2020-10-22:

Fri:
So what exciting thing happened today?

Let me get back to you on that one.

Christina had some mis-adventures in blocking screens. She spent most of a day trying to figure out why the blocking screen, the new one we put in that gets rid of the picture (yes someone paid us for this) seemed to exist on a B400 when it shouldn't. Well, turns out the normal blocking screen for that model doesn't have the picture in the first place. The screen changes from a hand with a card to a different hand with a card. Neato. Who knew?
Meeting about what could be going wrong with the card. The celiveo folks still just can't get anything to work, now it's their card when they insert it. It's showing an unsupported card message despite us implementing support for that card in 2018 by the looks of it. We're never going to get this stupid thing working, are we?
That was really it. Nothing new at the moment to test but of course we're eagerly awaiting the stuff that's coming. Leaving!

Saw my parents after all, they hadn't left yet. Freezer was fairly easy to fix, I guess all the electronics are right in the one panel. So that's nice.
Got groceries, my gas gauge had gone from more than half a tank when I left my parent's house to less than half by the time I got down the street so I got gas. Filled it up, but it still showed only 3/4 full? (By monday it showed as full again).
Came back, had dinner, had a phone call *ugh* flash. Yes, some online test or something that used yucky flash. Had to figure out how to allow it but at least it's on a per site basis. In other Flash news my flash player popped up a nice little message about how it was going to off itself and never pollute my machine again. Neat! So I let it. Goodbye and good riddance.
Got ready for tomorrow and game, had game.
Apparently I made .73 in the markets today, that's not nothing.
Game was fine, the party murdered a bunch of dudes who tried to rob us. Yay, combat magic for the win. Naturally I simply protected the group (mostly) and we only took one wound. Wasn't exactly clear how that happened, attacks had been bouncing off us before that. Odd.

Sat:
Cleaned up before heading out.
Took care of my 11:00, the setup. Hey, she didn't want 12:00 what a shocker. Fairly easy, just wanted the old machine wiped and had a few questions. So I took the user off and answered her questions. I realized later that if she had any apps installed from the apple store it would complain about it and ask for that account info. Well, they can always be deleted I guess.
Came back, ate lunch. Looked into electric snow blowers. There was an add for one in a catalog I got, and I was thinking "Okay, I do like my electric lawn mower though if I got another it would be battery powered but snow blowers? How does that work?" I watched some youtube videos and apparently, pretty well! They're way smaller and lighter than gas ones, shock and surprise. It seems only like one company makes them, at least lowes and home depot offered many models of one brand. So I figured, you know what, let's get rid of another source of gas in my life, and looked around for the best price on one. Thought it was going to be lowes but they wanted $60 to deliver it. I figured even with my car empty the box wouldn't fit, so I looked on amazon. They had it cheaper than lowes or the catalog and I got it delivered for free. Sheesh, is it any wonder they're taking over the world? If it works out this year I'll sell the gas one, and look to 2023 when I get my electric car. Down. With. Fossil. Fuels!
Mail came, got the battery that I had checked on earlier, it wasn't out for delivery yet. Weird. Put it in. Solved that problem. Connected to my wi-fi just fine, browsed, so don't know what his problem was.
Finished Mizzy's gift. Just need to buy a suction cup and I can box it up finally. I'm 1/2 ready for Christmas!
Looked at where I could put a freezer. Didn't matter, the one on offer was as old as Grandma's old one, and didn't work anyway.
Went over to the 2:00, left him a monitor for now, he said it was better. I checked his machine out and did a few things. He's going to order one, I'll have to go get mine when he does. He's just down the street, it's fine.
May or may not have had a nap when I got back.
Looked into finally getting the soundtrack I ordered for Sean, as it's been 3 weeks and nothing, so I think that site is just defunct despite being active. It's not in a torrent anywhere I could find, but I did find it on youtube, so maybe there's some hope there. It will just take a bunch of work splitting it up into the separate tracks, I mean we don't use cassette tapes for a reason.
Watched other videos, checked sites.
Was having dinner when my parents came for movie. Watched the 2014 Muppets.
Then did more Battleborn with the crew.

Sun:
Tore the youtube track apart to get the mp4 tracks individually for Sean. That took about 4 hours. Sheesh. Made a script to do it, using ffmpeg, which I found out could do the job so the tracks didn't get recompressed. Figured enough quality had been lost putting it on youtube. Put the metadata in with a program I downloaded, and bundled it up for him. Of course the official track list I was using was wrong. One of the songs was 1:12 but listed as :41 so as you need to specify the start time and length of the song to cut out that messed up all the tracks after it. (I was figuring the start times out manually by calculating them, previous song length plus previous song start = this song start) So there were some stumbling blocks but it all worked out in the end.
Finally got to writing the date chapter. Finished it. Fairly long one, took most of the rest of the day actually, and they had a good date. Lysanias took her to dinner, to the moon, created a new observatory for her next to her cottage, and raced karts. Yes, maybe he was showing off a little, what he might do for the third date (because of course the second is her choice of what to do) to top all that I have no idea. I mean, if they survive that long, but at one official date a week, the next alien attack wouldn't be for another week if they keep to schedule. Of course he might be in space by then because they're going to learn the alien homeworld location in the next chapter. I was thinking she might want something simple, to see if they can spend time together quietly instead of bouncing around the place. She likes golf, maybe they do a round of that? But I was also thinking she would want to be "out" not in the soulscape, and with the alien attacks over the last month would golf courses even be open? Eh, I suppose at that point no one would care to hassle them if they just showed up and started playing. We'll see. Other date nights will be "hand waved" they probably won't be detailed like this one was. I just wanted to show "they're dating now so if I say "they went on a date and such and such happened" it won't be "where did this come from?"" sort of thing. Got it?
One call, maybe Sunday? Emailing file, if her son can email her the file she needs from his machine I won't need to go. If he can't then I will. Simple as that.
Ready for bed and Battleborn, as Sean asked if I wanted to do that again. We won it, yay! Another day closer to it being turned off forever. I guess in a way their universe really is ending... Huh.

Mon:
Nothing exciting at work to talk about today. Didn't get any new stuff in, but did have the demo for D4.0 so that should be coming soon enough. The new voice thing meeting is next week, so I get a week there, and Christina looked over the new build of the versalink that supposedly fixed the name problem. She found our spec and their spec don't actually match, so who knows what it's really supposed to do? Not us!

Came home for once. On a Monday.

Raining and cold, looks like it's going to be that way for the next two days.
Checked sites, movies, put my checks in as I forgot that yesterday. Cat boxes.

All my fave people called in the same day! Dentist guy with a new printer, Ellen whining about printing pictures I guess, she was just ranting as usual so who knows. Boris, via proxy his nephew or something? No details. And a guy with a question. Should be great.

40 minutes on the phone with twitter guy, he says he's not being sent the code twitter wants him to put in. Well, what do you want me to do about that?

Reached dentist guy, he gets tomorrow. Ellen was just being a ditz as usual, who goes to fedex to print something? Staples. Staples has a huge printing center! Honestly.

Didn't reach the other guy, Boris proxy.

Got ready for bed so we could do something like among us, the besteeeeest gaaaaameeee evveeerrrrrrrrrrr. Or is it?

Never did do it. Played some Xenoblade and then Battleborn with the others. Huh. I'm not complaining.

Tues:
Another fairly slow day, tomorrow is when we get new voice software so I'll have something to do. I did look over the VBS for the copy system, now that we have an official name for it. They were all "waaa we need the name before we make the icon" but our icon is... two triangles? How does that suggest auto copy to someone? Well, whatever, it's not up to me.

Then I poked it it some more, just to make sure I hadn't missed anything. I don't think I have.

Went to see dentist guy. The reason for my visit was: printer + devices printing to printer.
What did I actually do?

1. Print his passwords out from google.
2. Reset his google password that had been changed only seven days ago.
3. Reset the carbonite password
4. Set up his alexa on the wi-fi.
5. Fix the Wi-fi so he knew the password again. (I left him a piece of paper last time with the password)
6. Look for a file on carbonite, the worst backup system ever.
7. Reset his one android device back to defaults that I had just reset the last time I was there because he forgot the password between then and now (I left the password off it)
8. Looked into a battery for another android device. (He like four of them? His phone, two small ones, and one large one. Why?
9. Looked into the laptop hinge he's broken. The screw tore out of the plastic on the LCD side, not the laptop side, so maybe I can get a replacement?
10. Set up the printers on the android devices (The thing I was there to do)

I didn't get home until after 6:00. Do you understand why I hate going there? Do you?

Got the snow blower, it's a cute little thing all right. It works, can't wait for snow!!!!! (Ha ha, yes I can, maybe getting this new snow blower will make it not snow this year, just to spite me? I'm okay with this)

Ate dinner, checked sites, got ready for tomorrow. One call, just the guy from yesterday. So I'm going to see Boris tomorrow, probably a password issue, mark my words. And mark them well.

Wed:
Guess what I didn't get today? A big hug and a kiss from the boss saying I was doing such a great job? Well, yes, I guess that's technically true, but I was thinking more in terms of the software I was supposed to get. Odd where your mind went, must be staying away from people is starting to get to you. Anyway!

Yeah, no new voice system. I will get a new voice unit to test at some point, and ship this prototype back along with the older prototype. But nothing for today. So yes, my hopes of having something to do were dashed.

But I certainly didn't sit there and come up with the spirit hunter Lysanias is going to fight, no sir.

What I did do was, uh, classified. Yes, very hush hush. Can't say. Very important. Yup.

Went to see Boris, I guess his only problem was he wasn't connected to his room wi-fi. They're by room so there was a huge list of them, for reasons? Okay, sure. I just clicked on it and he was connected again. So it was great to go down there for that.

Came back here, ordered stuff for dentist guy. Had dinner. Checked sites. Usual stuff.

Three calls, but one was dentist guy again so whatever. One said she was fine now, one was just the guy down the street to come pick up my monitor. Easy.

Played a bit of Battleborn but not much, we all had things to do.

Worked on the next fight, it's going to be a big one but only in terms of what goes on in the background. I keep track of what everyone else is doing but try to just write what Lysanias does. It's a little easier.

Thurs:
Starting to get a little busy, but at the meeting it's like, oh, everything Robert does is coming in next week? That's going to be fun for him.

Had the morning meeting of course.

Anyway, tried to put the new version of the copy app on some devices and found I couldn't get to the one. Tried to get to my gabi device. Couldn't. Tried to get to the muller device. Couldn't. What? Seems I randomly picked all the devices I can't get to. The one had the IP address changed for reasons, still haven't figured out why the other two devices have seemingly gone offline. I've used both recently, there's no reason they shouldn't be fine. Rebooted the one, it tells me "EIP is not available." What the heck does that mean, and why would it stop the network from working? The other one I can't get past the blocking screen on, so it's just dead to me now. Neat.

So I get to fiddle with that machine as well as all the other stuff this coming week. Maybe I can get it solved by tomorrow, I shouldn't have too much to do otherwise.

Got the copy thing installed on another machine, but then did a card reader test for Joe. "Plug three readers into one machine," he said. "Let's see what happens." Uh, sure. After finishing that up I looked into the copy thing. It's fine, some translation stuff still to work on, but function wise it seems fine. I did write a few things up about it.

Then the afternoon meeting and plants.

Got my monitor back and came home.

Checked sites, the usual and ate dinner.

Several calls today, yay! A guy with a very dead drive, I figured out how to run the diagnostic which told him so. So that's 1:00 saturday. A lady I had reboot her system and it came up fine, but she still wants me to come down. It's just down the street so that's 11:00 saturday. And I haven't heard from transfer files lady so that's 1:00 sunday. Also talked to Ellen, got her printer service restarted because windows is crap.

So what's the future all about? Well, it's the last week of October if you didn't realize it. The election is SOOOOO soon, can you feel it? The change in the air? Tomorrow is all about getting my machines to work. I do want to do another test, at least a quick one, on a D2.9 device for the copy thing. One I haven't done. But that shouldn't take too long. I don't think I'll have anything else until next week.

Seeing my parents, shopping, and then home for game.

Saturday looks like the two one easy and one a lot of tedious driving because it's a half hour away, then home for the Monster game. Will I almost get killed this time? We can only hope.

Then one job sunday. I want (have to) do my paperwork from last month finally, so I have that on the list. And I need to make a pie of course. Monday is my 5 year Xeroxiversary which will pass unnoticed by all. Which is just the way I like it. So there. Want to finish the current fight with the alien and Alisha, still don't know what killing Sangray will produce if Lysanias hits him with Ragnarok. Maybe I'll come up with something.

So that's that. I don't know if I'll finish up tonight with a little more of the combat or a bit of Xenoblade. In either case, have a good weekend and remember I'm pulling for you, we're all in this together.