2021-12-30:

Fri:
Checked sites, videos for the day. Put in my timecard.
Cleaned up the house a bit, not that anyone was going to see it any time soon but it does tend to get messed up after Christmas so leaving it a bit cleaner is a good idea.
Played FF7 as I said I would in the morning.
After lunch I cleared the driveway off. It hadn't really snowed all that much, and it was wet and heavy but I wanted to make sure the snowblower was okay after the summer (it's electric remember so there's no reason it shouldn't be) and get into the groove if you will. So it cleaned off, and was actually warm enough to melt so anything left went away after a bit.
Cleaned the car out so there was some space.
Put things into the car for later that evening.
More FF7.
Then over to my parent's house for the game and dinner. Hopefully everyone liked their stuff, including all their many cats. My questions were too easy, make a note for next year to increase the difficulty slider.
Sat:
Christmas!
What else can be said? We had the Opening of the Many Gifts, and the Big Meal, and went out to see grandpa who was having trouble with his vision. I think a good time was had by all, so I would recommend the same next year. No snow by that time, or at least very little. Well, it was a white christmas eve, what more do you want? It wasn't quite warm enough to ride bikes outside but it wasn't snowing at all either. I do wish to thank everyone for the gifts, and hope you all had a merry christmas.

Sunday:
Mostly just playing FF7. I did some cleanup though. Putting gifts away and such. Didn't take the tree down just yet, I'll leave it one more week. Why not?
As for FF7, I would like to take this opportunity for a bit of a rant, so if you don't care please skip to the next paragraph. I hate games where there seems to be two sets of rules in place. This mostly happens in RPGs of course but the point was driven home in this case. In the original we try to defend a tower from being blown up, and we rush up the stairs without seeing the other members of the resistance group we had gone with to blow up the reactor earlier. It's later assumed they are dead. But in this game we rush up every floor and have opportunities to interact with each separate member. Who are all, I hasten to assure you, alive for the moment. Beat up? Perhaps. Injured? Of course. But 100% alive. Now, by the rules of the game we have options for these unfortunate souls. We, these controlled "by me" in the world get beat up all the time. All I have to do is sit on a bench and I am back to full health. Or drink a potion of some kind (I have I think 87 of the weakest healing brew the game provides). Or I can whip up literal magic in seconds that cures all damage. Do I do any of these things? No I do not. I just stand there and let all of them sucumb to their wounds. All I had to do was pass them each a potion. They were alive. There was no need for any of them to die. At least in the original I hadn't found them, so it was "plausible" they had run out of healing items or whatever. But I have tons! It's hard to become emotionally invested in the scene when I'm sitting there thinking, "but they're alive? Just heal them and get on with it." It's dumb. HP clearly exists in the world because it goes up and down for me. I buy things from stores, and materia exists, explicitly to restore it. So they must know about it. Or is the game saying that "I" as some godlike figure watching them "from above" dispense this healing at my pleasure and they just ignore the fact they all should be dead many times over because of all the fights they have? Doesn't seem like it. Weapons and armor have slots, materia is just sitting around, they know it exists. Can only "some" people benefit from it? Again, this seems nonsensical because then what would determine this? Now maybe you're saying, oh, but in the scene they don't have backpacks full of stuff so maybe inventory is abstracted for us and they don't know about it. Ah ha, but I can change their weapons at any time and I don't see Cloud carrying around 4 swords I only see one. So he must have pulled it from somewhere, or is the game saying he just believes he had that sword the whole time, despite that not being true? So they must have inventory, I mean they walk around swiping stuff out of treasure chests where does that stuff go? Inventory, right! They must know about it, nothing else makes sense, so they had the same number of potions I know they have on their person, at the moment these people were alive and well, simply injured. The whole thing just plays off wrong, the original game was better because it left to our imagination how they died, rather then showing us meaning we could have prevented it easily. A second point: why have a game with such flashy visuals if you're not going to let us enjoy them? There was a dance sequence I had to go through but for "reasons" I had to do timed button presses (not that there seemed to be any consequences for "failing" such button presses). So I couldn't really concentrate on the visuals of the game because I was watching for the quicktime events. Terrible game design, just awful. They put so much effort into motion capturing and animating the stuff onscreen and I had to ignore 95% of it to "play" a "minigame." Who thought that would be a good idea? It wasn't! Let me watch the cutscene in peace! One third and final thing: difficulty. In the beginning the fights seemed tough but fair, and I enjoyed them. Then the Hell House showed up, and the game said "that's enough of that." It's like the designers all sat around and said "you how how they do damage by hitting stuff? What if they couldn't do that? Like, because of some sort of force shield the enemy put up around itself? That is not explained in any way or used by any other enemy in the game?" and some intern probably said "But don't they need to do physical damage in order to raise the "ATB bar" we've come up with so they can later do magic, which we've artificially locked behind some kind of arbitrary constraint that only exists in a combat situtation because they can do magic or use items in the field all they want?" and the guy in charge sprang up and said "I want that man removed!" and he was tossed out a window. "Now what do we do for the next boss? We've done the force shield, how else can we prevent the player from enjoying the fight?" "I know," said another, "What if it was a ghost, and half the time their attacks just went through it for some reason?" "You're getting a raise," said the first man. So yeah, the fights have gotten worse as the game has gone on, not better. This is not how it should happen, fellows. I do like walking around without random battles though, keep that.
And had to get ready for another blasted week of 2021, you're already in the rear view mirror buddy, go away already!
Made some calls, didn't reach Ellen but I have one for Monday and one for Wednesday, both setups which always goes quickly and well. Didn't reach dentist guy, but he called back at 9:30. Didn't care at that point.

Mon:
No one in the parking lot when I got in, though someone did pull in while I was walking into the building.
Checked out the latest build of D5.6 which does have the revised auto-release feature, so I worked on testing that. Works, for the most part. Wrote up one bug, if you take the card out with the prompt up, the next user sees the prompt, jobs to release or not.
After work job was terrible. Should have been just a normal setup. Got the new all in one turned on, noticed it seemed a bit slow. Put my ear to it. "You're kidding me, it's a spinning rust drive?" It was! It booted once, asked me the keyboard stuff, and then rebooted. And sat there on the lenovo screen with no progress indicator. For 5 minutes. "Well, this is busted." I then worked on trying to determine what was going on. I tilted it backwards to get the model number and suddenly it booted. Wha? That's... not supposed to happen. So I booted it again. Waited 20 minutes, had it tipped at the beginning, no luck. Tipped it again. Booted. Crazy. I set it up for him, but something will have to be done. See, he's not the buyer, some relative that works for lenovo sent it to him. I said call him, see what he has to say about this crappy product. I mean spinning rust? Come on.
Went home, it was about 8:30 at that point. What should I see by the side door but a cat?



Doesn't seem hungry, very friendly but hisses while rubbing up against me. Played with the cheese wedge toy. Doesn't seem concerned to be here. Looked at various sites, no missing cat matching this description has been reported. Don't want to just toss them out the door if they are lost but they're not thin, clearly owned by someone. Await further developments.

Tues:
Kitty didn't tear the place apart and ate their breakfast (most of it) and is still just happy to chill out out there. No word on any owner yet.
Work wise not much happened. Christina figured out there is some setting she didn't have on the machines that made the cards not work, and a cert wasn't put on right I guess? But one machine she had used some time ago still had the cert and that's why that particular card worked? And a machine in the lab she was using seemingly hasn't been touched for like 5 years or more? Who knows. Anyway, she had fun doing some retests and sending emails and retracting them and all this.
Nothing new on my end.

Got some flash drives for Thursday, but he later called and said that day was bad, he double booked it, and I didn't want to work on fri/sat so I gave him Monday. I have it off as well, may as well make it miserable!

Got back here, looked into kitty posts, no new news. Still seems fine, hisses but friendly. I waited too long, I thought the vet was open until 7:00 so I would call at 5:00 and see if they could quickly scan for a chip. They close at 6:00 and I know how busy they are so I figured I would wait until Friday. Call in the morning then they can have all day to get me in, if they can. A few days of being upstairs won't hurt them. They seem content enough at the moment.

Checked sites, ate dinner. No calls but dentist guy as I mentioned before. Got ready for tomorrow.

Wed:
Somewhat opposite of Monday, where work was kind of a pain but second work went fine. Let's break it down.
So Christina didn't came in, didn't say why but let's hope it's not what you're all thinking right now. I wasn't told there was any danger so I'm hoping there isn't. Anyway, I got roped into doing the DMP testing she was going to do. Setting those machines up is a real pain. Well, with her help as she was still online I got the one machine done. The plugins worked just fine, no problems, right?
Then I got roped into helping Don with his "let's send this job a bunch of times so it prints from different trays!!!!!!!" That took like an hour and a half.
Then back to the lab to work on the second machine. This has a fiery controller. Now let me explain what that does: I HAVE NO FREAKING CLUE. 20 years ago maybe we needed a whole separate PC to rip jobs but do we really need them today? Anyway, it's just a pain. It was giving me an error message, and there were three different controllers sitting there so I was initially rebooting the wrong one. Whoops. Figured out which one it was, but rebooting didn't help. Sigh. So I reset the machine (luckily I could get that far at least) and set it up from scratch. That solved the error issue and boom, I started setting it up according to the directions I have. This didn't work out. One selection that was vital to getting the other machine to work just plain isn't there, I can't enable smime (email encryption I guess, why it's called that again I have no idea) so needless to say I spent the rest of the afternoon this close to getting it working, but did not manage it. So I'll have to go back there tomorrow and see what we can figure out together.

Then second job, which went fine. It was a laptop, with an SSD, and he didn't have a ton of stuff to copy. Petted their pup, talked to the guy, and came home at a reasonable hour.

Kitty is still fine, cleaned the box so they are using it. They are eating and I played with them a bit. Heather has a scanner I guess so I'm borrowing it so I don't have to go to the vet. I mean, wouldn't I have to anyway, it's not going to tell me who owns the cat just a number, right? I guess we'll see.

No calls, so ate dinner, checked sites, and then got ready for tomorrow, last day of work this week.

Played some FF7 and with Sweet-tart, who does love to play and get pettings. Probably because they are bored up there. Don't rush down the stairs though, what a good kitty.

Thurs:
Back to the other lab. We figured out that I could log in with the card if I put in the pin and then the user's password, so I just did that. We could not figure out how to get email signing to work. The checkbox just won't enable itself and of course the manual was just "do this" but not what to do if that didn't work. Maybe John will know when we come back to work Tuesday.
Otherwise sat by the printer and told Don about what tray his print came out of. So fun.

No job because Dentist Guy moved to next week, so I came home.

Checked sites, ate dinner.

No more Sweets. Sad face. Some guy showed up at my door and asked if I was Robert. I was Robert, but then I wasn't. Wait, no, I still am. How in the heck did someone figure out my address and come get the cat? I didn't post the address though I guess my full name was on the facebook post. So bizarre, but he said the cat was his. Hey, don't let her go outside from now on! Maybe? Bye little one, hope you had a good time here, and that your owner keeps you safe. He said she "likes to go outside." I beg to differ, she was totally content to be in the upstairs and get the occasional treat, playtime, and cuddle for the last four days. So there.

Played a bunch of FF7 and got ready for tomorrow. No work! Taking Christmas down, maybe the lights we'll see how the weather is. I'll do the shopping, hopefully the bank is open, and see my parents. Then go over to Sean's for board games. I don't know that we're doing anything Saturday, there was a non-committal response and nothing else. So I guess I'll just plan to resume movies with my parents. Otherwise not much planned for the long weekend, apart from dentist guy on Monday.

So that seems to be it. 2021 is done. It wasn't exactly 2020 but it was a close second. Perhaps 2022 will redeem it? Hopefully so. I'll see you all next year, have a good weekend.