2023-04-20:

Fri:
Quite busy. More gabi stuff came in, but doesn't work. He went back to the generic screen and voice prompt, which I don't understand. Why does one work and not the other? How are they different? You can't programmatically change the text based on the situation? Doesn't make sense to me.
Putting the lockdown together. A lot of it just doesn't seem to even exist on the machines anymore? Mostly because of SSDs. We don't use McAfee anymore, that's out. Audit log seems to be locked to the on position even on devices that aren't locked down. I pity companies that pay for this, they're now getting half the features they were before.
Printed the book, hole punched it.
Then doing the lockdown test, at least a tiny part of it. Some can't even be done as noted above. But I'm just whipping through it. Yeah. So worthwhile.
Bank, then shopping and parents.
Back here for game. We took care of the wolf beast and didn't die. It was sort of narrated, and basically only worked because Sean didn't want us to die, after he put us in the situation that was about to kill us. Neil made one persuasion check that calmed the raging beast and kept it from attacking. Sure, sure, the wolf spirit becomes enraged, becomes Voltron, possesses the earth so it becomes a rock version of itself, runs over there, takes out half a temple by thrashing around, and a 16 year old saying "hey, can you please not attack us?" works just fine. Pretty reasonable, if you ask me. Started the next adventure, but didn't get too far. We got new members of the culb, so they can get killed off instead of us.

Sat:
Did the paperwork for last month. What little of it there was to do, anyway.
Did ellen's stuff, changes to the website. Didn't realize I would still be doing this twenty years later.
Vacuumed everything that could be vacuumed. Even the cats. (Kidding). I did clean off the pac-man cat bed, the bathroom curtains, the stairs.
Washed the floors. Shoot, forgot about the upstairs. That floor needs to be washed too. Washed the table in the breezeway, the counters, all that good stuff.
Game is canceled, invited parents.
Finished washing up.
Did some mining so I could get the gem I needed for the last part. Building now. It was pretty annoying to get but it turned out I didn't need as much as I thought, so that worked out. I now have both types of necromech, or will in 3 days.
Dinner.
Parents came for movie.
Then did some reading.
Then xbox.

Sun:
Picked up the sticks. Checked everybody and cleaned out some dead stuff, like the old milkweed stalks. May have good berry bushes this year, fingers crossed. They have tiny leaves, so let's get to making flowers and then, berries. Humm, wonder if I should make that second pie yet or wait until next month.
Checked sites.
Finished the book I was reading.
Worked a little on the pony book. Some strange stuff in there. At level 20 you ascend? Uh, no, that's only happened once in recorded history. There aren't going to be 4-6 new celestial ponies wandering around. And retire them? What if the adventure isn't over? Very odd. And we won't tell you how to play a yak or other character here, but buy another book and we will! Nope, one adventure with this book is all they get. And skill checks aren't a flat "bonus" like they are in paragon, you roll a d20, meaning you stat doesn't even enter into it? And then another die based on your skill level. So d2 for low skill, d12 for high skill. That's terrible, worse than Paragon. A concert pianist can sit down to do a concert and despite the fact they've been doing them for 30 years they can just as easily roll a 2 and basically forget how to play the piano. Meanwhile a 5 year old that's taken one lesson can roll up and get a 22 on the same check? How is that in any way fair? At least in Paragon, where there is still the possibility of a huge skill range, you can somewhat control it because the skill itself is a flat number you just add at the end. If you want to be good at it, you just have a bigger number. It's not "the possibility of a bigger number." Dumb.
Got ready for tomorrow.
Made a call. Twenty minutes to tell her "please follow the directions I've already helpfully provided you, then what you want to do will work." Strange how that works, isn't it.

Mon:
Rain. Back to lockdown tests I guess. I did find one feature I thought was gone, it's just been renamed. It worked just fine over the weekend so that's good I guess.
Spent most of the day with lockdown, and I still have more to do. It's slow going. Chris didn't put his best foot forward with these, but I'll get through them.
Also talked with Don, he was messaging me back and forth like "but what did you do" and I'm like "I've told you what I did!" so finally he called and discovered he was using the word device but he meant something else and finally admitted that yes, his question was totally misleading. Sheesh. Stupid challenge password.
Nothing else. Just chipping away at stupid lockdown. Oh, I did write up a bit of directions to add the cards I sent away to another server. Right, right, that too.

Back here, rained a bit. Checked sites, ate dinner.
Digested more of the pony book. I'm to the combat chapter. It's a lot to absorb but then, when we used to play shadowrun we spent more time looking up rules than actually doing anything in universe so maybe that's not so bad?

Tues:
Got though almost the rest of the lockdown stuff. There's only one more "test" and that's making sure the email time is somewhat randomized. Thrilling, I know.

Had two meetings, the first about the cards and cloning went like this: Here's our table of results. Wait did you clone to a different machine or the same machine? The same machine. Throw that table out it's useless and do it over. Okay.
Fantastic.
The second meeting was the usual Joe meeting about his projects. Fine.

Went to the shipping area too, picked up the video adapter for our little box.

Oh, no haul. The stuff for the 18th was gone and new stuff put in, but nothing in the trash. Sad face.

Came home, checked sites, guy for the fan came. Whoops, it wasn't the fan at all. It's his busted optical drive making that noise. Sigh.

Ate dinner.

Got ready for tomorrow. Last week we didn't do xbox we'll see what happens this week.

Took two calls. One lady with "black and white stripes" on her screen. I hate doing LCD replacements. Especially unseen. Hopefully Dell doesn't screw me yet again by having more than one model of LCD in this particular model of laptop. But I did sell her the thing so I guess I have to offer to fix it.

And a lady just up the street who I guess was scammed. Shock and surprise. That's Thursday, tomorrow is a possible HD issue so that will "only" take 3 hours to transfer to an SSD. Looking forward to it!

And it was snowing outside for a moment, fantastic.

Made vet appointments for the boys. May 29th? Wow they're really backed up huh? And I just got the notification too, I didn't wait like I usually do.

Finished the pony book. Started making Sunny, and discovered I do not like character creation. Part of what I need to know is at the beginning of the book. Part of what I need to know is in the middle. The sample characters don't have the same character sheet I'm trying to make, so it's tough to know where everything goes. Things are added to because of things you can pick later in the process, and the boxes you need to put number into a quite small. I may need to rewrite or at least summarize the process for the group.

Looked into reviews or youtube videos about the system. Nothing? That's odd, it's been out since March something I guess. Has no one tried to use it to do a game yet?

Wed:

Met with the people in India (virtually I mean) to try and help them with their server. They can't use the new cards we implemented. Everything looks right, and the error message is, of course, not helpful. It's saying "bad password" but it's not. We put in a "bad password" and the count of allowed tries went down to 14. Had it really been "bad password" the number would have been much lower. It's actually really weird, and my biggest fear. That I set something up wrong, we test it and it works, and once the customer gets it, setting it up right, it doesn't work. It's why I wanted to stay far,far away from challenge password.

Otherwise, not much else. I finished up making Sunny for the game. And wrote up a summary of how to make characters in the MLP system. Because it's all over the place. But I think I understand it now. Still didn't give her any magic, that's a whole different thing.

Got just enough sandwiches out of the trash for the rest of the week. Odd, but I'll take it.

Went to after work job, it wasn't acting up but given the messages she wrote down (thank for you that, you have no idea how many people don't) I suggested replacing it. It's cheap enough. Naturally it was going super slowly so I came back home. She's just down the street. Stupid thing.

Checked sites and ate dinner.

Called her at 7:00, no other calls by the way, thank you for that universe. It was 40% done. So I'm not going back there yet!
Called at 8:00, it was done, so I went over there. Whew. All set.

Thurs:
Wrote the last bug about Lockdown today, the random nature of sending emails was not random.

Then I got to work!!!!!!!! Learning about magic in equestria. Figured out how to add magic to the character sheet, updated the guide.
After that was done wrote the next chapter of the Legacy story.

There were some meetings, still don't have the final OneDrive files so nothing there. The usual status. Yup, not much going on at the moment.

Went to after work job. Changed all her passwords, at least she did have most of them written down, still took an hour and a half.

Came back here, checked sites, ate dinner. No calls.

Looking towards the future I'll do the usual tomorrow, the shopping. It's my parent's anniversary so we're eating out. Then game. Sean says he's "really looking forward to" this one which is scary for us.

Then Saturday. More cleaning, the upstairs floors, maybe the downstairs floors again. Have my parents over.
No game until the 6th, not sure which one yet though.

Played a bit of Legacy. Didn't get as far as I would like. The game is a series of delays but I did bug it out. You're supposed to go work with a professor but whoops, I already "cheated" in the spell so he left the room, glitched out, and was suddenly back. I talked to him and he continued the questline. But there's no getting past him being taken by the headmaster. Naturally I have to get past that part because in my story we'll leave right away. Oh well. If I don't have enough I'll go through the pony book and mark down the sections where there are important rules.

And that's it, I guess. For this week anyway. Hope you all had a good one and I'll see you all back here for the next one.