. While my guitar gently weeps.

Have a virus free week and I'll see you all next time.