2024-07-04:

Fri:
Fed everybody. Took Oliver in, he was curious about the rest of the house, he wanted to explore. No, no, they don't like strange kitties around there, Oliver!

Nothing obvious on the xray. Sigh. Brought him back home.

Some work on the tests for the new plugin, but I got distracted by two things.
The card login for cloud was working, so I finished up the initial tests there.
Then there was a long meeting about passwords and new security stuff handed down by corporate. It's all nonsense, even if someone somehow got past the firewall for our network, then somehow got on our network which is "physically" distinct such that no one outside the labs can even see our machines, and then somehow got onto our test domain... who cares? It's a test domain. There's no information on it. They're already further than they would need to go on the network. Why do we have to worry about passwords every 90 days? Or separate admin accounts and use regular accounts and get admin access only for specific tasks? It's overkill at every level, and makes our lives a lot harder. It's stupid. We're either going to script a password change every 90 days (if Ken can figure that out) or just erase all our users except those we are actively using and then have to put them back again if we need them later. What even even kicked this whole thing off? Was there some kind of breach that would have been prevented had all these weird polices been followed? Or is it just some new security guy being hired and wants to show he's "doing something" and making our lives miserable in the process?

Did the shopping, no good sugar just the nasty stuff. Bags and bags of it. I guess it ships in the box with half of the good stuff that sells, and the other half the nasty stuff that doesn't. Maybe they should change that?
Checked sites, and then did game. Got through the first 3/4 of the adventure! I thought it would be too short! Honestly we probably could have gotten through the rest in another hour or so, Things would have gone pretty smoothly once they got to the crystal empire.
Now do I put together episode 3? I suppose I should, I would have anyway... hummm. Yes, that's the plan. Problem is it could go one of two ways. I hate to develop both...

Sat:
Did so many things you guys!
Fed everyone at my parent's house.
Then went to good will, got a few goodies.

I did all the indoor stuff because it was raining pretty hard out;
I did checkbook stuff. It's weird how I used to be so on top of that sort of thing, but now that I actually have money, to a certain extent, it's not as much a priority anymore. I didn't even put anything into there last month, whoops, so I had to do some catchup.
I got Jade and her weapons out of the fabricator and modded them so I'm ready when we play next.
Baked a pie. I still have one more bag of berries, whoops.
Cleaned out the freezer, organized it a bit.
Thought about xmas gifts. Have an idea? For Neil anyway I don't think my idea for Sean is going to work. Sigh.
Picked berries when the rain let up a bit. It started again though.
Then did more reading.

Sun:
nicer day out.
Lawn doesn't need to be done. Fed everyone once more. Penny came right out to be brushed, she's knows what's good. Jingles still too scared. Even saw Onix. And Darien tried to take a bath in his water cup. They're all being silly.

Back here, did the weeding. Picked more berries. I have my small yellow container full of them. Still plenty coming along, but once again the ones under the trees right behind the house are going to underperform. So weird. Maybe I should just dig them up and relocate them to a sunnier area? Something.
Did the Sunday reading.
Worked a little on the MLP game, I had some ideas while picking.
Did Warframe with the others. Jade is so fun to play! Flying around, basically bombing the heck out of everything below you. They've really been on point lately, the last few frames have really nailed it. Jade actually has powers I use all the time. Even my previous "main" Mirage I only used like 2 of her 4 powers on a regular basis. But her? Spamming them! Now I can't decide who to play. Do I keep Dante around for the overguard? Jade because she's so fun? Mirage for the damage boost? And the new bow is fun with the "Split Level" mod I put on, but is it good enough to keep up with my Naturak? So many good choices now! What the heck, Warframe?
Got ready for tomorrow in there of course. Tuesday Oliver goes in again, he'll be so thrilled. He seems to be doing okay though. Hope he's gained weight again but it's only been like a week. So.

Looks like we got through it! We're to July.

Mon:
Got started on Joe's card test. I spent more time trying to configure the stupid machine than actually testing. At least today. Email didn't want to send, I was using a non-admin account because that's what we're supposed to be doing now, for "reasons". Oh and Ken started putting the new "policies" in place on our server. Who even knows what that's going to do to us. Anyway. It didn't work. Christina said it would, and I believed her. I'm pretty sure I had used a non-admin account on altalink myself, so it was a surprise to me when it didn't as well. Switching it over got that working.

Then I had to turn https on because the selection simply vanishes without a trace if that's the case, so I went to put in the code to make the machine accept SIPRnet cards and it wasn't there. Such great design. At least put it there and then give me an error as to what I need to do to enable it, rather than just making it vanish. I mean, really.

Oh, and the clone file didn't clone the whole machine. As I was walking out of work I decided that might actually be a bug, and I should write it up. I hate writing up Fuji bugs. Anyway, that screwed me over too because on the second machine, that I figured I would have no issues with now that it was set up properly... it wasn't. When I sent an email it gave me a different error than I had gotten before. But I did finally track that down.

I decided as there were no more machines in that room I had a code for (I have to ask someone else and Christina gave me a list of codes from an older test she did to enable this plugin) I would simply sign out and set up all the other devices I would test tomorrow. That way I can just walk in, plug the reader into a device, press the few buttons needed for the test, and then swiftly move on to the next device. If I've configured everything properly (and I haven't, I need to put another key in to each device to make it take the email address from the LDAP server, I hate VersaLink SO MUCH) (I forgot that part when setting them up) the test should take a half hour at most. Then I'll be mostly done with the test.

Oh and in between all that I remade my cert so I could email myself, because it was expired, set up a different machine so the developer guy could look a bug, got a haul, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Tomorrow I take Oliver in at 8:00 and hopefully put a lot of this stupid test behind me. Still no answer from Joe about exactly what he wants in the test. I guess he's just getting what I give him. And liking it!

Had dinner, checked sites.

Two calls, one guy it seems unplugging the router did the trick. The other lady I just had to adjust a few things.

Did Oliver's meds early, so he could get his churu in plenty of time. He's ready to go to the vet, I'll take up the food before i go to bed.

We did wind up doing xbox.

Tues:
Took Oliver in at 8:00. Got him back at 1:00, so I brought him home at that time.

Worked on the 90meter stuff. Gina is taking it over and telling me Joe is saying very different things than he actually told me. Like, I only need to do one model? Oh. Thanks for making that clear before I did every model. Yeah. Got XDM installed (thank you Christina). Report doesn't seem to work?

Was fighting with the cards too. The old ones weren't working. The error was "server is not configured to allow logins" which is crap. It clearly is, because I can log in with the new card just fine. After deleting a user and putting them back it worked, leading me to complain to Ken what was going on. Apparently I didn't understand that invalidating the passwords sort of "froze" the accounts so even though I was using smartcard, not password, it wasn't going to work. I had to manually go in and reset all the passwords of all the users I wanted to use. Neat! Thanks for that, Xerox Policy.

But the test is 95% done. I just have to figure out the report thing, really. Don wants to talk about the policy, not that he has anything to do with it so just let us handle it, Don. Whatever. So that'll be tomorrow.

No results on Oliver, I guess the doctor is out.

Came back here. Checked sites.

Did reading. I really gotta stop reading this story. It's so freaking long! Anyway, no xbox, MS had a service outage relating to login. And if you can't log in, you can't play 90% of your games! Such a great model, MS. So great. Well done.

Wed:
Had a meeting with Don, about the network stuff. So productive.

Figured out the XDM thing with the help of Fred, he didn't give me any clear directions or anything just assumed I knew what I was doing (I didn't) and asked about it. That at least showed me the thing to do.

So the plugin thing is done.

We're panicking because a client has finally gotten fed up with how bad the onedrive thing is and has given us two weeks to fix it. Yeah, maybe we should have had contracts in place for support before we started? Maybe we shouldn't have dragged it on for weeks doing nothing? Maybe daily meetings 2 months ago when the customer first complained? No? Okay then. Xerox deserves to lose this account. We hired some weirdo group to write a thing we easily could have written ourselves, they had no QA meaning we wrote hundreds of bugs, they take forever to fix anything, and I understand their frustration with us. I'm frustrated too. Projects that go on forever are in no-ones best interest. Look at the gabi thing, the voice nonsense. Worked years on that, no one bought it, and it was discontinued. It's the same thing here.

Worked on the pony adventure, and wrote a chapter of the story. Just got into the city, so there will be at least another chapter maybe two I will write tomorrow.

No obvious internal stuff for Oliver. Some slight irregularity in the kidneys and adrenal glands. They want to do a B16 (I think it was) blood test. They already have the blood, I said do it.

Fixed a machine the developer broke. I had it all the way I wanted. The developer guy asked if he could use it as I was leaving. I said fine. When I came in the next day the door was open, all my settings were wiped out, there was some weird 000.000 version of software on it. Clearly he had done nothing with it. I put D8.0 back on, cloned it so my settings were back... and now it has a fuser fault. Wonderful. It's a brand new machine. How is it this bad? Well, I don't think the developer needed it anyway. The one guy complained I hadn't included a log. Uh, it's a popup screen how is the log going to help? It's a visual thing. The popup used to happen in D7.8, now in D8.0 it doesn't. Do you really log that? Another developer chimed in "oh it was just a flag that was set wrong easy!" Okay. Someone knows what they're doing. Someone else... does not?

I think that's all the work stuff. No work tomorrow. Sheesh.

Came back here. Installed a new game! Another warframe clone, most likely. Sadly, everyone else and their brother also installed it. Can't connect to their server, it just sits there. Modded my warframe bows instead, looking at damage and such.

Ate dinner, checked sites.

Thurs:
Managed to log into the new game, got through the tutorial in case the others want to try playing it.

Picked half the berries, I'll wait until the sun is on the other side to do the ones on that side of the house.

Wrote the next chapter. All up to date now, so I can start on what we do tomorrow, next week.

More reading.

Picked the rest of the berries. Glad I waited. Much nicer out later than it was with the morning sun blasting down on me.

Let's look ahead. Huh, back to work tomorrow, boo! I don't think there's... oh no wait I have onedrive stuff to do. Well, it'll either get fixed in the next two weeks or it'll be thrown away I guess. So I'll be doing that.

Then the shopping as normal, and seeing my parents.

Then running game.

Saturday I'll have my parents over for movie night, the usual outside stuff... oh and maybe starting work on Neil's gift, as that's the only one I've come up with so far. We'll see.

Maybe work on the next adventure on Sunday? But we'll have some time no game on the 12th. Sean is away.

Dentist next week. With x-rays. At least they don't have to sedate me to get them. Though come to think of it they didn't sedate Oliver he came right back out. Only for the ultrasound. Huh. How did they manage that? Holding him with two people maybe?

Hope everyone is staying cool! See you next week, in the Kingdom of America, as that's what we have now. No really, it's true!