2024-03-21:

Fri:
More haul. Yes, I was surprised too! Nothing for weeks and now another half a box today. Some bigger things I'll give to my parents, and my stocks have reached a much more comfortable level. No salad or yummy cheesecake, but some breakfasts and the usual assortment.
Worked on test cases for the newly added tiny machine date range thing. Kevin looked it over and said it was fine.
Helped with LDAP testing, smartcard and convenience for the developer, so they could test their code. So we'll probably see that in a build fairly soon.
Did the shopping.
Saw the family.
Home for game, a few minutes late but it was fine, Sean was even later.
Still haven't beaten the river level. We passed part 2, the turtle looking things that were messing up the river, we had to rely on Miki's dream power which we've never actually attempted before. Because we were really stuck for it. We're in part 3 now, beat up some oni and we're headed to see the lord of the area about a dam they're building across the river. Let's hope I get to blow it up before we leave. Kinda looking forward to that actually. Still, I'm up to an even 50 XP while my current plans require at least 53. I'm almost there! I'll have a surplus by the time we're back in the real world and can get to work. With a surplus (57 or more) I can excelerate my training and have my two new items made at rating 10 in a month. Any extra then flows into new spells and my long terms plans, as I didn't expect to make so much "bank" so quickly. Thanks, disaster strikes card, you've really come through for us.

Sat:
Checked sites.
Did the cleaning before my parents came over.
Finished up the RPG, defeated Lilth (again).
Looking for the next one. Maybe back to sakura series? I'm not sure.
Did some reading of the new book.
Parents came for movie.
Then xbox.

Sun:
Download tax forms and looked over finances. One place had a loss since I last looked, that's not ideal. Everything else was up slightly. I'll print them all out huh somewhere I can't say where so we can do my taxes this Sunday.
Worked on the area upstairs. I have more plastic sheeting than I need, so I'm glad to finally use that stuff up. I bought it years ago, like 20 years ago. It's mostly just sat around since then. Anyway, looks really good. I got most of it done, I need maybe two rolls of insulation stuck up there and I can finish the last part of it off. I hope the kitties appreciate it. Area looks good, even if I did have to crawl around and lay on my back and whatnot to get it up there. I'll see about posting a picture later when it's done.
Settled on a puzzle game for a bit. Baba is you. It's a "push things around, never pull" style game where the things you push, mostly, are blocks of text that change the physical nature of the obsticles in the world. I got through I think 2.8 worlds, getting to the end of the third one. As with most puzzle games I found some earlier levels much harder than later levels. Go figure. But I'm pretty stumped on the last three stages of that world and decided I could always come back to it later. Yeah, that's the ticket. Hey, I at least gave it a try.
Moved on to a point and click adventure style game. Never really played anything like that, so we'll see how it goes.
Got ready for tomorrow. One call, but I didn't reach him. Something about email but webmail too? So it's not your PC then.
Did xbox with the others. Didn't get the warframe part we were going for but did score a weapon part I wasn't expecting. Leveled two weapons up and started building that one.

Mon:
Went to a demo, but it's a feature Christina took at the beginning. So I don't know much about it.
Ugh, PC was doing updates it was so slow this morning. It's acting better now.
Printed the stuff like I wanted.

Not much during the day. I did have another meeting for the onedrive stuff. We think there's a setting they can use to get smaller file sizes. So they wanted me to try with the EIP scanning tool to see if I got a similar file size with it off and what the size would be when on. It does give a much smaller file that's for sure but quality take a nosedive. I stayed late to finish that as the meeting was at 3:00. I could have just done it tomorrow I suppose but I figured I owed them.

Getting cold again. No snow though.

Came back here. One call so I have two. Yay.

Checked sites, ate dinner.

I take it back, it's snowing quite heavily. We have a coating already. Boo!

Spent 40 minutes on the phone with the guy from yesterday. Just password stuff, really. And you can't refuse the 14 day trial of malwarebytes anymore? Odd.

The other guy wanted me to come out. Sigh. Fairport, a 20+ minute journey. Yay.

Did some of the Broken Age. Got out of the clouds and into a cabin. Cloud shoes on a ladder? What will they think of next?

The xbox.

Maybe? It's past 9:30 it might be a bit late. We did some.

Tues:
Started out fine.

Did more onedrive stuff.

Found a machine setting that half affects the filesize? Very odd. Please explain.

Had the meeting, we get a week off as they're out of state maybe we'll have an answer by then?

Went to second job.

So SLOW.

Offered SSD as usual. Thought I could finally use an M.2 drive.
Nope, tiny drive.

Plugged both into copy unit. Something seemed wrong. Showed target disk as 1TB but it's only 512MB? Formatted and was checking it over. Suddenly windows gives me crap about damaged file system or something and wants to format the disk. Neat. So all his data is gone? Thanks. How is this acceptable?

I called him back, he said it'll probably be fine he has a 3 year old backup? Ouch. Maybe he has onedrive for some stuff?

Made a win11 disk and we'll at least get it booting again. I hate this.

No xbox tonight!

And it seems to be stuck at 56%? It's still writing according to taskmanager? I hate this.

Ah, it's at 91%!

It finished. Finally. And installed. Yay. Not that this gets his data back of course.

I'm going to bed.

Wed:
Right so yesterday was a disaster, let's discuss. And by discuss I mean I'm gonna type some stuff and you're going to be forced to read it, as that's the nature of the medium. So like it said above this guy didn't want remote help he wanted me to be there in person. And what I treat I was in store for. His system was super slow. I realized this morning maybe it was the "encryption" being turned on that caused it? I hadn't thought of that yesterday, but 30 seconds to just open a folder? Two minutes to open the browser? A whole minute to open a single website? I don't know, MS coders can't be that bad can they? I mean, okay maybe. Of course turning it off would have meant even more time sitting there staring at a screen but I digress.
The drive was a laptop drive, but supposedly 7200 RPM so it shouldn't have been that bad. Anyway, the usual fix is an SSD and he accepted. I brought it home and cracked the case open. Oh. It doesn't have a full sized M.2 slot, despite this being a laptop in an all-in-one case which is mostly empty. There would have been plenty of room for the connector. Oh, and it had only 1 8gb ram stick rather than 2 4gb which would be faster I believe? So another slow clap for Dell if you please screwing that up as well. It's some kind of half sized thing. So the ones I have won't fit. Delightful. So I pulled it out, stuck in into the dual drive bay I have with the SSD I'm going to use and opened up the cloning software. Right away I see something is wrong. The SSD reports as 1TB because I can just drag all the partitions to it and they're accepted as is. I figure this is a bad idea because if I do this, despite there being only 110gb of stuff, if it formats the SSD wrong that's a worse situation to be in. So I eject the drives, (or try to, it's "busy" which is a favorite of windows, the drive is always "busy" even though no activity lights are flashing and everything is closed. Yeah, "busy" how? MS? HOW? So I just turn it off, plug in the SSD alone, format it in windows which yes, shows the 512GB size, eject it again, plug in both drives again, and turn it on.
Now it wants to format j: partition meaning all his stuff is now inaccessible. Neat! And there seem to be no tools to fix this, that I could find. It's an error I've not seen before, which again is rare and special here I was thinking I had seen all errors in my time but no. MS has once again showed me there are always more errors to discover. So I called him to give him the great news his data is all gone. Why did he get rid of the old drive from his old machine? That would have been a big help right now, it wasn't that long ago. AARG. And of course he has no backup. Maybe I should have some new policy; no backup, I'm not touching your stuff. I don't know. Anyway, apparently his son did something like 3 years ago? He wasn't sure. If you have a backup drive why not keep it plugged in? What are you even doing?
So I got it running at least. We'll see what he has and if he remembers any passwords at all. Chance of that happening: 0%. Gonna be a great afternoon, I can just feel it.

Let me emphasize, this is a fairly new machine. I just set it up for the guy. It was that system you had to lay down to get it to boot? Remember that one? He had to get a different one, that whole situation? You remember. Like it was a lenovo, then he got a dell? Oh, and thanks, Dell, for the whole "let's put an M.2 slot but still use a spinning rust drive" thing. Love ya! Yer the best. (At being the worst!)
So why did this happen? Was it just a matter of time? Was it something I did? Was the drive really bad and that's why the slow performance and it just so happened to mess up fully while under my care? Yes I realize windows disks are super fragile and can fail in many, many ways but I wasn't writing to the disk. I wasn't using it at all, really. I had all the software closed. Nothing should have messed up the boot record or whatever the problem is that wiped out the ability to access the file table. But yet, here we are. It makes no sense.
Anyway this morning started off great too, my machine did the old "we can't load your profile" trick nice to see you again pretty flower that is the default windows background screen. Rebooted and logged in again. So great.

Oh yeah, as for the setting. I did more scan tests. Rick backed me up later and said "Yes, the scan to settings should not affect EIP scan that may be a bug" so I was right in saying it shouldn't have anything to do with it. But when I turned this one setting off for scan to my file sizes got way bigger. Like they hovered around 300MB for all three tests. Like it wasn't doing any compressing at all? So all three worked out to be the same size? I expected my results to be the same. And I was half right, which makes it all the more bizarre. This whole project is just turning into a real problem.

So right, work. Not much new to report. Still haven't gotten the green light on anything new, really.

Pleased to report SSD guy wasn't a total loss. Thankfully he had his passwords written down, they were mostly correct, and he did have an MS account so he was backing up to oneDrive. Whew! His physical backup was from 2019 so he was waaaay off there but I got some pictures back from that and left it plugged in, rather than in a desk drawer, so he can, you know, continue backing up? Yeah. Also thankfully he had logged into chrome so his bookmarks were backed up too. Neat.

So it wasn't a total disaster.

Got back, a lot of calls today? Stop it. Why all these calls?

Have to go Saturday morning to see about a monitor, and it really does seem like the monitor is bad. One guy didn't need help it was just a scam he rebooted and was fine. And answering some questions for another lady.

Ate dinner, checked sites. Snowed really hard, it was sunny and nice on the way home so I thought everything was going to be okay! But no, there's a real coating now. Isn't it spring?

Thurs:
At least today went better.

I did get the news of what version to test for the cert stuff and ARM, so I'll pick that up tomorrow.

Got a machine ready for Kevin, he's coming to look at it tomorrow.

Listened to fax tones as loud as they could be, over and over, as a developer I guess tries to drive me mad? Why? What have I done to deserve this?

Finished the story I was reading. It's not done of course. But the content is.

Had the usual meeting. Watered the plants.

Went to second work. Her old laptop would not cooperate. Spinning endlessly to turn file sharing on. Then it wouldn't recognize my USB drive, simply spinning and spinning "installing driver." Uh huh. Sure.

Finally ripped it out of there, did the usual sitting for 10 minutes (or more) while the "permissions" got updated (thanks again, MS love ya!) and finally was able to copy her stuff over.

Got home at 6:00. Checked sites, ate dinner.

One call. No game tomorrow and it's the guy literally down the street so I'll just stop on the way home. Something about a password, as usual.

Other future looking: I'll do the shopping tomorrow, some actual work, see my parents. No game.

Saturday I have a 9:30. Monitor guy. Then back to Sean's for the Pyre game again, yes, so soon! I'm shocked too.

Sunday I also have to work, a Mac guy that suddenly seems to have lost his mind where email is concerned. Should be a ball of fun and then taxes! Yes, don't forget that! Yup, going to be a busy weekend this time. Sure glad I love those.

Anyway, that's it for this week. See you all next time, back up your data!