2020-04-30:

Fri:

Tracking down a rouge IP was the most excitement for today. Got an email from our "lab manager" about a device the security scan had said was unsafe. Wasn't sure what it could be at first, there isn't much plugged in but printers in my area but then I remembered my little smartbox. And there it was. Tried to figure out how to update it but in the end just unplugged it. We'll see what else I can come up with later.
Loading machines, don't know what build my stuff is in so I didn't want to test only to be told "test on the next build" and have wasted my time.
Found the bird again in the morning but not the afternoon. Where did you go little bird? Left some water out by the plant in a lid.
Boring. Certainly didn't do any writing!

Saw my parents. Injected myself with both bleach and a super bright light as our president suggested. Have to keep myself safe!

More space combat in Sean's game, yay! At least I was on the ground sneaking around so I had some purpose this game. We managed to get in and out of the place with only a few, uh, minor issues. And a bunch of people blowing themselves up after being possessed by the ghost that lives in Mizzy's head now. Ah well.

Sat:
Got up, got ready to go. Brought the monitor over to the guy, it was dead as I expected. Odd though, usually you can see a little bit of an image when the backlight is gone, but nothing. It was on, just not showing a picture so it seemed a good time for replacement. Ah well. Shoot, this monitor doesn't have speakers and his old one did. Glad to get it out of my basement. For some bizarre reason his daughter had done a windows reload, so I also got to sit there and reload everything I had loaded onto his machine, and find his old appdata folder so I could get his bookmarks back. Honestely, can you not poke around with things you don't understand? That do more harm than good? (I'm looking at you, Trump, you're the poster boy for the whole movement)

Came back here, sites, straightened up, put checks in. Cleaned the window of nose prints. Made sure I had the movie for tonight (I did). Lunch. Worked on the next chapter.

Played some arcade games again. I'm not as bad at Mr. Do as I am at Galaga, but it's a close thing. Don't get me started on Pengo.

Had dinner.

Back to writing. Coming along pretty good, if I do say so myself. I worked in what I wanted to after watching the Dr Who with the dream stealer guy and it doesn't seem that out of left field, to use a baseball reference. Anyone still play that game? Or any game? No? Okay then.

Then dad came. He had seen the movie. It was just so forgettable he didn't realize it until the end. That's Star Wars for you now, honestly, all the lady had to do was tell Po "we're heading to this planet over there." instead of being a jerk about it and he would have been "oh, okay, that makes sense." And half the movie wouldn't have happened. As it shouldn't.

Sun:
Did a bunch of writing, got some flowers from another reality using the world of dreams as a hub, so I'm up to chapter 8 in the current book. Now he can pollinate the Mana Tree and get the seeds he needs. Because we all know the Mana Tree is female, so how would there have been Mana Seeds in the later games? What would have pollinated the flowers to produce them? Doesn't make sense if you think about it. *points to head* Guts.

Watched some stuff, pony and Macross. Figured I had better finally get through them, I mean I downloaded them. I mean, legally acquired them! Well, the Macross stuff is just fansubbed I think and from the 1980s so no one cares about that. But I'm still watching the previous season of Ponies so chop, chop!

Usual sunday stuff, no comics in I'll put all the thundercats in at once. Little did I know I had all of them but 1 until I went down and grabbed the next batch. Whoops, no problem, it'll just be a bigger stack next week.

Played some Future Cop, the game Sean and I never finished together. *sadface* Figured out too late that there are no checkpoints. If you die at the very end of the stage, you're going back to the very beginning of the stage. Neat. Thank you for save states, emulation. Now I save it every two feet. Spent like half an hour trying to figure out the stupid maze. Remember when games didn't have waypoints? I do. And it sucked. Especially low res games where everything blends into everything else. I walked past the door many, many times just because I didn't realize there was a break in the wall. I was about to quit it and go back to ponies when I found it. Honestly, not great level design. And wiki says it didn't sell well? I can't imagine why at this point. I was going to try and bust out an old Mac play it that way, but figured, eh, I have it on PS1 and emulation of that system is pretty fantastic, I'll just do it up here. Glad I did.

Baked my last pie for this year... until more berries come in.

Rained all day today.


Mon:
A variety of things done today. We got a request to test the stuff we've been testing with a certain build so we can send it to the customer, so I took the 2.9 stuff of the various new cards and the blackboard reader, and Christina took the blackboard reader on the d4.0 product. Supposedly the card stuff too but I had the cards so I'm planning to do that tomorrow. Unless she does it before I get in tomorrow. Did some upgrade tests, wrote a bug because my machine wouldn't clone. Then downgraded the machine, had to wait a half hour for the login password timer to expire, and then upgraded. This was right at the end of the day but the machine rebooted when I cloned it. Very odd.

Also loaded the "trunk" release they said because a certain feature should be in. It wasn't. I emailed back "are you sure?"

So that was today.

Came back here, sites and dinner. Plus pie. Got ready for tomorrow, then worked on the next adventure for this week.

A couple of calls, but nothing major, just some questions.

Got ready for bed so I could play online games with the crew.
In one game I was 2000+ points behind the next nearest person. Clearly I am a master of the online drawing games.

Tues:
Did some more, well, one more, downgrade and then upgrade test. Then ran the cards again. No problems. Showed Christina how to do it, the tool is very wonky. You have to select the folder the upgrade file is in, not the file itself. Yes, it goes against every programming convention ever. But it is java so what can you expect?

Why is it Java?

Let's see, also loaded another D5.4 machine because the developer said it was in that model, not the model I tried before. Okay, sent the jobs to it. Crashed and burned the whole thing, it wouldn't boot up again. How can sending a few print jobs crash the device that badly? Left it for them to look at.

But why is it Java, though?

Tried the cards out on the other D5.4 just in case. No luck.
Took the paper out of several printers that were just spewing garbage. Random text on the page, for seemingly no reason. Yeah, okay, sure, well you can queue up as many jobs as you want with your randomness, silly person.

Fairly slow today, honestly. Tomorrow will be better, USDA day again.

Came back here, the usual stuff. Sites, an episode of ponies, more thinking about the game for Friday. Getting ready for tomorrow, then more Borderlands.

The phone rang just as we were going to start. The lady I talked to yesterday with a Vista machine is going to take my refurb system. Neat. So I get to go over there and set that up tomorrow.

Wed:
USDA, all day, every day! Wait, no, just today. We had the meeting where we went over just a few things, and then got right into installing the new version. Which has crashed on me more times than any before. Or was it the mask? I'm not sure, I'll probably do more testing tomorrow as everything else seems to be taken care of. Don agreed I've probably done enough for the VersaLink software testing, the D2.9 stuff was all fine, and our D4.0 product, uh, sucks. When it wakes from sleep it thinks it has a paper jam in the feeder. If it wakes at all, the display on two machines doesn't come back. If it goes to sleep at all. The one machine I kept trying to make go to sleep and it would just wake itself back up. Silly.

So yeah, added another 3 pages of notes for the vision-e team to go through, verified some things were fixed, but there is still quite a long way to go. We're not even sure we can make the enter button on the keyboard work, which is pretty much a show stopper because a blind person isn't going to be able to type in a number and then hit something on the flat, smooth, featureless tablet like interface. Whoops, maybe should have known that earlier? We aren't even sure why it happens, apparently. We're awesome.

But not as awesome as trying to delete 500,000+ temp files from years and years back before transferring stuff to the new PC! Yup, grinding the permissions for 2 hours was super fun, sitting there doing nothing. I really should have worked on the script I envisioned to make that easier but nope. I did not. Because I'm just that good.

Finally got back at 8:00, had dinner, and it's time to get ready for tomorrow. At least I didn't have any calls today.

Thurs:
Another day of USDA, with most everything else done I decided to focus on it another day, see what else I could find. I wrote more notes, not 3 pages worth thank goodness, but a good amount. Had a bit of a scare in the beginning, come to find out that around midnight for some time now, someone's been getting into my machine and doing stuff with it. Thank you, audit log. Yeah, uploading certificates, turning things on and off. Neat stuff. So when I went to use it, nothing would work. I poked around and got it back working, but then the last thing I did didn't make the problem start happening again so who knows what it was? Not this guy! I changed the admin password so good luck getting into it now, sucker.

Some odd things are going on in the lab in general. Several printers are just printing garbage so I took their paper away. Did I mention that already? I seem to recall mentioning that at some point. And a bunch of the lights in "my" area were just out when I went in after watering the plants. Just for no reason. Great stuff.

But yeah, had the meeting, marked a bunch of the work as done because we're not getting any builds from FX for a while, that's for sure. Blocked a few. Tomorrow I'll work on Don's request to set up a bunch of users and maybe do a bit of D5.4 stuff as that's in. And I have the final D2.9 build to look at, so I'll be busy, busy, busy.

Still, all next week to do any of that, there's no real rush on it.

Watered the plants. No bird, so either it died someplace or hopefully it got out somehow. I'm just going to go ahead and believe it got out somehow.

What does the future hold? More distancing and mask wearing, for sure. Rain, as it did today, no doubt. Then getting groceries, seeing my parents, and running game. Hopefully some good stuff planned.

Then a quiet weekend. Figuring out a Mother's day gift, and.... I'm not sure what else.

Going to hopefully post this with the right name, unlike last week, and go play Borderlands with the crew.

See you all, from far away, next week.