2020-06-04:

Fri:

Going through the Gabi bugs, still a page or two of notes made about what I experienced.
My tablet machine came back nicely I can use it completely again, jobs don't fail. I still can't do some things, like releasing secure print jobs but who needs to do that? That took pretty much all day so not much more to talk about there.

Then went to see my parents, forgot to give her the box, and came back here. They're coming over tomorrow I just need to remember to give it to her. Plus the other big boxes I have.

Had a good first session in the new game, not that we got more than half a mile from our starting point. We fought off three swordsman/magic users so that's a plus. Only one of us almost died! It's a good thing he's a beefy woodcutter type, as much damage as he took would have killed me for sure.

Sat:

The majority of today was me struggling to work with that stupid Win2003 machine over at York. TCP/IP issue? Who knows? Disks? Acting different when mounted vs written to a CD? I get some tcp/ip failure message when it boots and at the start I couldn't even get on the network. Of course no modern anti-malware tools will run on a 17 year old OS so I tried running chkdsk and the only other logical thing I can, an sfc check. This tells me to insert the disk it needs to copy some files. I think as long as I do this, maybe the machine will be fine. Right? Well, first things first my friend! I kept mounting various versions of server 2003 (and why do there have to be this many versions?) but it would always tell me it was the wrong version. In desperation I remembered my work "visual studio" account and "can't I download windows versions from there?" Yes, yes I can. So I just downloaded all the 2003 I could. Still didn't work. In further desperation I burned one to CD hoping maybe I could boot from it? Mounting it the way I was would bring up the "splash" screen with the options to browse the CD or start the install, but clicking on start the install did nothing. I was going to try a repair by booting, I didn't know if you could do that with 2003, I know you could with win98. Woowee does that take me back! Anyway, it finally accepted that disk. Huh? It showed a different splash screen too. Of course this wasn't the end of the problem because it still gave me the error on boot. But his little dumb terminals worked and he was online so having been there four hours I didn't care anymore and left. Again telling him to to replace this ancient crap ASAP!

Before that I was reading the packet Sean made us with "lore" as the kids say, made some notes on the game as he said it was okay to read it while "on watch" so I did. He really did a good job on it.

Before that I checked sites, did some cleaning for the evening.

When I got home I ate lunch (at 2:30) wrote up my plans for the next step in game, wrote a journal entry, talked about next steps with the others, and somehow my parents were due to arrive shortly. Sheesh, what a crappy day.

Replace your stupid windows system already, would ya?


Watched a movie.

Installed the Warhammer 40,000 game to maybe play later, it's a limited time thing. Played for a few minutes to get the feel of it. Maybe it'll be better with friends (as all things should be) but it's a third person game. With an annoying camera placement. What's the point of being a sniper if you can't look down the scope and snipe stuff? Should have just taken the closer range fighter. Ah well.

Did some reading and went to bed.

Sun:
Got a lot accomplished in the morning. Pulled a ton of weeds out. I have a huge stack of them on my back pile now, hopefully they'll break down faster than the sticks did, or my parents can take them this year. Cleaned out the side by the driveway, the back by the driveway, and the side of the house opposite the driveway. I just want berries, not other weeds, okay? Sheesh, those things grow well.
Moved some berry bushes. Maybe some not strictly speaking on my property but close enough. There are still some over there, the larger ones that are older and have a half dozen stalks, but the newer ones I moved. Gave them some fertilizer and watered them. In other growing news, my catnip seed is sending up a few shoots. Not 300 by any means but not nothing either. Don't know how fast they'll grow, but at least it's a start.
Cut the front lawn.
Patched that hole in my garage. Hopefully I mixed the stuff up correctly, and that it is what I think it is. Because it might not be, you know. It seems like cement, but who knows! I've had that bucket of it since I moved into the house.
Then had lunch.
Watched videos.
Did sunday stuff. Cleaned the mouse, got ready for another exciting week. Will there be more riots? Maybe, who knows?

Mon:
Fairly boring, not much to do. Only real work of note was downgrading and then upgrading a device as one of our partners is trying to do. They got sent a compressed file that was originally 500mb crushed down to 70mb. Clearly something happened as recompressing a known good copy myself actually increased the file size, so it must be compressed already. The ZIP compression actually added overhead and made the file bigger. Trying to install it didn't work, so Joe sent them a new file, which will hopefully take care of their issue. Odd that unzipping the file gave a file exactly as big as it should be. Doing a file compare gave "too many differences" so yeah, something happened.

Came back here, usual stuff. Sites, eating dinner. Then things took a turn for the worse.

I spent nearly 2 hours on the phone with one person. He wasn't able to get his Aol on Thunderbird and he couldn't send. He would get an error when sending but nothing when receiving. We went through all the settings, of course AOL says one thing, other pages say another. One page said they had a "allow less secure apps" like google did, but logging into AOL showed no sign of that setting. (This page was updated like 5 days ago according to the page itself) Know what fixed it? Running Malwarebytes. And this was on a Mac? I have no idea why that would make a difference. How would it even get in there, and why would it disrupt email to the point that email no works no more? Doesn't that, I don't know, immediately tip your hand and cause whatever you're trying to do to be discovered and removed? Seems that way to me. Anyway, it was horrible.

Got ready for bed and finally joined the others playing games. Neil was actually later than I was, so take that, you others.

Tues:
Dentist day, who doesn't love dentist day?

Cast around for something to do at work, there's stuff on the horizon and I suppose I can always yell at the voice system for USDA some more but there's not a lot going on. I suppose I could write but I'm just not gripped by it like I was doing Susan and the first books of Lysanias. I need to do more work, like figuring out which order the temples are going to be built in, and what happens when they are. Before I was just following the script that was already laid out. Or maybe I've just gotten lazy about it.

Anyway, work, such as it was. There still isn't a lot of it. The final build of D4.0 came out and Christina checked it over, not knowing the release I had already picked up and tested was the one chosen as the final release. But hey, no harm in it.

We did test the USDA keyboard thing. It picks up the enter key now. In, uh, half the cases. Keep trying dudes.

Shouted at her a bit more, wrote up a few notes I observed.

Went to the dentist after I ate lunch, no problems but there is a slight repair job to be done next time and that awful gums test they do because they are sadists and enjoy our torment.

Came back here, checked sites, the usual while I ate dinner.

One call, didn't reach him or the person that called before that I haven't reached. His goes right to voicemail at least the guy from today has a ringing phone.

Got ready for tomorrow, no notice from Sean about playing that warhammer game so whatever.

Wed:
What notable things happened today? Ken came back and took away my linux machine. He replaced it with another machine, an intel core 2 duo. Sheesh, the other one was faster, why not just put win10 on that if you have such a love for it. Didn't even start it up or ask me if I had done anything with it. He just assumed not and took it. It ran fine and was useful. Oh well.

Got my one alta link in the room to work again, yay! I swapped out the panel to see if it wasn't the button that was the problem. It wasn't, it didn't start with an official panel either. (Thank goodness we have some laying around but like I said it wasn't useful apart from "this isn't the problem.") I reseated the motherboard and it started up. Odd that I would need to do that, it was screwed in fairly tight. So it shouldn't have been loose. Huh. At least it works and has the latest software on it.

Tried to reproduce a bug from before, no luck.

Helped look at the keyboard thing in USDA code, no luck.

And wrote a few more notes on USDA. That audio interface really is terrible. Adnan came to talk to us and it went bonkers, "I can't understand. I can't understand. I can't understand." Yeah, we're not talking to you! Finally pulled my card out and that shut it up. Unless there's only one machine in range and it's in a super quiet area, I don't see it working. Ever.

Came back here, one call. Checked sites, videos as usual.

Got ready for tomorrow.

The call was of course horrible, 45 minutes because he kept insisting the picture he imported from mail to photos was only half there. Uh, it's the picture, it can't be only half there. I tried to get him to screen share with skype. Nope, doesn't know his password. Finally got that reset. Then sharing the screen brought up a warning he had to go into system prefs and allow it. (That's where we had gotten stuck before) Couldn't follow the directions and do it. Thanks for wasting my time.

Got the new (older) Shantae game and played a bit of it. Pixels!

No Warhammer.

Thurs:
Happy Fiber Day! Two years ago today, and still going strong. Take that, Spectrum or Charter or whatever you're calling yourself these days.

Spent a good part of today looking into how to make a card, or actually how to erase some cards we had that are expired. At the meeting I was asked if I could make one, and told the name of the tool Chris apparently used. I did find it in his folder, along with some notes on the process. (5 pages, ugh) Seems straightforward enough I suppose, and implied I could erase cards as well. Not so much, not without the card PIN. There's a user pin, an SO pin in case the user pin is lost, and the Card PIN to manipulate the card itself. Sadly, this is not known.

Sent the certs to a guy to look over, for another card task I need to do. He didn't get back to me.

Still no USDA code to test.

So we're still in waiting mode for the next thing to come in.

Had the afternoon meeting, and watered the plants as usual. Still not many people in the building, oddly.

Came back here, no new calls but I did help someone from yesterday. When all my troubles seemed so far away. Now I think that they are here to stay, oh yesterday came suddenly. Just needed to get his printer back on his wi-fi and it started printing immediately. I'm a hero.

I got the webcam, I'll call her about it sometime and go over there to deliver it. Sometime.

Did the usual thursday stuff, like the new shopping on thursday. Fairly busy, they had all three registers open and still a line. Odd, hasn't been that busy before. Got home, getting ready for tomorrow, the big friday. So big. So big folks you won't believe it. Then the usual sites and fooling around.

Let's see the future! Another bang up day tomorrow with something to while away the hours at work. Then getting gas and seeing my parents. Getting my hair cut perhaps? Then back here for the materia game.

Saturday I'll drop the camera off. I need to do my paperwork for last month. Cut the back lawn. My little seedlings aren't ready to be planted yet but they're actually coming along fairly nicely. The usual cleaning, and having my parents over for the third movie.

And that's about it! Having a good June? I hope so. See you back here next week as June continues.