2020-05-28:

Fri:

Spent the day going over the voice stuff. Some things are better but it still seems to get worse not better. At least she isn't interrupting me like she used to. I still have concerns about her understanding me with the mask on, but I guess that's out of their hands, they just license the library they're using for the voice recognition. I mean I suppose we've come a long way that a tiny box like that can even do something remotely resembling voice recognition but we still have a long way to go before even Hal 9000 is possible.

Got gas, saw my parents.

Came back, did game until 1:00 AM, still wasn't through it. Of course it went the only way it could. At least we didn't have to fight through the entire ship's worth of troops, he helpfully came right to us.

Sat:
Moved 15 elthia bushes before it got too "hot" out. They're now in a nice line at the back of the property where the big trees that were taken out used to be. It'll be years before they're as big as the one in the front of the house, if they get that big at all. I have a bunch that are big, like the one that came out out of the side of the driveway next to the house that I would have preferred not to be there. But that one that's in the back now never got very big at all. It's strange. These are just tiny sticks at the moment so we'll see how they do. I still have about 20 growing in the berries I hate to just dig out but I don't really want them back there.
Picked up sticks, so my stick pile is growing nicely. Can't exactly compost sticks. I tried with some of the wood shavings from the mouse. They still hadn't broken down and it's been more than I year as I recall. They're still visibly wood shavings. So I just dumped them on the trees I replanted out back. I'll start that bucket over with new stuff.
Cut the back lawn.
Checked sites.
Cleaned, though I didn't think my parents were coming over because we had to finish up the game.


We did the game and beat the bad guy. Shooting the guy with a gun, pow pow, no effect. Mizzy punching him once? Dead. I just have to figure out what happened to my people, but that's the next "season."
We talked about the next game, Neal/Mizzy didn't work on a character yet so we couldn't start.


Sun:
Got up, went over to see dentist guy. Always a production over there. He was saying something about quicken showing him two lines per line? But that's impossible, if the data was corrupt the file wouldn't open. Of course he couldn't demonstrait this for me. Also he's got quicken files all over the freaking place, and after I closed it the first time I couldn't get it to open again. Neat. I hate that stupid program. It's always been terrible, I don't know how it and quickbooks got as big as they did. He says his other machine (the ancient laptop he really needs to let go of) is blue screening now. They reloaded windows on it (for reasons?) and I looked it over. Checked the memory, tested the SSD as far as I could. Seesm fine. If a machine is BSODing at this point, there's probably a hardware issue. (Though that one desktop I had recently proves not in all cases.) Reminds me I need to get a new refurb system ordered. Got back a bit after 12:00. Ate lunch, finished a movie.

Worked on my optional rules document. I still had no way to make a "superman" type character and while I can approximate one, it's still not exactly right. I mean Superman has been shown lifting a lot. But the most I can get him up to is maybe a full semi? It's a problem. The trouble is there's all kind of super heroes out there, often in the same universe. Like how do you put Mz. Marvel and Halkeye in the same universe and keep the points balanced? I've tried to use a sliding scale but there are so many tiers of power: None, but some supernatural skill like black widow at martial arts. (I know the paragon background exists but it's 4 total points. You can get natural magician at that point) Then someone with a gimmic or a suit of armor they built, then a spider man type, then a green lantern type, then a superman type, then a superman villain type, like doomsday that can kill superman. But is going from spider-man to superman worth only one point? I was up to 6 points at that, er, point, so that's really getting up there. No easy answer to that one.

Watched another movie just for more ideas mind you. Didn't get any. How can people who are actual speedsters inhabit a world with a person who can only glow? More of that Halkeye situation. It's weird.

Sorted beads. Got ready for tomorrow, though much less than usual as I wasn't going to work.

Mon:
Did some reading. Even sat outside to do it. Finally nice out, lots of sun and mid 70s. I forgot such weather existed!
More sorting. Oh, what I'm doing there is I had some similar colors of my little melty beads together because I didn't have containers for all of them. I got a whole bunch of really nice containers with clear lids so I'm going through now and further sorting the similar colors into separate containers. Will I ever do a melty bead again? Er, 8-ball says check back later.
Checked sites.
Messed around with a multi-boot USB tool. I can hopefully replace 4 USB drives with one USB drive. Booting up the windows installers none could find the drive. Does that little yoga-book I was testing need a special driver to find the drive? Was it the USB 3 port I was using? (I don't know if 8/10 suffer from the same issue that win7 does in that area) Will it just not work? I mean they all booted, so it should. More testing required. Still a neat little thing, you can just drop iso images on the drive and then next time you boot with it, there it is. Wish I had known about it earlier.
Went to see my family. Hope everyone had a good mamorial day. The president spent it mocking his opponent in the race for wearing a face mask. Yes, that's what we've come to in this world. Pity us.
Came back and did games with the crew.
Went to bed.

Tues:
Took care of some emails in the morning, and was getting set up to do a card test as FX got us a new plugin. But Christina had done it. It actually got a little worse, before with one card it would at least show the login prompt. Now neither card did. Whoops. I looked into other cards he wanted us to "regression" test but one of them doesn't even work on the other product. Just says unsupported card. So that one's out. We have 2 from the whole list they originally sent. One doesn't work. Did it work before? Who knows! The other card is expired, so even if I do see the login prompt, I can't actually log in with it. So basically you're getting the new cards, and screw regression testing.
Also rebooted a system like 3 times as John was trying to send an upgrade to it and it kept failing. I kept walking past it and "yup, have to reboot it again."

In the afternoon I saw what I could see with the voice system. Made a few more notes, nothing major jumped out. I did have a strange reset though, I had looked at something in the morning, then went over there and had to reboot the smartbox. (again) When I did it started telling me some strange stuff and when I looked at the server, it was like it had never been installed. Huh? How did that happen? Boring, we should get some new code tomorrow, we'll see how it improves things.

It was 90 today, so welcome to summer. Hope you enjoyed the switch being flipped from winter to summer. You can have it for two, maybe three weeks, and then it's back to winter again.

Came back here, ate dinner, the usual checking of sites and more sorting of almost but not quite the same color melty beads.

Wed:
No USDA code today, they're still trying to work out some of the issues I've brought to their attention. Go me! What I did do, is try to work out dates.
Not those kind of dates, I won't get any of those, I mean how the jira website shows one date, but the twice weekly email shows another. Is the software done or is it still in the future? I emailed for clarification but one of the two wasn't in this week. The other said the final version was 6/1, but that's crazy talk. That's past any of the dates currently seen. Plus a new build hasn't been created since 5/19. Weird.

I was deep in testing by the time he actually got back to me. He said testing his 2 things were fine and I didn't have to retest with whatever came in a few days. He didn't know about the other guy's thing. Personally, I just closed them all. They've been fine the whole time, and like I said if the builds aren't being, uh, built for the last week it's done. Over. The end.

So that took the afternoon. What did I do in the morning? Tried a card reader, the same one the developer had me set up last week. I hoped his code would be in and I could check another test off the list. No such luck. With that failure I just loaded the software for the test in the afternoon.

Came back here, ate dinner, checked sites, did more sorting. Glad I got so many of these little jars, I'm actually using them up. I have 3 or 4 colors in one tin, like there was 4 different shades of yellow in the yellow tin. I count 4 shades of brown too.

Thurs:
Another week speeds to a close, as does another month. The month of May. So may May Days. May Daze? May Taze? Mai tais?
Sorry, got off track there, where were we? Yes! I did stuff. I tried to figure out why my tablet machine was acting up, because I'd really like it to work again. Discovered it was in some kind of "diagnostic" mode and had to go through all sorts 'o gyrations because the admin password wouldn't work. Why is that do you think? Oh, checking the audit log it seems someone, perhaps from India? Messed with it and changed it! So neat! Thanks, India guy or gal! So I got it out of that mode, checked the settings against the other tablet machine in the room, and was still having trouble. Not knowing what they had done I decided to altboot the thing in hopes that would set all to rights. Silly. Took it three times before it would go all the way though, and even then only at the end of the day.

Can you stay off my machines please k thks bye.

Oh, and found out my USDA machine had been screwed with as well, somehow a day ago someone, (hello person or persons from India!) they used SNMP to change the login type from card to convenience. Perhaps that's why I had trouble logging in yesterday? Oh, those totes adorbes little fucking ass- I mean cutie pies! Those little scamps! They didn't try to log in, there was no record of a failure in the audit log. Just *boop* *boop* two little changes. Which I didn't notice because of the blocking screen change to the Vison-E thing instead of the normal screen.

I have unplugged the machine from the network overnight. Let's see you get into it now you little cun- ning people from India! I see you back there! Wave, that's it!

So I did a little USDA work, after figuring out how to repair the damage because for some reason this SNMP change made it so my webpage to change it back was totally blank. Neat! Luckily Don suggested a thing that worked, and that was that.

Let's see, the normal meeting, and the normal watering of plants. There were, like, more people there and some junk? And I was like, uh, like, what are all these, like, people doing here? I'm supposed to be alone? With my plants? Like, totally? But building 111 has been cleared to open up (because they've plastered the whole place with signs, no seriously) so 25% of people who need to come in can. Here's an idea! How about not? K?

So that was basically my day. Pretty great, huh?

Did the shopping. Had to come back here to make the list, I had forgotten until just about before noon. I was like, wait, it's Thursday now? That extra day threw me, I guess, I forgot to make a list. Didn't need much, but I got it.

Came back here, checked sites, two calls? Where did they come from I haven't had a call in days!
Called the one person back, she had set up her printer fine, she just had it set up, uh, again over there. Oh windows, what a bundle of laughs you are. I deleted it.

The other was York, something about a thing making noise? I don't know, I didn't reach them.

So, the weekend looms large upon us. Tomorrow I'll do more USDA stuff and maybe finish straightening out my tablet machine. Put it back together, as I ripped the front off to put the native UI on so I could see what the heck was going on. Yeah, it's a terrible design, but there's no way they could have done it better! *Wink!*

Seeing my parents, I won't need to get gas yet, I'm only down a bit more than a quarter tank.

Then back here for game.

I'll have to cut the front lawn this week, otherwise just York and having my parents over for more Back to the Future action. Hopefully should be fairly uneventful.

Random stuff: My transplanted trees are growing nice little leaves so it looks like they'll all pull through. I saw little buds for the berries, hope I get a few bags worth for some pies, stupid neighbors. (They cut their grass yesterday, finally) Lots of green everwhere, and it's sort of summerlike out there. Huh. Dentist is coming up next week, and I've had Greenlight for two years now? Sheesh, where did that time go?

Hope May treated you right, I'll see you next month in June.