2020-05-21:

Fri:
We did get a vision-e build but late in the day and it was really messed up. It logs me out in the middle of doing stuff, interrupts me, and doesn't want to listen when I say yes or no. Wait, is it a teenager now?
Did finalize the D5.1 test, some other machines had it loaded so I could finish up stapling and such.
Cleaned out the fridge, there's frozen stuff in there from 2018! Sheesh. And some really moldy stuff in the fridge I got rid of.
Otherwise not much.
Went to the other Aldi, I totally forgot mine was closed. Going to try going Thursday next week, just because the whole trip is about a half hour, so if I can save some of that time, so much the better.
Saw my parents.
Came back here and did game. We have some plans! Some of them confuse me, but at least hacking can once again save the day!

Sat:
Cleaned up a bit, put the seeds in the dirt so hopefully that works out better than the milkweed did. I got 300 catnip seeds but it didn't really look like that many. Didn't hardly look like one hundred but we'll see how they do.
Then went to my two jobs. The first needed 2 seconds of effort, he needed to press the "input" button on his remote control. Yes, some challenges awaited me.

The second was much longer, but only because of the crappy core2 duo and spinning rust drive she had. Nothing found by Mbam. And of course we didn't know any passwords and had several accounts which I finally got working together. She had a chromebook under one gmail while her PC was signed in with an MS account under a different gmail. Straightened out and got back at 2:30.

Ate lunch, checked videos, welcomed summer! Yes, it was sooooo hot out today, like 60 almost. Put on a short sleeved shirt and cut the front lawn. Take that, global cooling!


Did some reading until my parents arrived, and then watched the pony movie.

Sun:

Finished up 1984, what a depressing book. The "hero" loses in the end. What's that all about? Equilibrium (which seems to have a very similar plot just with the addition of more guns, this is not. I suppose it's just a cautionary tale, not a fable that one person can change the world. Because really, they can't.

Engaged my hoarder tendencies and ordered, uh, a few things that have been hard to get lately. As Uline lifted the restrictions on buying them I figured I might as well. They're cheaper than their Aldi counterparts, though maybe not taking into account shipping? But hey, I'll be well stocked for like a year. So I made room in the closet for them.

Watched a movie. Looked for some other movies to "legally download."


Spent half an hour on the phone for chess.com, for some reason it had a different root cert then I did, and chrome was complaining about it. I finally exported the cert from my machine and imported the cert into his root store. So glad I know all about certs now! *sarcasm*

Got ready for tomorrow, back to USDA I guess. Should be a thrill.
My one call from Saturday was a guy I'm just going to put an SSD in for. Says his HD is noisy. I'd believe it. Let's get rid of it.

Mon:
Brought dirt in, re-potted a plant that really needed it that I found behind a support beam. How it was still alive I don't know. It's one of those plants that's basically just a big leaf. Some of the smaller leaves were dead but I think it'll be fine. Enjoy your new dirt, little plant. (It's not that little)

Wrote up a copy of a bug so it could be in D4.0 instead of D5.1 the log was huge! How does just a text file get that big? Have fun going through it I guess.

Today was horrible. Nothing worked. Allow me to elaborate:
Can't connect to the domain server. At least not in the normal way. Pretty sure it worked just fine last week, Christina was testing cards so she must have used it if only for the one card we switch back and forth. But today I try to remote into it, and the oh so helpful error message is "something went wrong." Yeah thanks, "something" doesn't tell me a darn thing. I put in an ticket for Ken to look at it. (Spoiler, it got worse)
Can't figure out why the equitrac thing is busted. I can't make it talk to any D5.1 or higher machine. I know it used to, I for sure tested D5.3 with it for a certain card reader. But now? Nope, just gives errors. I did find I could connect to D4.0 and D2.9 so it's not the server. What changed? Why suddenly are these machines all against me?
Something I thought was busted wasn't, so I had to admit that which was fun. I have a screenshot of something not working. I wrote the bug up "here it is not working." Now that FX is back Don said they said it should be working can I try it again. I said sure. And proceeded to prove them right. What? Where did this non-working screenshot come from then? How can I have both (I used the same machine) a working an non-working screenshot. The software should have been the same. It makes no sense.
Also had the "back to work" "training" meeting. They're making us sign and send in, every day, a notice that I feel I don't have C-19. Every. Day. Which seems more to me like Xerox making sure no responsibility falls upon them when (I mean if) something happens. "See, see, he said he wasn't sick, blame him that 10 people got sick not us!" It's just weird I have to sign something every day "yup still not sick!" my coming in to work should be enough. "Attestation" my butt, I've never even heard that word before.
Then 3 hours trying to clone and then reload windows to put the SSD in. It would fail immediately trying to do the clone. Wouldn't even make a single partition, and I had to reformat the drive every time I tried. So then I somehow busted it and it wouldn't boot. That was fun. Then I swapped the drives and foolishly, oh so foolishly how could you even think of doing this, had the audacity to plug the flash drive into a USB 3.0 port. The horror. This of course made the windows setup not see the HD???? And demand drivers??? Making me try command line tools thinking maybe it was still messed up from the last clone attempt? Finally figured that out (oh windows I love you so much, I just switched the drive to the single USB 2.0 port the machine had. Good thing it had that!) and did the install and moved everything over.

Got home at 8:00.

4 calls. Of course all were awful. A half hour because someone updated their mac and now their 2008 version of office (a 32 bit app) won't work anymore. Tried to get them to download LibreOffice. Painful, have to call them back tomorrow after he gets a chance to look it over.
One person wants me to hook up a printer and do general cleanouts. Wasn't I just there? So I'm going there Wednesday.
One lady is having trouble with email again. Apparently her password has been messed up again (we just reset it like a week or two ago) and using the automated system just gave us an error message. Neato. She gets to call Spectrum again, her favorite activity.
And the forth one is a guy not far from me who is supposedly having internet issues. Didn't diagnose it over the phone, it was getting too late. Going there tomorrow on the way home.
And it's about time for bed. Neato. Ddin't get to play with the others, but I guess it was called off as Neil was also busy. Hope I get to do it all again tomorrow!

Tues:
Started about the same as how yesterday left off. John figured out turning some stuff off on the Equitrac server made it install, which I guess is enough for me? Why would that suddenly be needed? It makes no sense the steps that work on other machines, and have worked on the machines I'm trying to make work in the past suddenly no longer do so.

I couldn't log into the server anymore even with the console, it gave me errors. So we were completely locked out of it. Ken could get in, thankfully. Why could he... I don't even want to know. He asked if I could get in after a change he made. Nope. And we actually don't have any backups because "if we revert a DC, it can blow up the domainÉthey donÕt like to work with restores" in the words of Our Great Leader "I want a hamberder." Wait, no, the other one. "We can't have the cure be worse than the disease." If you can't revert to a previous backup without risking blowing the whole thing up, you really don't have a backup, do you?

Is a "how to use microsoft teams" meeting sent in webex good planning ahead or simply irony on a scale undreamed of? It was funny at the very least.
Worked with Ken, or I guess more accurately watched him work trying to fix the server. No dice. Heck, if I had Dice I'm sure it wouldn't have been a challenge at all. (That's a webcomic joke, nobody got it, it's fine.)

Still no USDA work, they must be having a rough time over there.

Hey, Ken figured it out! He traced it down to a certain folder either having the wrong permissions or something, and used a script to reset it. We were able to log in! Now I may have messed with this folder for the NDES stuff (I'm not exactly sure what folder it was, though I could look in my notes I guess) but if I had screwed it up, why did it take this long to manifest? It would have been weeks ago! It's so weird. But we didn't have to rebuild the server after all. Whew.

So yeah, not a lot accomplished by me today, but at least I watched other people getting things done.

Went to my after work job, he was already back online so don't know what happened there. Reset his MS password but his account was still locked out ? Strange. Got gmail working with windows live mail. I turned "secure" off so it would work. But it didn't work. The next time I looked, it was still on. What? Did I not just turn you off? So I turned it off (again) and it worked. Stupid google. Updated his windows live apps, (to the 2012 version wooooooo) and changed his edge to the new chrome based one because I saw he had it opened. Stupid edge. I still see people at work opening IE for Pete's sake. Let it go. Did the standard update, he was using v4 of LibreOffice and the current version is 6 something.

Came back here, checked sites, watched videos. Changed the power supply of a PC that was dropped off. Put away all the stuff I had bought. 4 big boxes of stuff. Didn't have room in the closet, so some of the stuff went downstairs.

Got ready for bed in case the others wanted to play games at 8:30. It's 8:24 now and no word yet. Huh.

We did games!

Wed:
Did a few minor things today. Now that I could set up equitrac on D5.4 I set that up so the developer could verify it worked. It did.

Did not have a meeting with Vision-E, they're still plugging away at my last report of "hey this kinda sucks so fix it." They wanted to make sure it worked, which hey, good on them!

Verified an upgrade on a machine changed a setting it shouldn't, because the company was complaining about it. I wrote it up as a bug. Then realized someone else had the machine signed out so I had to quickly put it back to the version it was running. Personally, the machine didn't have an IP address I had to set it to manual not DHCP. (That's a "feature" in our labs) so he couldn't have been using it anyway, really. Hopefully he didn't even notice.

Upgraded the linux system I maintain in my - sorry I mean "the" - lab to the latest version. Found out it could do remote desktop to our windows servers. That's neat I guess, could come in handy?

Still no major work, but it'll come back.

Went to see the guy about his systems, they were all fine. Intel Core2 duos I wouldn't even bother refurbing. Originally meant to run Vista, now running unactivated Windows 10 Pro? Yuck. The one machine still won't run mbam, and spybot is really, really, really slow. Apparently. I haven't used it in 10 years! (Surprised it's still around, honestly) I gave up and figured it was fine.

Came back here, put in the order for a power supply (I already have another customer with a dead machine after the power outage recently) & 2 SSD.

Checked sites, enjoyed having the breezeway door open because it's 70 out! Woohoo, let's hope it doesn't snow tomorrow just to spite us. Pretty pink tree is being pretty and pink again in the front. White flower tree lost all it's white flowers. (This is at work)

Put my meter readings in, got ready for tomorrow, you know, the usual stuff.

Thurs:
A lot of meetings today. There was the Joe meeting, a demo on the new MS Teams app we all have to use now, the usual Thursday meeting. Huh.

I did get a new version of everything for the new voice system but it was pretty late in the day. I'll get to that tomorrow. Hopefully it works a little better than it did. I did install it, that much went right. (er, for the most part)

Realized one of our machines was useless, it was converted to a reference machine so now we can't use it as the machine it actually is anymore. I put a sign on it, so we don't forget.

Not very exciting, honestly.

Watered the plants. Found a note on one thanking me and they were coming back so I didn't have to any more. Another set was totally gone. Most are still in need though.

Went to see about this password issue. It wasn't actually an issue. Book guy is living over on Ayralt rd now, with his little puppy. He knew all his passwords, or at least they were in firefox. Don't know why I was even there, honestly. But I got rid of the numbers in them, as he wanted. Whatever.

Did the shopping so I hopefully saved some time.

Came back here, checked out the next PC dropped off for the power supply issue. It's one of these fake desktops with the laptop MB in it. I tried two of my laptop power cords but no juice. It's dead, Jim. Didn't take me up on my offer of a refurb unit. Silly.

Sites, videos, getting ready for tomorrow.

Spent an hour trying to beat iTunes into someone's head. It's not that hard.

So tomorrow, back to testing the voice stuff. Get gas, see my parents.

Then Saturday I want to do some replanting, move some little trees over to where the big trees in my neighbor's yard no longer are.
Did they cut the berries? I seem to recall more berry bushes there when we trimmed them last year. Weird. Last time they just left them laying there but this year they're just gone. Wonder what would happen if they "mysteriously" "vanished" one day? I get a lot of berries from that side, and I maintain them, why do people that can't bother to cut their grass more than once a month (they haven't yet) just leave the stupid berry bushes alone?

Anyway, planting. That's my plan for the weekend. You? It should be warm out with little chance of rain so get out and don't go anywhere because it's dangerous out there!

Have a good Memorial Day, and I'll see you back here where may is just about over.