2021-09-30:

Fri:
As expected, not much exciting at work. I did finish two whole chapters though, leaving me with just the final chapter to write.
Did the shopping, what happened to milk? There was only whole milk. No skim, no 2%. It's been like that for a bit, no skim, but they usually have 2%. So weird. No cider either. Then at tractor supply they had no big boxes of cat litter. Had to get almost their last plastic tubs of it. Ugh, plastic. Sheesh.
But I got cat food, (no aldi brand but that's okay I'm set for now) me food, and toilet tabs. Yet a third brand, as both I have bought before are missing.
Saw their christmas stuff was out already. It is still September, right? Right. Okay, just checking.
Got back home, had dinner. Started ice cream. Actually got it poured into the tiny contaniers without making too much of a mess. Go me!
No game tomorrow, Stan isn't feeling well. It'll be the 16th before we can do game again.
Checked sites, videos.
iMac guy called. We discussed why he should buy the more expensive iMac. So he didn't need a bunch of adapters or a router. He went ahead... and bought the cheaper one. Great job guy, now you get to buy a router from me, and have to have an adapter for your backup drive. Good. Job. Did I not explain you would not be able to plug the internet into your machine if you got the cheep one? I DID? Oh, okay.
And the guy dropped off his PC to do the switch of the SSD. He called as well. "Can you check it over?" UH, no, because you didn't bring me the power adapter and it's one of those fake desktops where they shoved a laptop board into a case and called it a day. So how am I supposed to power it?
Started the transfer, I finally get to use the offline capability of the unit because they're the same size.
Called the two morons.
Did more of the game I'm playing.
I guess I am still going to Sean's, for something. Games just not the Monster game.

Sat:
Went over to feed everybody. Got more plants into database.
Went to my 10:00, not a power supply issue, I just reseated everything and it was fine. Her router was non-wi-fi because cat.
Got back here, stopped at pond. No feathers this time but a few plants in the database.
Looked at the 1TB system. Looks like the transfer worked.
Also worked: Ice cream molds. Got one out of it, and ate it up. Looks like that's how it'll go in the future.
Blew the dust out, it's a pretty terrible processor, you should see the heatsink. It's so tiny. His machine is still pretty slow, but I tried everything I could, can't find any reason but it being a crappy product. Go figure.
Ate lunch, checked sites.
Looked at laptop, it powers on with power cord from box. Put in SSD and started install.
The Win10 installer just crashes. Neat.
Went to Sean's. Won one game, watched 2 movies. Had cake.

Sun:
Last time feeding everyone over at my parent's house. Held the bunny.
Cleaning type stuff around the house.
Watched two What if episodes, I was behind.
Took SSD out of laptop. Right click doesn't work, ethernet was working but stopped, wireless doesn't seem to work. Seems like a lot of effort to try and get it working so I'm not going to bother. Going to recycle it.
Played more of the game.
Got ready for tomorrow.
Warframe.

Mon:
No real new work. Don has some sort of task he wants us to do that is contained in this long and rambling email that has so many three letter acronyms in it I can't tell what's going on. I emailed for clarification "you want us to do this 5 steps?" but as of 12:00 he hadn't gotten back to me. Christina came over and said "I don't think it's this because of what he said in this part" and I was like, oh, you're right but isn't in the same thing because LDAP can be set up for that authentication method so can't we just do that? But the app doesn't directly show it but the newer release can add scanning to network as a button so she said "okay I better go back and email him for even more clarification about what they want." So she went away to do that. They want to do this weird thing, dudes, just trust your employes maybe? I don't know.

Otherwise, talked with Don and Christina (separately) about some new task he didn't explain very well. I don't think we can replicate the customer setup anyway, and what they want to do is fairly stupid in the first place so there's that. Why not just, I don't know, trust your employees? It's a thing you could do.

Finished book 1 of the Monster Diaries. Herman almost got killed, I rolled his damage while he finished off the other guy. Neat. He's fine though. Started the proofread.

Went home, started watching videos, and my Mac kept crashing. What the heck?

I took the whole thing apart and found this, which wasn't helpful to it.



I guess the air I blow in doesn't reach that far? I don't know. I cleaned it out and put it all back together. Didn't help. I took out a bunch of stuff, like the drives, video card, no help.
I then checked my RAM. It was fairly hot! Like, really hot. I oiled one of the fans, hoping that would help. No. But I have two "modules" where the RAM is. One module wasn't that hot. The other one was that hot. Weird. But only 3 of the 4? So figure that out. I've taken those modules out, halving my RAM, but no crash yet. I ordered double the RAM I currently have for $60. So maybe that'll help? Just put the new RAM into the slots where the old RAM is and hope that's that. I mean why would some modules get hot? Are they bad now? Did the thermal paste on the heatsinks dry up? I don't get it.

No calls, got ready for tomorrow and finished my videos/sites for the day.

Then warframe. On a Monday, I know! What's that about?

Tues:
Saw Tinker's double hanging out by the breezeway in the morning. Ran away once I stepped outside. I would give you a nice home little one!

We had actual work come in today. We got the pre-release build of the trunk SPAR release, which I know is a whole lot of gibberish. Anyway, tested the feature, they used the wrong icon according to the VBS but that's almost to be expected at this point. Otherwise, I'm sort of fuzzy on exactly when this new dialog box (the only new feature in the release) is supposed to show up. When you log in? When you enter the secure print area? According to the description it's right away, but you have to hit a button to trigger it. I emailed Joe about it, no response yet.

Otherwise finished the read of the book, so books 1 and 2 are done! Wait, that means I need something else to write. Huh. Maybe another Herman adventure? Was all I could do to get the first plot in my head. I guess I'll think about it. I have another machine to test for the new feature tomorrow, which honestly won't take that long. So we'll see.

Came back here, checked sites, had dinner. Got ready for tomorrow.
Had one call, I think he's the guy way out by Sean's.

Did some Warframe on my own, I know, it's a terrible single player game but I needed to do some stuff the others won't want to do so...

No Mac crashes. Good.

Got the stuff I needed in Warframe, and finally built a better Amp. Sheesh. I like it a lot better.

Wed:
Finished up the test of the new pop up. It's odd, I used my clone file from the machine yesterday, and it didn't show the popup. I had to toggle it off and back on again to make it work right. Bug! Wrote that up. Got clarification from Ted on when I was supposed to see it, too. You do have to press the button. Why we needed to add this extra "are you sure" window because you have to touch the screen 4 times to get to this window and release the jobs, so really it's a waste. But whatever, it's done.

Otherwise some thinking about a new book, I have an idea??? We'll see where it goes.

Got out to the setup and SSD install. UGh, I hate that now. Didn't leave until 7:30. It took about a half hour to just install the stupid clone program and run CCleaner to have the minimal amount to transfer. Nuts. It finally finished obviously, and it was transferring at 20-40MB/sec so it was moving along. And he only had 120GB of stuff so it shouldn't have taken much more than an hour. It did though. Weird. USB3. I don't get it. His new machine has an M.2 so that's nice.

Got back here, checked sites, videos, ate dinner. Got ready for tomorrow. It's dark at 7:30 now, when did that happen? Seems to have snuck up on me, I didn't think it was getting so dark so fast, but it is. Last day of September.

Called the guy I didn't reach yesterday, the guy down from Sean's so it's a half hour trip out there. Another setup, but he doesn't have much. Should be easy.

Houdini got out apparently. I noticed his water wasn't getting messy and looked for him. Not there. After all the work I did securing the cage too. I just cleaned him three days ago, and he was there at that point. He was in the tube between levels. What the heck? I guess I can at least be glad he didn't immediately get caught again so he's in the wind now. Enjoy every day being a struggle to survive silly mouse.

Got ready for bed. I had a half hour left before I wanted to get into bed and decided now that I had a decent weapon for my squishy human form in warframe I would check out the "wear the mask at night" quest. I turned the game on. I got into the game. I noticed that... it would be "night" in 30 minutes. The exact amount of time I had to play the game! Neat. Thanks warframe, for not letting me do the thing I wanted to do. Had I been designing it, I would have allowed a choice when you want to the planet "do you want day or night" and you can't choose that again until you've gone though the length of time the usual cycle is. That way you can do what you need to do on your schedule, not the game's schedule. Again, warframe really making it difficult to enjoy playing.

Thurs:
Meeting day. We talked about the whole "how should the feature work" and later in the day it was decided that yes, we did it wrong. Whoops. Will they be able to fix it before it has to go out? Doubt it.

Otherwise not much else work wise. Meetings, plants, wrote up the bones of the next book. I don't know if it'll be long enough but I started chapter 1.

Went out to the far away guy. It was fine, he didn't have much to move. So I moved it.

Got back home, Squeaker was nosing around the same place I caught Houdini last time. He was squished back there again! Ha ha, serves you right trying to escape little one. I tried grabbing him but Squeak got to him first, so I carried them to the bathroom and got him in the tub. He's in the aquarium now, I need to try and find a wheel he can use in there, because he's not getting back in the escapefull cage. It's a word, look it up.

Had dinner, checked sites. Got ready for tomorrow. No calls today.

October bound. Let's see what we might see there: More writing tomorrow, for sure. Bank, (kinda forgot last week, whoops) shopping and pet store. Then seeing parents. Snacks?
Then game, I think? Don't know if Sean worked out the next adventure, but I'm sure he did. He's a professional.

Nothing for the weekend, how odd. Oh, I'll print Jon's christmas gift, he got me something last year so I've made him something for this year. I've got it modeled we'll have to see how it works out. If I do it in one piece or two, that sort of thing.

Otherwise, a new month begins. So that's all for this one. Hope it's been okay for you, there's 3 months left in the year, almost exactly 8 weeks to turkey day and it'll probably snow in the next three minutes.

See you all next week.