2020-08-06:

Fri:
Did the plugin testing. Had an issue related to system vs logged in user, figured that out. When the system did an LDAP lookup via what I had typed in, I got errors. When it was done as the user that was logged into the machine it succeeded. Did I type the password wrong or something? We'll never know.
Reloaded the voice system and put the v3 patch on. Hope it survives the weekend. Still can't log in with alternate login. Emailed everyone as to possible reasons why.
Still no forms to send the cards out.
Finished up the machine to make sure the card was in. It was. So that test got put into the done bucket.
Did the shopping, got ice cream materials.
Saw my parents and the Jenny, who seems more like her usual meowy self.
Came home, put stuff away, remembered my time sheet, and did game. We solved the case! With some help from magic, and he honestly incriminated himself because they don't have the fifth amendment there.

Sat:
Moved many trees. Found beans? Took out more clingy vine. Why do I have grape vine with no grapes? It turned out the "beans" are sweat peas, which I can't even eat. Why you gotta look like beans? At least I showed my parents and they were like, "wait a second..." There's a lot of clearing to do this year...
Cut the lawn.
Made ice cream. It froze up properly this time, but honestly the last batch was better. Weird. Oh well, it's ice cream, I'm gonna eat it. I mean it's still good, don't get me wrong, I just think the last batch was better. I did run out of the cocoa powder and used my hot chocolate mix, but I love that stuff so I expected it to be even better than the last batch. Not so much. Ah well.
Cleaned up, as my parents are coming over.
Tried upgrading the Dell laptop to win10, why did dell take out the A11 firmware from their website? It was running A07 but the latest on the site was... A03? That doesn't make sense, and it said it was from like July of this year. Very odd. After upgrading that at least it didn't give me the error anymore. Of course I had to scour the next for the firmware, thanks Dell. You're a real peach.
Have to take the whole darn thing apart to change the drive. Because Dell can't be bothered to put another door on the bottom of the laptop. Thanks Dell, you're a peach. Wait, did I say that already?
Did some reading and changed my weaponry around for my dwarf guy. He can always carry a shotgun, I want his built in weaponry to be more non-lethal. So I just made the "pod" system from Arsenal. It's a superconductor based disk thrower that whatever the disks stick to simply floats in the air. Thank you, magic.

Sun:
The weirdest thing happened today. I fed Chillmouse and noticed his food was disturbed. I give him way too much honestly I don't know how much a mouse eats but the waste goes out to the birds so it's fine. But usually there's half eaten stuff and the shells at least a little scattered around. This week, nothing. Even the peanut butter looked untouched. Concerned I looked in his tube, and poked him under his little house. Didn't see him. I took the cage into the bathroom, took it apart, and carefully searched the bedding. Didn't see him. Looked in the tube, dumped the litter into a bag. Nothing. He wasn't dead, there was no body. He was just gone. What? At no time was the cage door unlocked. He was there when I cleaned him last week. I'm sure I saw him after that maybe Monday or Tuesday looking down at me. Somehow after that he got out, dropped from his very high perch on the shelf I have the cage on, and just vanished? There's no little mouse body on the desk. The cats haven't brought him to me. Where did he go? Was he abducted by aliens? It's so bizarre, and inconceivable.



Nearly two years with me, suddenly he gets out of his cage? That's still locked? And past 3 cats? And doesn't die?
Well, good on you I guess. Hope you're happy back wherever you made it to, where you have to scrounge for food and be wary of danger around every turn. Hope you got at least some measure of happiness with me. At least you'll be the fittest mouse around, even if you are old-old mouse now.

So no more mouse for now. *sadface*

Read the second Arsenal book.
Tested the Atari, it works!
Checked my trees, no visible wilting yet. Maybe they'll all make it this time, which would be nice.
Worked on another item for the armor, as it could be easily tracked in a world of magic. Don't want anyone stealing it, at least don't want to make it too easy for "them" i.e. Sean to have bad guys find it. I mean if they're going to find it, they're going to find it, but at least I can say I didn't leave it totally vulnerable to scrying.
Worked on the laptop, got it all ready to go. Wasn't too annoying, but still annoying to get the whole thing apart. Win10 installed and updated, it's ready to go.
Sent the armor stuff to Sean for approval before Saturday.
Got ready for tomorrow.
Made phone calls, nothing too exciting. No job for tomorrow.

Mon:
Found Chillmouse, I'm afraid. at least it must be them, what other mouse would I find running around after I just discovered they were missing? 4:30 in the morning I got up and the cats were all acting weird. They were cornered behind the laundry basket in the living room and squeezed between two old macs. They were exhausted, didn't try to get away when I picked them up by the tail and put them in the bathtub. When I got back with the "holding cage" they hadn't even moved. Didn't survive the night. Didn't see any injuries, but I guess they were. Why did you escape from your safe little cage to a bigger and much more unsafe one? You knew I had cats, they look at you when you come out and look around at us. Guess you can't think that far ahead, huh? Sorry little one. Still, you got two years of the good life, that's something at least.
We have the upgrade tool, I guess Don posted it and never bothered to tell me, as I found it on my own. Thanks dude. Set up the machines for the test and then ran the test. I'll need to do it again when we get V3 patch in there but at least I can have some initial results for him at this time. The results are... mixed. One machine upgraded fine, just fine. No problems. The other machine was not so lucky. It said a file needed "repair" which is nuts because I did a fresh load on both machines so they were in a good state. But I sent the results out.
Next I watched the annual ethics video and checked the box saying I would be a good little boy.
After that I learned we got the expected D4.0 software and so I loaded that to test it. It seemed to work fine. Christina was also testing it because we have nothing much else to do at the moment. It's a fairly easy test for once, so that's all well and good.
Came back here, did the usual things to get ready for tomorrow so we can do "something" online tonight with the Monday Crew.
Two calls. Sold the laptop I just got, so that was a stroke of luck. I'll drop it off tomorrow.

Tues:
Did two things today, one of them twice. I reloaded the two machines I had upgraded yesterday to try it with the new zip file containing the v3 patch. Then I did it again after the meeting with the developers because they had a new version of the tool that fixed the problems I had mentioned to them. Sigh. At least the new version worked better, it loaded both machines and didn't hang up on the machine it couldn't find.

Ted wants me to demo the encrypted cloud print feature tomorrow, which is backwards. It should be demoed to us, not the other way around. So I tried to get the machine I want to use ready. Upgraded to the correct software version, and... the app won't load. Stupid cloud server. Basically if it doesn't work right away, it's never going to. I had used it with that machine before too, so I don't know why suddenly it doesn't like it. At the end of the day before I left I reloaded it from scratch just in case. We'll see how it goes tomorrow. There's another machine it's loaded on I can use if I have to. It's just frustrating to see it not work when it did before. And there's no real reason it shouldn't just load up.

Oh yeah, tried to track down more of the shipping stuff, I don't think Joe knows what he's doing.

Dropped the laptop off, not painful at all as she didn't really have anything on the old one. Easy.

Came back, ate dinner, the usual stuff. No calls (3 hangups) so I got ready for tomorrow and played some gears with the guys.

Wed:
Demo was somewhat a disaster. At 8:14 I sent a job to the printer to make sure it would go well. It printed. No problems, right? Not so much. Once in the demo the feature no longer worked. On my machine or Christiana's machine. What the heck? Previously it worked fine. Cert in- printed. Cert out- no printed. Test over. Feature is perfect. Now it either prints garbage or gives me some weird error. Thanks.

So we get to try and figure that out.

We went back and forth with various things the rest of the day, no progress made.

Got the forms in so I asked for the cards back. They were not around so I had to wait for the other developer guy to bring them, which he finally did before I left. Buttoned them up and they should be on their way.

Came back, the usual stuff, and more gears. We're almost through the ice area.

Thurs:
Again? They just keep coming. It's already Thursday!

Loaded a slightly newer version of the software to see if that cleared up my problem from yesterday. It didn't. Had the Joe meeting, again rather silly that I was there at all but hey, it's on the calendar and it's work related so I'm there.

Nothing much exciting. We've gotten some new projects in the pipeline so we'll have more to do later. That's always good. Took a look into the one, it's a product that doesn't seem to be on our website anymore. Huh. Weird.

Had the other meeting. Then did the plants. Yeah, quite boring today.
Christina did find the long sequence of events that causes it to print garbage, so at the debugging meeting tomorrow she can at least show that.

And the developer wants to see a successful login on the printer that doesn't work with the new card reader. But as each card reader seems to give a different number I couldn't do it. I'll have to find the number given by that card, have John add it to Y-soft, and then get the log after that. So I have something to do tomorrow as well as the meeting.

Otherwise, not much else. Nothing else will be in for some time.

Went to see about the lady's iPad. It was full of "other" and there's no real way to get rid of it but wipe it and reload from a backup? That can't be right. But I did it. That's dumb.

Came back here, got ready for tomorrow.

Game tomorrow, of course seeing parents and buying food but probably not gas yet. We'll get through it somehow. The day I mean, not buying food. Game wise we had our week of downtime so probably head back to the place we were heading to? Don't know.
No game saturday, Stan isn't available so my big reveal is postponed another week. Ah well, I'll have my parents over again.

Probably move some of the catnip, see if it'll still grow a bit before the frost if I put it in the sun. It hasn't died but it hasn't really gotten any taller either, so I guess it doesn't do well in shade. I'll move it back to where the little trees are now. They've all held up by the way, looking good back there. That's about my only plan for this weekend. Maybe finally get to work on Mizzy's gift? The pattern has just been sitting there.

Leave your comments about what you're doing for the weekend below, and don't forget to like and subscribe! Wait, does he think he's on youtube right now?

See you next week everyone.