2020-11-26:

Fri:
Got another build of the second voice system so I checked that out today. It solves most of the problems, and then an even later build solved another. He said he couldn't replicate my issue with the job release. Odd. That was at about 3:20 so I didn't get back to him. Plenty of time monday. He said he left the debugging messages on in this build, so I'll see about contacting him then and he can look at them while I do the test.

Otherwise I collected data about the hands app, one machine just wouldn't save the log despite letting it go basically all day. Weird. I'll have to do something similar once I get back from the weekend, just to see if leaving it longer creates more problems. But for now I have at least some logs they can look over. Given the problem doesn't happen at all on the altalink machines, I'm guessing it's just a versalink issue we can't do anything about.

Helped Gina a little bit.

Delivered a package that I found in the lobby for some bizarre reason.

You know, the usual.

Got groceries, got gas, saw my parents in Christmas Town, and came back here. Checked sites.
And no game. Jon was not available. Ah well.

Did writing instead, I'm cleaning up the mess that the avatar left by blowing stuff up. I mean I'm having Lysanias blow stuff up, the avatar didn't blow stuff up. But he left a mess, that's for sure.

Sat:
Cleaning, not just because my parents are coming over of course.
Went to 11:30 job. Many of the things he had written down he couldn't replicate, and the others were either him not understanding something or just general oddness. So it didn't take that long. While there my tire light blinked, went steady, and then turned off again. Huh? In the manual it says that may indicate a problem with the tire pressure sensing system. Which I'm certain isn't an expensive fix at all. No sir!
Dropped off stuff, gave presents. Hope Sean likes his phoenix.
Came back, ate lunch. Sites.
Played Control. I would have a very different opinion about it had it not come with the "invulnerability" feature. Because with no radar or shields, you can do everything right by staying in cover, taking enemies down one by one, managing ammo, etc, and still get nailed from behind when someone with a stupid rocket launcher sneaks up on you. Yeah, that's fun. Thanks for being made of tissue paper, protagonist. Why do starting enemies have such devastating attacks? Plus all the crashing didn't help my mood, it crashed just opening the menu, for Pete's sake. The. Menu. Really. Game loves to crash just as you're nearing a checkpoint station. "Oh, I'll just take this control point over and have a new checkpoint." LOL, nope, it crashed instead. Now you get to do all you just did, all over again! Oh, and talking about rocket launchers, I saved up for the "ability" to grab rockets and grenades and throw them back. Why this take points when grabbing things with TK is grabbing things with TK I don't know, but there you are. One would think the game would be nice enough that, if there's a rocket coming at you, and you hit the button to grab it, it would do so. And not some random chunk of the wall or piece of scenery. But no, you would be wrong. And the map is kinda terrible, no waypoints so you have no freaking clue where you're supposed to be going so I wound up wandering around lost a good chunk of the time. It's not like you can ask an NPC that works there "hey, how do I get to X from here?" nope you just have to wander around and guess. And as material drops are random, I've been waiting hours to try and get 2 more "astral whatevers" to upgrade my gun. Doesn't seem like it's going to happen though. I have about 3x the "money" I need, whatever it is I'm collecting from enemies, it doesn't actually show up anywhere you just "get" it. Weird. Did the previous owner never upgrade the thing? Ever? What a terrible director! But yeah otherwise I'm enjoying it. Thanks, invulnerability! You saved the game. The devs must have realized, oh, we made our enemies too smart, and we can't put in shields or radar, so we'll just make a checkbox that says "you don't have to worry about it anymore." Which I greatly appreciate, believe you me. All games should have cheat codes baked right in.
Writing, mess all cleaned up. He gets to move on which as I want to give him a Ryo-Ohki may be Tenchi for a little bit and not The Last Unicorn. I think someone could have captured him, and is drawing off his power and they need to get him back. Then Ryoko can give him a "copy" of Ryo-Ohki in thanks. Every story needs an animal mascot! EVERY. STORY.
Parents over.
More Control. See above for full review.

Sun:
Played control.
Took care of PCs. The laptop got torn up and I'll take it to work Monday to throw in the bin. It had a whole 1GB of RAM. Nice! Ah, vista era, how much I don't miss thee. The desktop is super full of smoke particles, I don't know how useful it'll be, but I've torn the HD apart as promised and I'll see what I'm going to do with it later. Reminds me, I may have to order more SSDs.
Sites and videos as usual.
No calls, but one from before. No answer, so I get to go right home tomorrow.
Writing. Left that reality and met Ryoko.
Getting ready for tomorrow.

Mon:
Started by upgrading a machine for the final card menu test. We'll probably do two machines a black and a color but it shouldn't take long.
Then went and did the "wake up" test for the versalink hands feature. It's a lot slower when waking from sleep vs with the hands app not running. Odd. But all I can do is collect logs and send them in. Of course both Louis and the developer are gone the whole week. Great job fellows.

Worked on the final release of D4.0 the card stuff. Did both models at the same time, it's just easier that way. No problems, and the translation stuff seems fine. So that can go out as planned.

Finished off book 9 and started 10. Not sure how long it'll be, I came up with the whole thing because I wanted Lysanias to have a Ryo-Ohki, and it kind of spiraled out from there. "Hey, what if Tenchi got captured!" That sort of thing. Have no idea where it'll go, I have to figure that out. I've got like the first chapter in my head, but nothing past that.

Worked on the voice system with the developer. Showed him the issue, then we found a different issue, then I couldn't reproduce that. Huh.

Came back, was awfully dark and it was snowing a bit when I went to get the mail.

Sites, dinner, watched a bit of Tenchi. No calls, but called the lady from yesterday. She has some minor stuff to do.

Tues:
Had some things to do today. I got what will hopefully be the last build of the voice system for the newer product and made sure the fixes to the secure print release worked okay. They did. That should close it out but I emailed the results and we'll see if they want to do anything else. Maybe I can finally move that machine back into the real lab.

I also got 4 cards Joe wants tested on every platform under the sun, so I got the certs off them and made new users for them. Odd cards. Christina did an altalink, the easy one, so I took the VersaLink. Of course, it complained about cert stuff. Despite everything being fine on Alta the setup is so different on versa it's a miracle (on 34th street) when it actually works. I tried a bunch of stuff and finally upgraded the machine as I had nothing else I could think of to do. I got further, but it still has a really weird error message. Sigh.

Left and went to do the stuff the lady wanted. It was fine, nothing too major.

Came back here, sites, and watching more Tenchi.
Three calls. One lady who used to live down the street is sending me her laptop that won't turn on.
Didn't reach person #2.
Mr Jaw was still having problems with sucky windows live mail, so I switched him over to thunderbird.

Wed:
At least I had something to do today, even if that something was bashing my head into the wall over and over.
I did get a new version of the voice system I briefly tested, and yes it did fix the scaling bug. Once we get the print job release stuff in, hopefully next week, we can do a final test there and after nearly a year, toss it out the window. Sheesh.
But back to the wall banging. How did you know it was certs? You've read this blog for too long! You're right! It was certs, and versalink needing things done so differently, and we think something is wrong with the mail server.

We switched it over to the other mail server, and I think I figured out a method to show that everything is working as it should, but it doesn't seem exactly right. I don't know. We'll see what he says about my explanation of what happened and what I did about it Monday.

Watered the plants, and cut the top off the plant that fell over some time ago. The leaves were pretty much gone so we'll see how it grows up now. It's doing really well, lots of nice little leaves off the side.

Went to Good Will, got a few things for the game but not much. Sadface.

Came back, the usual.

Thurs:
And so here we are again, as promised, after another Thanksgiving. Hope you all had a good one.

Did a few things in the morning like proofreading book 9, and some Control. After restarting the Xbox it didn't even crash, though I didn't play it for that long. Got a few things together to go to my parent's house, and went over there.

Saw my sister and her husband, and even Onix very briefly. Had a good turkey day but I don't think I got my take home pie! I was robbed!

I'll probably do more of the same now, a bit of proofreading and some Control.

As always, let us look to the future at this point. Tomorrow I have a 10:00, 'ol "I had problems for a month and now that I can't get it to boot I want the stuff off it." Uh huh. I'll do the shopping, get candy stuff, put up the tree and other decorations, read over the star trek character creation rules and do a mini-game with the crew in the evening.

Then hopefully a quiet weekend. I'll have my parents over for a movie Saturday though as no game I guess. Silly Stan.

November is almost over. Saw lots of lights on the way home, is there some kind of festival of lights coming up?

See you all next week, watch out for elves.