2024-12-12:

Fri:
Realized I could finally get that test task off the board relating to D8.0 R25-2 "verify bugs fixed." Yay! Or not. Many of the bugs are still "active" or "accepted" meaning they haven't been looked into at all. There were 17 I think it was, I can verify 7. One of them still fails.

In testing them I had to look at one of the smaller devices and the developer guy agreed something odd was going on. We're not showing the first screen we used to, which confused me, so now you have to insert your card, hit the x to close the window, then you get the password prompt? That can't be right.

Anyway talked about that. Helped altboot a device.

The cases filled up! Yay! Haul on Tuesday maybe?

Found the test cases for the driver thing, I guess we did do it before, a few years ago. Looked it over, put it up on the site as "In progress" just in case. WHy did we did that on the lab PC and not our laptops? There was a reason but I can't for the life of me I can't recall it. We had admin control of the laptop at that time, it wasn't that. Oh well, I guess the virtual will be good enough.

Alyx was gently (I think) chiding me (rightly?) about not seeing a doctor or taking vacations. I did some quick math, and if I work to 75 (which I will the "retirement age" keeps going up and you think social security will survive?) and I get only two weeks off (I don't know the anniversary numbers it goes up on) plus every seven years there's another two weeks total from the two "personal holiday" days it'll mean I'll have been at work an extra year and a half.

37 years on the job (if the company doesn't crumble to dust that is)
2 days -> every 7 years is two weeks.
5 extra weeks from the 2 "holiday" days.

2 weeks every year
2 * 37 weeks + 5 weeks = 79 weeks
79 weeks / 52 weeks in a year = 1.5 years

Crazy! I guess small things really do add up over time. It is as Tetris teaches us. Mistakes pile up, and accomplishments dissappear.

Went shopping, no more cider. Sad.

Saw my parents. Got cookies. Happy. Thank you Heather for the cookies. Mom also did a great job on my pony's hair, thanks again!

Came back here, checked sites, got ready for tomorrow and did game. Sean was a tiny bit late but that was okay! We got through the learning of the first spell! The next ones should go much easier as they know what they're doing now. And each spell starts the same so they can bypass the thing that gave them the most trouble. Good, my prep work for next week is already done.

Sat:
Two magicraft runs. I know, I should have only done one. But I did get enough to get the final upgrade to my auto-battle build. I'll have 6 wands going for me. That should get me pretty far.

Checked sites, videos. Did my daily Descendant login to get Bunny later. I think I can get a standard descendant too. Looked into which I could get. Maybe the others will have a good idea what I would like. They have a dozen of them somehow.

Watched the claymation special while I ate lunch.

Watched a movie.

Wasn't much time left before I had to leave.

Over to Sean's for game. Whoops, Adam kinda sorta forgot. We went ahead without him. More food for us.

Killed some zombie deer, and saw the guy we're after. So he didn't miss too much. Not to brag but I took out 2/3 of the deer myself. Sean is thinking of adjusting the difficulty slider. I implored him to think of the others. Just because I'm a min-maxer doesn't mean the others are. We don't want to make it more difficult for them too! There are four of them (one NPC) and only one of me. That I killed 4 of the 6 enemies before us speaks more to a power scaling problem than "needing to make the enemies more difficult." 4/5 of the party couldn't take out their opponent in less than three actions. How is making them more difficult going to solve that problem? I just picked things that scale well and am outpacing the group because of it. Making it more difficult for them isn't the answer, right?

Sun:
Another Magicraft run before gift wrapping. On HARD. And I was correct, having 6 wands means the final boss worm thing honestly didn't have a chance against me. Seriously, he got taken out pretty quickly, I wasn't even worried. Didn't even get me down to half health. Take that, giant worm thing!

Ate lunch. Did the reading, not many stories updated actually.

Then christmas stuff! It's taking a while, actually. Wrapped my mother's birthday gifts and everything for my friends. Whew. Laid out everything else. Well, not the stuff for the game. That's a whole other issue. Still, plenty of time.
Then just some normal Sunday stuff, getting ready for tommorrow, made two calls. One person said "firefox tabs are crashing" so I focused on that for twenty minutes looking into why that could be. He only had adblock so I was running into a dead end. Then he admits that oh by the way libreoffice is crashing too. Uh, so okay it's not the fault of firefox and this would have been good to know 20 minutes ago. I ran a RAM test, no result. Of course the built in one is very rudimentary. Ran Mbam. No results. Not sure why it could be happening. He was looking at new laptops. Some piece of junk $400 deal. Yeah, that'll be great build quality. The other guy wasn't having his issue at the time.
Then did some xbox with the others.

Mon:
Two meetings today, the morning demo and another meeting about test strategy for all the models of machine we have now.
Christina was out. How dare she take her fully deserved time off!!!

Ah, Don canceled the meeting, rightly believing we should probably wait until everyone is, you know, at work? He's pushed it off until Jan 6th.

That means, well, not much to do.

Wrote a chapter. Just got the palace made, we're into the dungeon proper now. Naturally I can't, and won't, try to replicate the 4 hours of messing about they did to figure out the first room. So that'll be cut short but it's all good.

Very quiet day.

Came back here, shoot should have bought cat litter. I'll need some soon.

Checked sites, ate dinner.

Why yes I did start another run, how did you know?

One call, but he wants to drop it off. Fine. He can do so. I didn't reach him, but he knows the place and said I might not, just to leave a message. I did so.

Tues:
Went to lunch with the very few people left in our group. We used to fill up a whole room. Weird how that happens.

Otherwise in the morning I had a meeting with the PJL people, they pretty much have that done now. The two first entries were backwards, that was a thing, but otherwise they did some good testing and now handle the errors properly.

I also had the onedrive meeting in the afternoon, a meeting I shouldn't even be at right now because it's just about them getting logs again.

The usual Joe meeting was canceled.

I feel as though there was something else, but I can't recall it at the moment.

Finished the amount of content I have for the book. Looking over my rules document I need to make some changes I think. Or at least make sure all the example spells fit the current "template" and make a template.

Food is back in the cases, but piled on top of the food that expired today. It was still there when I left. Give me food!

Oh lunch was good. The Cobblestone. Basically just a piece of salmon and things on a huge bun. It was good, if a bit messy. Their fries were like thick slices not the usual type you think of.

And suddenly it was time to go home.

Got the PC that was dropped off. A yucky spinning rust HD 1/10 full. Ran Mbam in safe mode, it found some stuff. I want to check the disk but I get an error. "Close this dialog box, and then repair the drive." Uh, yeah windows, that's what I'm trying to do. Thanks. Please do what I tell you to do.

I've booted the machine in command prompt mode and tried to do a chkdsk. It's been just sitting there doing nothing for like ten minutes. Neat.

Checked sites. Had dinner. A small one.

PC finally did something. Corrected errors, nothing on the second run. Boots up and hangs out, but does get going I guess. Install dates are 2014 on some things so maybe it's a 10 year old PC? Windows 8 on the sticker. So yeah it's probably that old. Surprised it runs at all.

Two other calls. A checkup I guess he didn't elaborate said he couldn't hear me tomorrow. And setting up a laptop on Monday. We'll see what dropoff guy wants to do.

Then xbox with the others.

Oops, he called back. They're getting a laptop. Sure, that's one way to do it.

Wed:
Surprise work stuff today. Neethu was like, here's some color tables! And I asked Don "are these the color tables you've been asking about?" And he's like "nah, that went right to the customer" so I was like "so what are these?"

It's just more T-mobile stuff. Don't know why we don't strive for better color accuracy from the start, but their pink prints out red. We can clearly make it print pink, with the color table. But why do we need that? It seems odd to me.

Otherwise proofread what I wrote yesterday.

Food was gone. What the heck!? Years and years of a regular schedule and now this? You can't tell me some new policy went into effect dec 2024. Well, maybe we'll get back on track after the holiday.

Worked on spells and more tweaks for Building Block Magic. Made sure all the spells fit the template.

Then thought about The Game. I have the concept of a plan, we'll have to see how it develops.

And that's about it. Oh, of course I made the T-Mobile printouts and handed them over. Seems fine to me, it looked more pink than red when I put the color table in.

Went out to see after work guy. So dark out, and raining too! Neat. Not sure what he was doing but he had a lot of firefox windows open. And they wouldn't go away? Like I would close firefox and then open it and a dozen windows were open. His setting was just to open the home page. It's a windows 7 laptop. Still running Windows 7, I might add. Haven't seen one of them in a while. Sheesh.

Mbam came up empty and he doesn't have anything installed. I forced all the windows to close, rebooted a few times. It seemed fine. So odd.

Back here, checked sites, had my last dinner. I'll have to start making stuff for myself again. The horror. I don't want to bring lunch stuff here, eat that at work I guess.

One call, the guy by Sean's is not getting wi-fi out at the shop. Hummm. Going there at 3:00 Saturday. Hopefully it doesn't take long, I doubt it will.

Thurs:
Ah, meeting day. We meet again.

Did more work on the color stuff. Apparently we got a v2 of the color table for the tiny machines, and by my reckoning we'll get a third. I thought the original was fine but apparently not? But the v2 seemed worse somehow. One machine was fine, I guess, but the other was not pink at all.

Then I had to load software on a D4.0 device out of the blue. Thanks for telling me all this was coming, by the way, Kevin. We got a patch for that device. It seemed pink enough, but I dropped it off so we'll see what the man says.

Worked on The Game, I think it can work.

Some work on the dungeons, making sure the spells were okay. I reworked them.

The usual onedrive meeting, they want some crazy IPv6 garbage now. Look, just because the customer says "hey does it work with IPv6?" you don't have to fly into a tizzy and start demanding everyone look into it. Ask them "do you actually use IPv6 internally, because you are some kind of masochist?" Because the answer will be no. Who in their right mind would use IPv6 internally? It's beyond bizarre.

Anyway, Don wants me to look into it. Karen was happy enough letting the developer do so. As she should. We should no longer be their QA department. It runs. Our work should be over 6 months ago.

And Joe wants me to look at all the bugs not yet closed under D8.0 and see if they're scheduled for D8.5 or we're behind on D8.0. Fun.

And the prioritization meeting that never is that. We'll have it next week but not the day after Christmas.

Oh, also put the corrections in for Breaking the System.

Went to get cat litter.

Then home. Had dinner, checked sites. Maybe a run...

Looking ahead I'll do the stuff I complained about a second ago tomorrow. See my parents, do the shopping, and run game. We should finish the dungeon and move on to the first generated quest, if we're lucky.

Saturday is more wrapping I think, Sean's game of Pyre. What were we doing again? Oh, the spirit still, right. The big dungeon, that's right.

Sunday refine The Game more?

There you have it. I'll see you all next week.