2020-06-11:

Fri:

A little gabi work done, was working with a developer here to see where exactly the keyboard issue is. He doesn't think it's us, given the enter key works on one screen, so it should work on another. His tests bared that out. Bore that out? Beared that out? Boring that out? You know what I mean. Otherwise really only one other piece of exciting news from the trenches, such as they are.
I fixed another printer, it was the RAM. Strangely it has a 2gb chip in one slot, and a 1gb chip in the other slot. Messing around with it- I mean troubleshooting it- I realized when one slot only was filled I got no video. Is this machine using a 1gb RAM chip for video RAM? Seems excessive, honestly. Maybe we got a deal on them? When I swapped the other chip with the machine next to it, the problem followed to that machine and the machine I was having trouble with booted. Neat. I've put a 1gb chip in it as the machine is fairly useless to us for other reasons, and left a note for Ken if he can order a replacement when he gets back.

Got gas.
Saw my parents. Got a haircut and listened to a Jenny complain. She got whipped cream, she had nothing to complain about. Poor old Jenny.
Came back here, put stuff away. Had some time to I figured I woul tackle a little home project.

Tried to get my sink faucet off to change the cartridge to stop the dripping. I was, uh, less than successful. The center of it comes out. But not the whole cartridge. Odd. Told dad he would have to look at it when he came over. Sigh, it was going so well, too.

Then did game. We were in a fairly tight spot right at the start, having been attacked by sereral dragon pups due to a bit of miscounting, but then one evaporated, so we weren't in as much trouble as we thought. I still almost lost an arm, two of us were asleep, good thing someone thought to bring a pointy stick they could use to solve the problem. No money popped out when the monsters were dead, disappointed! :-)

Otherwise it went fine, we stayed on track and learned more about the world.

Sat:
Cleaned a bit, spayed more oil into the sink handle in an attempt to free it up for later that afternoon.

At 10:00 went over to deliver the camera. Set up her phone as well, it went fine.

Came back, checked sites, wrote up the journal entry from the game last night. As my magic fizzled in every possible way I'm of the belief that the gods of this world don't like me because I venerate another. I mean if magic doesn't flow from the gods, where does it come from? Nowhere. Exactly.

Watched a few things, then my parents came over. Finished the last Back to the Future movie so it's on to other things. Probably just have dad over next week for Father's day.


Sun:
Watered the plants and checked the lawn. Looks like it does need to be cut, but it was too early at that time. I respect my neighbors!
Did paperwork from last month. 9 whole jobs, glad I have a a real job now. Checked emails, sites.
Cut the lawn.
Thought about Christmas, hey it's coming up you know. Don't let all that sun or whatever fool you. Winter is always just a few inches away. I mean you've started thinking about gifts, right? The year is almost half over, what are you waiting for?
Watched a movie.

Made tremendous progress on Neil's gift! I know exactly what I want to make him, how to accomplish it, what to order to accomplish it, and created a major piece of it using my own 3D printer. Really need to use that more, but after a bit of tinkering it performed perfectly. The parts are fairly small and need to be painted, but they look pretty good. About half tore off the bed on the first run so I had to do them again. I made them shorter so it didn't take as long to print, and put them in a line so the other nozzle wouldn't knock into them. Worked great.

One person called at 7:00, a half hour away, wants another wi-fi extender. Going over there Tuesday.

Found an old flash drive under the 3D printer. A whole gb! Maybe I'll take it to work and use it for loading machines instead of my larger one. Of course then what would I use the larger one for? Hummmmm.

Got ready for tomorrow. Did a little reading, I'm done with the last Odyssey no not that odyssey the space one, so I'm now reading an agathy christy mystery. Hey, I'm going in order and I don't know how all these books got loaded onto my Kindle. Elves, maybe? There's a train, and I think they've all done it.

Mon:
Two major victories today at work. Neither of them really related to, uh, work, but hey, every little bit helps.

The first victory was over entropy itself. We have two 6655 machines in the lab next to each other. The one I had fixed earlier, the scanner beam assembly wouldn't move. I took it apart and after some back and forth by hand it's been okay. But the one next to it was more of a challenge. It wouldn't boot. Having swapped the SD cards before and getting no further I figured it must be something else. Signed pointed to the hard drive. I figured out how to get the covers off and get at it. We didn't have any 320GB drives around but I found a 160gb from another printer, it had been hanging around forever. So I figured, eh, why not use that? So I did. It worked. I loaded the printer software onto it, and many reboots later it came up fine. Another victory! Oddly it has 4GB of RAM, while the much larger machine had only 2. I suppose it's a newer model but still, weird to see so small a printer have that large a chip in it.

The other victory was over my own fears. I successfully followed some directions and made a brand new PIV card! Someone wanted one, and Joe volunteered me as I am New Chris. (Old Chris had done this) Well, I got to step 4. Enter PIN and-

wait, PIN? What PIN? It doesn't say! AARRRGG. But I managed to figure it out with trail and error before I totally locked the card out. *whew* Maybe I'll try tackling those expired cards now that I know a possible PIN for them. Anyway, made the certs, loaded them up, and logged in the card. How about that? Not bad, not bad.

No USDA testing, they're getting me the new case, and they said some of the voice stuff (which is in pieces for reasons?) expired so I couldn't do any testing even if I wanted to. So there.

Nothing exciting otherwise. There are a few more broken printers in the lab, one with a fault someone else already looked at and gave up on. Another with a weird "close cover" message, one with a yellow toner issue? Nothing I can do about them. Ah well.

Came back home, got a new wi-fi extender on the way. Ordered a 36 month CD as it's the magical date of June 8th which isn't important. It just worked out that way.

Checked sites, ordered the supplies for Neil's gift. Shoot, I'll need a box or something... but I guess better to see how big they turn out to be.

Got ready for bed so I could do games with the others at 8:30.

One call, his laptop speakers died he said, I suggested headphones as a workaround for now.

Tues:
Nothing really accomplished today. Looked at the cards now that I knew a little more, but my knowledge didn't help. The one is outright expired, so there's no help there (and why do these card expire anyway? What's the point of wasting them like that?) and the others did accept the SO PIN, but not the card PIN so I couldn't erase them.

I looked at some other machines in the lab. The one with "close toner waste door" does work if you stand there and hold it a little. We have another machine with a feeder like that. I just made a note of it. The other had a "yellow developer" problem so I took it out, cleaned the contacts and put it back in. That seemed to clear it up. Go me.

I really need to figure out the next chapters so I could at least do writing.

Went out to set up the extender. That went fine. Saw a giant TV by the side of the road but the screen was totally busted. What, did you throw something at it? Or did it fall off the wall? Figured it would be tricky to repair, so I left it.

Came back here, did the usual stuff here of sites and videos.

One call, an iMac with what I figure is a busted hard drive. You have a backup, right?
He does! So all is not lost.

Wed:
Pretty boring again today, big surprise. I had a USDA meeting to look forward to at least, though it was mostly just "we have no idea what's going on. Do you have any idea what's going on? No, we don't have any idea what's going on either!" sort of thing. Neat. So they're still looking into stuff and maybe I'll have new things to test later this week?

Did some lab stuff. Moved some things around to free up a cart. We have a ton of supplies, many for printers we don't even own, that are stacked up on shelves and on a cart. So I finally decided to smoosh the shelves together and get the stuff off the cart. After all, a cart is useful for moving things around. Shelves are useful for standing there and holding stuff. Let's let the proper thing do the proper job! Propo, as I call it. Little hunger games humor there. Also replaced two smaller hubs with one larger one, I've got all these old hubs laying here, the smaller ones are actually in more demand. So I freed them up. Made the row all nice, the cables aren't all a tangle, the back part looks really good now. Too bad nobody really goes back there.

At lunch had a weird thing happen. I check my email and I got an email from my energy supplier (or however that works. It's some solar thing, I don't know) that they hadn't gotten an RG&E bill since March. And maybe I should look into that? So I did. They were right. I see payments made Jan, Feb, March, April, and that's it. My account even has some $22 credit from somewhere? Well, I couldn't tell anything so I called the number they said. Which was the wrong number, got some totally unrelated company. Thanks. I looked at my bill and of the 5 or so numbers picked one. I told the computer system my information and got through to a person. Rather than passing this information on the computer jealously hoarded it and I told her my information. I told her "I have not been billed in several months. Can you tell me what's going on?" Implying that "yes I do enjoy paying nothing and getting service but sooner or later this will catch up to me and that will be a Bad Thing because I will owe tons." She looked at the account and transferred me. She too jealously guarded my information and I told it all, again, to the nice lady that picked up. I told her my story. She too looked at the account. "I'm going to have to email someone in billing to have a look at this. You're right, several bills should have been generated by now." Uh, what? And it may "take a few days?" I mean, okay, RG&E believes my balance is zero or I have a credit so at the moment I'm not in danger of them turing my service off or anything (if they even can?). I can't pay a bill I haven't gotten, after all. My question is why is RG&E paying all these people to not help me?

First the programer(s) that made the phone tree system that was no help.
Then the first lady that was no help.
Then the second lady that was no help.
Then the person she's going to email.

That's 4 people right there. I mean yes, please, employ people by all means, but don't employ people that know nothing and can do nothing. That's just silly. If I call and the real live person I talk to has to transfer me, that's a failure of the system right there. I mean, right? I'm not out of line saying that? Train people to take care of problems! And lady #2 said the billing people are at home, that's why it would take so long, my question: why does that make a difference? They can look at my account information just as easily on a monitor they own as one the company owns. I mean, really. Why can't I talk to them directly? Do they not have phones at home? I mean, I would think someone calling up to say "don't I owe you guys some... money?" would generate a more immediate response than "yeah, whatever, we'll look into it I guess."

So that all happened. Hopefully they can straighten it out and I can start getting bills again. Because you know that is what I like.

The only other thing of note today checking to make sure a printer in the lab supported custom paper sizes. But of course we knew it did, he sent me directions for how to verify it. So I'm not sure of the point of that exercise at all.

Came back home. Sean wanted to play Warhammer so I got ready. A couple of calls had to be made first, of course. iMac guy again, take it to Apple I said are you stupid? A guy with hopefully a dead power supply (because that's easy to fix) and a lady that just needed to turn her machine off rather than putting it to sleep to get it to boot up.

Didn't actually get to play Warhammer because it took a page out of Secret of Mana's playbook where you need to have done some of the adventure beforehand before you can play multiplayer. Thanks. So we did the Takedown and while we died the first time, we managed to all stay alive the second. Neat.

Thurs:
Didn't exactly get what we planned but I did a few things.

I made some test cases up for the new screensaver like app Louis is all hot fer. Tried to load the files he gave me, but I don't have the right tool for it. It's not the final graphics anyway, so I wouldn't have loaded it everywhere as I plan to when the final version comes in.
I installed the "new" voice stuff, which had the same version number as the "old" one. They just messed with the voice stuff, they hadn't fixed any bugs. But they say they'll get right on that, now that the new case is done. I messed with it for a bit, still about the same as far as I can tell. Wrote down a few things I noticed that I hadn't before.
Had the meeting about the cards, you know where I emailed the guy last week with "are these certs right?" He said he thought he had gotten back to me but admitted to not always hitting send on messages. Uh, okay? So I made the cards. Had to adjust the certs, of course, because I couldn't just use the ones I had made, no, they had to have the private key attached. Because of course they did. But the cards got made, they got tested, they even worked, and I handed them over. Whew.
Had the meeting and watered the plants as usual. Still hardly anyone in the building.
I think that's about it!

Went to see power supply guy, it was the power supply. Good thing, and I even had one. Have to order another. Still, that was pretty easy, and I did a few other minor things for him. Didn't take long at all.

Went shopping, got some stuff for Father's day. A little early I know, but you do realize I've started working on Christmas gifts, right? You recall that?

Then back here. Updated Borderlands for the new content. Checked sites, the usual stuff.

Got ready for tomorrow.

What's coming up? I'll take a look at the already loaded test hand washing thing tomorrow, see if there are any more ideas for test cases I get. Other than that, who knows? I'll get gas, (down a half tank!) and see my parents.

Then presumably the new magic survival game.

The weekend? I have one job, I didn't speak to her because she works nights she said but hopefully saturday morning is fine. I just left a message. Maybe cutting part of the lawn, the stuff for the gift won't arrive so I won't be doing that. Around the house stuff, and I'll have my parents over most likely.

So that's it. We're rounding the corner of June to the middle and about the middle of the year. Protests still going on, companies opening back up while, oddly, virus cases continue to rise. Who would have thought? Madness.

Stay sane out there, see you all next week.