2024-07-25:

Fri:
Hey, remember that crowdstrike deal everybody and their brother deployed onto windows devices because they are so vulnerable they need several pieces of 3rd party software to function in a "secure" way? Of course you do. Well, they crapped all over windows and any machine getting an update last night was Blue Screened in the morning.

WELL DONE.

Maybe don't rely on software proven to be terrible? Just a thought. I guess it turned out an update had all zeros in it, and rather than do any error checking which as everyone knows is nonsense they just processed it like a normal update and because it's a privlidged process, boom, down she went. Nice job guys, maybe sanitize your inputs? Do some sanity checking? I don't know, seems important to me.

All the PCs in the lab were down, it was funny I walked in and saw the lab PC was blue screened and thought "oh, that old piece of junk finally gave it up, eh?" Went about my business of picking up where I left off in the magical rules (and checking for haul, no haul) Adnan comes down and is like "what do you think about all this crowdstrike stuff" and I'm like "what are you smoking now dude?" Turns out I have a half dozen emails I had ignored talking about it. Whoops! We walked around the lab, hilarious! They were all down! Ken is going to have so much fun getting everything working again. I can't get into the VMs, I can't get into the machine that controls the VMs. I have no idea how he's going to reboot them all in that state. At least the physical hardware is a little easier to see.

Anyway, no real work, as the network was screwed up. (Wi-fi worked oddly enough but ethernet didn't)

Just worked on the spells and tried to keep from laughing too hard.

No shopping, didn't actually need anything. So I just went straight to my parent's house.

Then back here for game. What was I worried about? We got up to the castle assault, and they're actually going in alone??? Wow, I gave them an army but they want to sneak in. More power to them I guess. I'll reset the castle into night mode and we'll pick up there next time. I think it actually went fairly well, didn't really get to the castle and my hard work laying it out but that's okay. It's just moving the sprites around all they all need to stay and the backgrounds are of course all still needed. So it's not that much work lost. We stayed on task and that's what counts. Shouldn't be too long, I'll work on episode 4 as well.

Sat:
Did the lawn first thing.
Straightened up the house.
Took the cans down to the can kings. I got 8 dollars! They're still doing the pandemic thing where they just take your container, and bring you out money. I approve of this system. Time to start filling the can up again.
Picked a few berries, and I mean a few. Bagged up the ones I have, got another full one that went into the freezer. The next bag needs one more cup, will I make it? Looks like only 3 bags this year. It's not terrible but it's not last year. Weird, we had more rain too, I need to plant more bushes and get rid of more of that yucky ground cover in the back.
Did more trimming though. The stick pile grows ever higer.
Ate lunch
Then worked on the gift. Did the modeling, it wasn't too bad! I think. We'll only know once it's printed. Two parts went fine, one I had to almost completely redo. Not a big deal, they are not complex which made me wonder why I had to do it in the first place. Only take 6 hours to print all 3 parts? Not bad. Not like the 40 hours last year took me for only one gift. Going much, much smaller this year. As you could probably tell.
Ate dinner.
Parents came for movie.
Then xbox. We got more parts, so it was a good run.

Sun:
Started the model printing. Only an hour each for the smaller parts. They came out okay. The tops needed a lot of work but my wood filler stuff is still flexible so I fixed them. Looked into a reusable, and variable size box to made the mold in. Such a thing exists, only $9.99 on amazon. What would we do without you, daddy amazon?

Checked sites, did my sunday readings.

Ate lunch.

Did a few warframe stages trying to get a certain drop. Got 5 in one run once, but mostly 2 or less. Needed 20 so it didn't take too long.

The largest part is printing, looks good so far.

And it finished. Came off the bed a little bit, I can fix that when I build the box I think just by putting some filler in under it and letting it dry before pouring the stuff on it. Smoothed it out otherwise so all three are smooth, drying, and ready to go. I'll order more mold making stuff (I have some but clearly not enough) and resin, and we'll call it being in good shape, especially for July. Now for Mizzy...

Worked on the next adventure.
Watched a movie.
Got ready for tomorrow, no calls and no xbox tonight. Ready to start another week.

Mon:
Oh right, Biden dropped out of the race. Kamala? I don't know, we (the people) elected a woman president before but our electoral collage said "nah bro" and we got tRump instead. Will the same thing happen this time? I suppose (and this is depressing) it's still "anybody's game." So depressing. He's a felon, people, in the "law and order" party. A literal rapist and felon. Do you not see that? Really? He's also now the oldest nominee we've ever had. So old. He should drop out of the race.
Ken came in to work on our stuff. Our VMs are still down as of this morning.

Oh right! In the morning my PC just decided it wasn't going to recognize my external drive anymore. So of course my VM went down while typing stuff up. It actually gave an error message and could have recovered rather than just crashing (looks at you, Crowdstrike) had the PC, you know, seen the drive again. Had to reboot to get it to be recognized, and promptly updated my backup with the new virtual drive. USB still worked, I was still using the keyboard/mouse. It was just that drive it didn't like. Scared me, I thought my brand new drive was defective.

Love ya, windows! (said no one, ever)

He just got to them at about 3:00.

Diligently... worked on the next adventure and then finished the next chapter of the pony story.

Had a 4:00 meeting it turned out I really didn't need to go to, but fine. So I stayed late, and I won't have to make the time up on Wed when I leave early. I'll leave at 2:50 so I can get home at 3:00, give Tinker his gabipenton, and then get to the vet at 4:10. I don't think it will really have taken effect but we'll see.

Got a good haul, dropped stuff off at my parent's house.

Back here I checked sites, had dinner, did a kitty walk.

Worked on the next chapter.

Then xbox with the others.

Tues:
Christina is back!

And our servers are working again. Hurray. Had some meetings. The onedrive people are of course also (still?) dealing with crowdstrike stuff so they haven't had much chance to test our thing. But now they're getting some kind of imaging error when they scan the color job? Seems like a device issue to me, which will be proven when they try other devices I guess. I never saw anything like it. But it's still a bad look for us. Neat.

Wrote up to the stopping point in the game. So I'm in good shape there.

Nothing new has come in, so we're really just waiting.

Came back here, had dinner.

Worked on the castle, it's now in "night mode" and it's going to be tricky sneaking all those people past those guards. Good luck!

Did a kitty walk.

Got ready for tomorrow.

Then xbox.

Wed:
Met with Don about getting "test plans" i.e. a test summary from Fuji. Wow, they really went overboard on this cert thing. I did one test, they did 30? Do they not trust their machines? It's a cert. Like all other certs. You put it on, does it get served? Test over? But no they test airprint and LDAP and some random crap I don't even know. We're not convinced of the value, and oh I was told to go get the spec myself as the people who should be doing it (Kevin) tend not to. Uh, it's his job. Not mine. He gives me specs, I use those specs to make a test plan. I test the release. Why do I have to do his job? Get someone that can do the job, rather than making me do his job.

Spent the morning validating a bug. They "fixed" the issue of our low end machines (that should never have been accepted or released) not being able to scan 150 pages by turning on compression. Thus making the job take literally a half hour. One scan job, one earthly half hour. We rejected that setting in the OneDrive code because even the bigger devices that took 4 minutes to do the job were taking 9 minutes. That wasn't acceptable. But now the fix is to ignore the setting, use the compression, and make the customer wait. I mean I guess it "works" because the job does finish. If you wait. And wait. And wait. And wait. There was a big discussion about it. Part of the time was my B8055 crapping out again. When you do the update it hangs, tries again, and then fails. Tien said he fixed it, but no, he didn't. He says we need to order a scanner board for it. He didn't say he was going to order this scanner board. I foolishly assumed he would. I'll follow up next week to see if he did it or not. So yeah, I had to go through all that, then find a different machine to load the release on and get the timing test. Why is everything in our lab busted?

Did some proofreading. Not a lot.

Got a nice haul. Would have brought more to my parents but had to take Tinker in. Left early so he could take his pill and not be a jerk to the vet. It worked this time. He was fine. Maybe get his teeth done early next year.

Back here, checked sites. Ate dinner.

One call? Huh? What's that all about? I haven't had a call in ages. Just up the street from work, no big deal.

Got ready for tomorrow.

Thurs:
Very short onedrive meeting with the developer, told him about the image error at the client. Then the status meeting.

Otherwise not much to talk about. I worked on the adventure for tomorrow, and then on the magic system.

Our current guy from India is leaving soon, and we're getting our other guy from India back. It's musical developers.

Ken is putting together a budget for 2025, good time for it. You know, 6 months out.

Yeah, not too exciting today.

Went to email guy down the street. His wife's machine is... something. It's an old Win8 all in one that was running 2 antivirus programs. So that didn't help it. It also had a "drivers" folder on the C drive with a bunch of crazy stuff in it from 2021. Like the PC was rebuilt but while his stuff was saved it wasn't put back? He said Jeff worked on it, so maybe that explains.

Anyway, took the 300,000+ files out of that, freeing up 50+ GB which was about half his total drive space currently used. That didn't help much with the speed either. It's probably got some crappy laptop drive. I said to see how it went and I could return to change the drive later. It was almost 7:00 at that point and I didn't care anymore.

Got back, checked sites. Ate dinner.

Need to do one thing for the game which I'll do right now.

Whew, got that done. I don't know that we'll get to it, but episode 4 is by far the shortest. We need to finish eps 3 so if we go right into it, maybe? Wanted to be ready.

With that done I can relax a little. Looking ahead nothing huge planned work wise for tomorrow.

I'll go to the bank, shopping for sure this week, and then see my parents.

Run game of course.

Usual stuff saturday like berries, though I can't see getting too many at this point. Have my parents over.
I'll write up the next part of the adventure maybe? Who knows.

Yeah, nothing big planned for the weekend either. Not much of July left.

Oh, if I get my delivery I'll for sure work on the xmas gift, right! Can't forget that.

Good luck with the sale this weekend! (you know who you are)

See you all next week.