2020-04-09:

Fri:

Found something to do today, and it was somewhat meaningful! We got another piece of software a lot earlier than I expected so we borrowed a machine in another lab and did the usual card test. No issues, after the setup was done anyway. That took from 11:30 to about 1:30 in total. After that I wrote up the results, posted them, changed the status, and by 2:15 everyone was gone. And by "everyone" I mean Christina. So I did more lab cleanup, found some non-dairy creamer in a drawer that had either 2012 or 2016 stamped on the bottom. It showed both, not sure why, but it went in the garbage. Things like that. There's a rolling cabinet that's locked and I tried to find a key for it. No luck. It will be unknowable forever.

Otherwise not much else exciting.

The bank was closed, so I'll have to deposit these checks with my app. It's not a huge deal either way, I just don't want the checks to sit here so long they're not good anymore. You would think people would have more than $50 in an account at any one time but you could be wrong.

Went shopping, the cashiers are behind plastic barriers now. At least the store doesn't seem a barren wasteland anymore.

And saw my parents. No gas, I figured at this point 3/4 of a tank was just fine. Held a Jenny and an Emily, and came home to do game.

I think it went fairly well, a little different at the end when the guy who was warning them showed up, but you have to expect it.

Bedtime, it's Saturday already.

Sat:

Did some cleaning, wasn't sure if my father was going to come over or not. I mean I suppose I would have done some anyway but probably the next day.

Finally tackled one of the projects on my long term list, painting the fairy I have. See, her wings have been broken a time or two so I wanted to make them look a little nicer. But just painting\ the wings would look really odd. So I made some (questionable??) color choices and went at it. Here she is before the procedure.

take these broken wings, and learn to fly again

And here she is after.

I actually finished her Sunday, the flesh tone needed several coats.
I know I spilled over a bit on the stump. Maybe one day, in the far, far distant future, I'll be really proactive and paint that too.

Of course my usual sites, movies, playing mass effect took place.

Then dad came over. We watched 3 episodes, the first two which were classic Dr Who even if we had some audio glitches, sorry about that dad. Interestingly subtitles work, it truly is a full service method, isn't it?

Then borderlands, the slaughterstar was much easier! I still died at the end though. Still, I see better from a distance awnyway.

Sun:
Finished up painting the fairy, as I noted just a second ago.

Sites, took picutres of the fairy and put 3 books into the database. No comics this week because I've been reading real books.

Played a whole bunch of Mass Effect. I still have a lot of that game to go. I thought I had only one more planet to find, plus the extra missions I had picked up along the way. Nope, the place the Krogan settled on had tons of missions so I'm not even close. Spent like a half hour fighting one of those stupid ship sized robots and died needing to hit it like three more times. So I changed the difficulty and beat it in 5 minutes. So weird, should there really be that much of a jump?

Touched up the fairy and put her out in the breezeway. Hope she likes being painted. Keep your wings on little one.

One call, spent a half hour waiting for her to send a picture of her screen because I have no idea what she's talking about. Some bizarre picture password? I don't know, and she says her mouse and keyboard don't work. I have to go over there. Yay.

Got ready for tomorrow.

Mon:
Very boring day today, I'm afraid to say. Didn't really do much. Did 1 minor card test as I realized I had used the wrong card in a test earlier. The numbers are quite similar. Sigh.

Did more lab cleaning, after everyone else had left of course. Honestly, it was a real snoozer today. You have no idea.

Went over to the lady with the keyboard and mouse issue. Bluetooth was her problem. Her machine just didn't see it anymore, or there was a device it didn't want to activate now. The weird password thing I think she just saw because she couldn't use the keyboard and mouse. Of course it wouldn't un-install, giving me an error in the setup program that "you don't have the hardware to use this. Setup aborted." Dude, I'm trying to get rid of it. Not install it. I hate you. I ripped it out manually.
I looked for a bluetooth adapter in my car I was sure I had one, in an envelope marked "bluetooth adapter" or something of that nature. Couldn't find it. Went home and got the one I bought years ago to do WII controller on my Mac. Ah, good times. It worked, so that solves that problem.

Got ready for bed early, wanted to do a 7:30 thing with Sean and the others. It turned out to be 8:30 so I did the first stage in Shantae to try going into the water as the crab. Got another heart, that will help. I'm stuck on the desert stage the boss is just this worm and you have to outrun it... Vertically. Yeah, great.

Tues:
Another mostly boring day. I did have the meeting with India, and we made one step worth of progress towards getting my NDES setup working. They were talking about access to this one folder (I think I've mentioned this) that didn't seem to exist, I finally figure out it needed me to uncheck "hide protected system files." This is a server os. You know, that people need to do actual work with. Hiding stuff? Not your best move MS. That brought it up. They were talking about permissions and "reload all of XDM" and I was like sure, of course there was no "repair" I had to remove it first. Then I didn't know the SQL stuff Ken had used initially. So I had to put a ticket in for that. He finally did get it going again.

Oh look, the same issue! What a shock. I was so shocked. So I gave the "everyone" user total access to the folder. Talk about shooting flies with a nuke. But it worked.

Oh, it still doesn't work, I just get a different, and still totally useless, error message. Yay!

Otherwise, yeah, nothing much to report.

Came back here, had one call, did the usual eating and then played some Mass Effect.

Spent an hour and a half on the phone with someone having "email" problems. Uh, no, you're not in the internet. At first it seemed their router was the issue, but we finally got it taken out by plugging her laptop directly into the modem. It still wouldn't get an IP address. Well, call Spectrum, have them deal with you.

Wed:
Thought I might get some work to do today, but it didn't quite pan out. At the USDA meeting they said they would have a build for me, but not until later in the day.

So I busied myself messing about with NDES some more. Still no luck. I did figure out that what the server returns is some weird AES.1 I think it's called file. Which of course is not a certificate, nor can I seem to turn it into a certificate. I did manage to find a tool to open it and sort of see what was in it. So it's not exactly empty, it's not not what I thought it was. Upshot is the server does seem to return something when asked, tomorrow I'll see if I can compare them. I have the string the manual way uses, and I have the string the (failing) XDM way uses. I didn't think about that I was focused on trying to figure out what the heck it was I had. As I've basically given up trying to get anything useful out of it I'll just focus on how it's different from one method to the other.
In the hope, of course, that this reveals something I've missed. Likelihood? Zero!

Then the next meeting time happened. We installed the new software and got a message "please try again later." Uh, what? He had no idea what that was about, so Don is going to talk to others "in the know" and see if they know. Likelihood? Fair.

Came back here, no calls, ate dinner as usual.

Then some Mass Effect. Won Peebee's heart but still a long way to go to conquer the universe.
I mean, uh, help out the universe. That's what I meant to say.

Thurs:
There was something extremely important I had to do today. That only I could do. What was it... oh right it was watering the plants again.

But I did get some real work done today. We got a replacement build that took care of a problem in the previous one. They wanted it tested right away before they built all the products. The fix worked, I was able to do what I expected like on the other products. The log file isn't actually what they said in the spec but that's secondary.

Helped pin down the celiveo install issue. Turns out to be some javascript library and a more stringent check of time zones. You know, when some companies make changes to their code they have a warning period of at least one release. "If your code relies on X it's going away" it'll say in logs or in technical documents. Not us, I guess that's for losers. We just change our code and to heck with the consequences.

Had the meeting of course, and after that I did the plant watering I spoke of earlier. Proofread some documents and sent in corrections.

Tomorrow we'll have a morning meeting with vision-e and hopefully get the whole weblet thing sorted. Then rebuild my smartbox and I can finally test USDA.

And Don wants me to help Kathy reproduce a tablet bug I saw. Hey, if it's not reproducible it's not reproducible. That's fine, just close it.
Looking even further into the future I'll be doing the usual stuff of shopping and getting gas tomorrow. Seeing my parents. Then home for a socially distant Sean's game.

Spent from 7:00 to 9:00 on the phone. Two people. One with a busted webcam, not that Dell had any useful software for me to verify that loaded on the device. They don't seem to support their webcam software anymore, so thanks for that Dell. I got it working but it was such a terrible picture it was unusable.

Then the other guy was from 2 days ago, I was trying to get his email back. I came to the conclusion that Windows Live Mail just won't work anymore and switched him over to Thunderbird.

So the weekend should be quiet as I got that out of the way. I guess I prefer 2 hours on the phone to driving someplace. Right?

Not sure if I'll do any Mass Effect, it seems pretty late. Maybe I'll try my hand at that Shantae stage again.

That's another week done. Hope you are all staying safe out there, have a great Bunny Day, (put on your Bunny Suit!) and have a Good Friday tomorrow. I'll see you all back here next week. And that's my personal guarantee*.





*nothing is guaranteed