2024-04-18:

Fri:

Spent much of the day doing the D8.0 test, which went fine. All the readers updated as they should, and I took it off the list.
Had a "demo" of part of the EIP stuff in the morning. They didn't really show us anything but the UI changes, not what happens when they actually change stuff. I wasn't impressed. Hopefully the second one next week will show some improvement. Note that demos are supposed to be done when the feature is ready to test. This whole project has been like pulling teeth.
Got another haul, so I brought stuff to my parent's again. Many breakfast things I'll bring home next week. Going to have to start eating them for dinner as well, or something, if this keeps up.
Oh right, modified some of the EIP test cases after the demo.

Didn't need much at the store, and went to see my parents. Dad wasn't here, he was at some show.
Saw one deer but it freaked out and ran away at once.
Came back here, Sean decided on no game. I finished up moving stuff to the NAS, got iTunes -> sorry "Music" to see the new location, hey this thing can do bittorrent (uh, which I know nothing about of course!) and even home automation all on its own. Neato!

Moved Dropbox over to it. That took a bit of creative thinking as it has to be HFS+ which the NAS... isn't. So I made a sparse disk image, mounted it, and copied all my files into that. Ha! Take that, foreign file system!

Looks like it's going to work out great. Now I just need my multi-disk bay to arrive and do a backup, then I can truly be secure, or whatever. It's a lot faster than my old way of doing it. In every way. Should last longer too, as it's not 4 spinning disks that have to power up every time I want a file. I mean yes, they're off most of the time because I'm not home, my thinking then was valid, and still is, this is simply better. That should come tuesday by the tracking number.

Went to bed, no xbox.

Sat:
Looked at the NAS stuff, home automation stuff, even the minor things I want to do, could be expensive. Worth it? Humm.
Worked on crunching down some video files, should have done that before all this moving it would have saved time. I forgot they were there.

Worked on the modular magic system, then had lunch.

More working, then made a simple ramp and put some carpet on it for the playroom. That might be it?

Some spells just aren't viable. Like the rain spells, with my "range" mechanic you would never reach the clouds. However, combined with the "ritual" mechanic it would be fine, and more logical if you want to effect something as huge as the weather, you should need to gather a lot of power to do it. That's what the ritual is for.

I don't like my weight calculation (or "power") just to knock someone back 10m is 46 MP? No, that can't be right if a fireball effect is 28.

Maybe I'll do something closer to TK in paragon now, with a table that starts at 1 for 1kg and goes up much faster.

Went over to Sean's for game. We didn't actually get to the curse stuff, which I guess he did prepare for. It turned out the adventure we were on had another adventure inside it, which we of course had to mostly slog though, then we did the "adventure" we were on (quickly) which was just a fetch quest request so we have two new adventures now (the other adventure was just freeing some kind of wind spirit... who sent us on a fetch quest) so I have no idea what we're doing next. The wind spirit thing seemed to indicate there was more than one object they needed to be freed, so my vote would be to pacify the dragon so it doesn't get any weird ideas about attacking dwarven cities (and why would it when it supposedly wants to just be left alone? Wouldn't that be counter productive?) then do my curse stuff, then look into the wind spirit thing.

Sun:
The usual stuff.

Read my stories for the day.
Did more NAS stuff, moving things around, getting the drives ready to be pulled out, watched a few things and tossed them. There were some things I was using in the "old dropbox folder" folder I needed to save, good thing I caught that.
Checked sites, watched videos.
Did some warframe, got the last things I needed for the gun part and started building it. At work I can use the app to fit the pieces together and start the final weapon build. When it's done I can level up the warframe and his two weapons at the same time. Oh I also modified my usual warframe, Mirage, to incorporate the "anti-knockdown" mod I got a little while ago. I won't be able to get up to 100% as she is now, but I can mod her again once she's level 30 and reduce the cost of another mod, allowing me to fit everything in. Would be nice not to get knocked over anymore.
Got ready for tomorrow.
Two calls, one lady that typed 32 pages of text but still really didn't know how to use LibreOffice, so at least her stuff wasn't lost. And a setup for tomorrow, it's not too far from home. Still hate setups though, it'll likely be hours.

Did warframe with the others. Got my current frame up to level 29, missed level 30 by that much. Sigh. Oh well, whatever.

Mon:
The D8.0 builds are failing, so no testing that for the time being.
Spent some time with Ken trying to change a password, more corporate stuff, the S3 was supposed to mean we only had one password. Not three. And he has to do a bunch of stuff behind the scenes to make it work. Poor guy.

Finished the next emberhaven chapter, and started another. Just about to go deeper into the cave.

Then the horribleness started.

First was after work job. The stuff transferred fairly quickly, there was only 13GB. That was fine.
It was the printer. Apparently there's a brand of HP printers that MUST go online. (I found at least someone complaining about it in 2022 so it's not new, strange I never came across it before) They force you do to it, you can't just set it up and run it as a USB printer. This printer had no Wi-fi. Yes, a printer they force online has no wireless. Neat. (there was a model with a slightly different number that did, and the manual talked about it, they didn't even bother to print different boxes/manuals/etc. Classy, HP, classy) Thankfully her router was close by, I had to make an ethernet cable for it. I had one that was way too long, every other one was too short. I finally got the code it needed to punch in to the website, so it finally printed. Yes, I had to do this. Just setting it up through windows and sending the test page, after canceling their stupid wizard? Nope, it just sat there and refused to print until I jumped through all the hoops. Worst experience ever. The code vanished, she had to set up an account (she had one, so she had to reset the password) there was no clear way to get the code back, why is something as simple as a printer this difficult to set up?

Do not buy an HP printer.

Then I got home. My package was delivered! Yay! I took it out of the box, I put the drives in, I was looking at the manual. "Where do you set the raid level?"

Oh. Crap.

They made a 5 bay enclosure that doesn't have built in RAID. Neat! Why would you do that? Who wants 5 disks mounted on their desktop? It even seems to admit this is not what you want. "Do Soft Raid in MacOS" it proclaims. Uh, no? They have another model, it looks almost identical, IT has RAID support. Sigh. So I took it all apart again, packed it up, and returned it. Ordered the other model. Yes, yes, this is at least 80% my fault for not realizing that a 5 bay enclosure would not have RAID. It's just such a stupid thing to leave out, I figured they would be insane to do so.

Oh, you poor fool. They are. They are that insane.

So is it worth it, Orinco or whatever company this is? Was it worth it to trick me simply because I didn't read the fine print closely enough? Everyone lost here. You lost the original sale, Newegg lost because of the time and effort to ship this back and forth, it can't be sold as new now, I lost time  figuring out and trying to fight with the thing to make it work on the NAS. (Which only saw one disk, for reasons? The PC/Mac saw all of them so I know it worked) And now it'll be another week before I have a backup using the "correct" unit. Great, just great all around. Why not just have one product? Is developing, testing, building, packing, selling two nearly identical products really worth it? And my company is just as bad don't get me wrong it's stupid everywhere it happens but this... seems particularly egregious. Hey, I seem to have spelled that right the first time, go me!

Finally ate dinner, checked sites, and it's time for bed.

Oh, and I have to go back to that lady's house because she forgot she wanted me to try hooking up her camera or some crap. That's on you, lady. I should charge you again. "Anything else?" I asked after setting up her printer, phone, new laptop, I've been here longer than I really wanted? No? Great! Byeeeeeeee.

Jerk.

So fun.

At least she's just down the street, I guess. Maybe... do it yourself? If you can't set something up, maybe you shouldn't be using it, sort of thing?

Tues:
Many meetings today.

Had a demo of sorts first, developer code only, not in any release I could test with. We saw it work, I guess? It's really slow on our low end machine. Thanks, lexmark.

Then I did my new training, for GenAI... that doesn't exist. GenAlgorithms exist, but there is no "I" in "AI" yet. Honest. It doesn't have thoughts. It's just code. Anyway, it was "hosted" if you will by a very creepy pair of manikins if you will. I had to stop looking at them eventually, they were really, really creepy. They kept mispronouncing words, and the way they spoke (they don't have to breathe after all) was really weird as well. Very unnatural. I just focused on the subtitles. Was this supposed to be some kind of meta-commentary? I have no idea. I don't think Xerox is that subtle. Takeaway- AI is so powerful, it can transform our business! Never use it for business purposes!!!! Wait what?

Then another meeting, more Joe stuff. A new feature coming in October I guess, but more XDM. I don't understand why we're not just using clone files for this, that would already do what the customer wanted?

Then in the afternoon the usual OneDrive meeting, nothing new to share I don't have any new code to test or give them.

In between all that I wrote the next 1.5 chapters of emberhaven, taking us up to the ending point of last Saturday. I'm ready for two weeks again. We'll probably do the dragon thing, then my thing, then the wind spirit thing because that's the longest (we think).

No haul.

Went to second work. Reason she can't get her camera online is simple, if obscure. Her "advanced" spectrum router binds both 2.5 and 5Ghz signals into one name/password. Sadly, the camera only operates on the 2.5 band. Trying to manually turn this "feature" off via the router was of course met by "go download our app" which I did. Why? So they can show me ads I guess? There's really no other reason to obfuscate it so. Anyway no dice. Looked it up, I'm not the only one complaining about this. One person's "solution" was to simply try to move beyond the 5ghz range so 2.5 was all that was left, and connect things that way. Yeah, thanks. Spectrum? You suck.

Oh, right, gave my package of the return to UPS. Byeeeeeee.

By the way, what product do we never buy?

That's right kids an HP printer! Good job, you remembered from yesterday!

Got back here, checked sites. Got ready for tomorrow, did some xbox.

Wed:
Another incomplete demo this morning. And at 8:00, as I got the haul (and sorta forgot about it) I was a bit late. Whoops. Didn't matter. I watched the recording and didn't miss much. The demo was actually over when I got there. He just showed logging in with the key thing. And Joe was like, okay but what about the control and the customized blocking screen and the other strings and the guy was like, oh, that's part of this too?

Yeah, that's part of this too!

Sigh. So no sense taking that build until everything is in. Christina loaded it, not realizing it was so incomplete, so I also did a login just to see it work. Hey it worked! We knew it would, I tested that part already. Neat.

Otherwise just finishing the next chapter of Breaking the System.

No after work job, came home. Checked sites. Ate dinner.

Several calls, but all over the phone stuff. Typing lady wiped out her progress again, clearly doesn't know what she's doing. New laptop lady couldn't scan, I guess the HP software I installed didn't do the scanning part. So I had to do that manually.


Do not buy an HP printer.

And a guy asking about signing a PDF.

Got ready for tomorrow.


Thurs:
The morning was taken up somewhat doing a Kevin thing, printing things to see the color. Also found out the job didn't want to print when submitted directly, which turned out to be a memory issue we've fixed (supposedly) in D8.0. It probably won't be brought back to D7.8. Thanks guys. Why are these $2000 machines so memory constrained again?

Had some meetings of course. OneDrive meeting. The status meeting. Next week is going to be rough, I'm double booked for like 2 meetings on Tuesday, one of them is supposed to be an hour and a half. There's an 8:00 meeting on Monday that's that long. It's crazy.

Gina wants a fairly long test on an old feature, "just in case we messed it up!" How about we just don't mess it up then? They're not even using the thing we changed, as it didn't exist yet. I hate her projects. They just keep coming back time and time and time again. Why? Nobody else's projects do this. Just hers.

Came back home, checked sites, had dinner.

Did some warframe, got the parts I was going for in the circuit. Also got an affinity booster so I leveled up Mirage twice, making her basically my strongest frame at this point. Finally I have a warframe that can't be knocked down. Trouble is I really like the new frame a lot too! Maybe I can just go back and forth. Give them both some love.

No calls.

Looking ahead we may not do game again. Sean isn't sure, he's still pretty busy at work. I will do the shopping tomorrow, still not worth going to the bank. See my parents. Nothing big planned over the weekend, as the cat area is done now. Need a new project. Ah, work on the modular magic system. I've been thinking about it, just need to get some notes down and refine it more. Have my parents over for movie night.

This image should have been seen last week. I uploaded it, so I did intend to have it up there. I don't know where it went. Sorry.

See you all next week.