2025-03-13:

Fri:
Let a mouse go, hope you do okay little one!
No news about the color table.
Put in the changes in that Alyx sent me.
Did part of a chapter.
Did the shopping, then saw my parents.
Come home, ran game. Got through the adventure just at midnight, so that was timed well.
Off to the next dungeon!

Sat:
Cleaned out the junk drawer a little, I was looking for metal roof stuff (when I was doing the insurance thing) and decided it needed a bit of attention.
Picked up the living room, no more table! Gave kitties some catnip to celebrate, I haven't given them any in a long time it's just been hanging there.
A little cleaning, as it was already clean from Alyx's visit.
My conflict with the mouse kingdom continues. I have been assured by the very gods themselves that there will be a victor!!!!! Sadly that victor may not be me...
Looked at the security footage. The mouse issue is not solved.
Look at this absolute cutie pie! I mean he must be there somewhere, it's a little blurry...




Did he not even go in the trap? What gives? Still, did some vacuuming in there.
And washing. How many mice can one house hold? What are they eating? Especially to produce the amount of poop I find! It's bizarre. Please go in the trap and stay there little ones! Do not chew on it either.

Finished up the MagiCraft run I had started.

Did some first descendant stuff, a solo mission for the character I use.
Parents came at the end of the big monster fight. Lost. That's okay.
Did movie.
Then xbox with the others.

Sun:
TWO more mice overnight. Two. For those keeping track at home, that's 6 mice caught in recent days. Now I see why I'm awash in mouse poop. A few aren't eating and just spraying poop everywhere, there's a million of them each pooping once! Is this the end of the war? I doubt it.

Did the morning readings. The late morning readings, as we lost an hour. I should look around for it, maybe I can find it again. Musk will find it for us, no doubt.

Then lunch.

More first Descendant, I got another one of the guns I got before so I can smash it together with another gun and make it better. I love the realism in this game, it's so refreshing.

What do you mean you've never smashed two things together to make a better version?

Then FF7 for a bit. Finally to chapter 10 and a new area. Why does cosmo canyon have to be an area? Why can't we just visit Nanaki's home town and be done with it? At least it seems to have less things? I don't know.

Getting ready for the week and such. Made food. The usual stuff.

Made 4 calls. Two appointments, a setup (yay 2 hour+ jobs!!!) and a printer setup (I mean really? You can't plug a printer in? That's basically all it takes these days) switched a lady's default browser back to chrome (thanks MS) and didn't reach leTex guy from last week. Good.

Humm, now what? Calls went on for a half hour.

Some FF7 I guess.

Okay, there's a worse area than the mushroom jumping area. Who knew? Trying to glide around an area is really annoying. And the dive mechanic from the batman game? Really? I couldn't get the hang of it then (and stopped playing the game because of it that I recall??? Not sure) so I'm pretty sure I'm not going to get the hang of it now. So many times in the stupid "training" minigame I just slammed into the ground. Yeah, this doesn't work fellows.

Mon:
Took 2 mice over. Nice day outside.
No work though, still not ready.
I did make another printout for the guy.
Just did reading, Delve, my second favorite story on RR. I figured I re-read my favorite one, better do the same for this one. It's not done. The magic system doesn't go as deep, but it was going somewhere before it stopped being updated.

Then to second job. Did the setup, pretty standard. Once again sitting around for 20 minutes while Win11 "updated" after turning the machine on the first time. You suck, MS. And why does it take so long to copy stuff? I did a shared folder thinking it would be faster than trying to disassemble the old laptop. Sooooooooooo slooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwww. It was 2GB. Over a modern wi-fi with laptops a foot apart. It should take a few minutes. Not 30 minutes. It should not go a kb per second. MB per second minimum. Got home about 7:00.

Had dinner, checked sites quick. One call, so now I have a Wed. job. Neat. Something about an email account.

Got ready for tomorrow, Sean wanted to start It Takes Two so we did that.

Tues:
Spent most of the morning trying to get some other person's smartcard working. It was a user account that was lost in the purge, so of course the entire thing had to be remade.
The problem #1 it didn't have the special number for some reason that I now use to avoid using the longer string that proved troublesome in the past. So I had to try that again. I have mentioned this in the past I think. Some time ago MS "improved" security so now you have to build this complicated string and put it in the user record in a specific place. In a backwards order, reversing the serial number in a specific way. So neat. Once I found out you could use some number in the cert instead of this needlessly complex string I started using that. Why doesn't this cert have that number? Odd. It also didn't help that the supposed user name folder had a different cert than the one one the card. With the same name. I only discovered it trying to manually log in and realizing "why are these huge strings of digits different?" Thanks, Chris! (This was a Chris card, it has his "label" on it (that gave no detals) and then my label (with all details) added after. How did he get a 2028 expiration on it too? I can only get 2 years no matter what actual number I put in there. This card was from 2019 or something, as I recall.

Turns out it didn't like spaces! Yes, just a bit of whitespace completely derailed the whole thing. Thanks. I copied the values from the window which was something like "O = avalue" but it wanted "O=avalue" because sure, why not allow spaces in the field but then be completely unable to deal with them. It's so MS, I would be more mad but it's totally in character for them. Hate you guys!!!!! Learn how to program or maybe test your crap before shipping k? byeeeeee!!!!!

Made more color prints as well.

Then did some work on the pony story. Didn't get all the content entered. Lazy.

Then after work job. An HP printer, thinking less and less of them lately, by the way. The "smart" insisted it be on wi-fi. It was plugged into the network, it was found by the "smart" but no, there was no way to tell it "I don't want wi-fi I just want you to use the IP address you already have." Nope. It went to a screen "get on wi-fi" and the only other choice was "exit." Of course it couldn't get on wi-fi because the ethernet port was in use, and the machine couldn't switch. It's so stupid.
So I did that, set it up, and tried to switch it. During this process the printer itself crashed twice and had to reboot itself. Once during a firmware update it decided to do, on its own. Neat. Thanks. Never seen a home printer just crash and give up saying "yeah there was a problem I need to reboot" and then there's a button to reboot it. Yikes.
So it's on wi-fi I guess. The Ethernet port it just wouldn't accept, despite it being lit up. I would reboot the machine and it would just say "no internet connection" despite it being right there. So that took more than an hour.

Came back here, checked sites, ate dinner.

3 calls? You've got to be kidding me.

First call, the stupid MS scanner app had to be refreshed or whatever MS does to make it work again. No, your Win7 era scanning software won't work probably. The website doesn't let you download it, or at least only puts the last version under Win7.

Then wi-fi guy. I guess the external antenna isn't working out. So I go over there thursday maybe a different, non-spectrum router will work better? I do have an extender too... hummm. So much for taking the 13th off for no reason.

And the third lady was just "look in your documents folder." Why am I getting all these calls suddenly? Did I even do three jobs last month total? It's bizarre. And I don't like it. A job every day this week? I don't like that either. Router guy is a half hour away, and who knows how many times I'll have to go over there? Because the modern world has convinced him he should be able to wirelessly transmit information out to his garage when his house doesn't support that conclusion? (He gets other people's wi-fi so clearly it's not his PC, it's just the signal coming from that direction) Wi-fi sucks dude, run a cable out there if you need relyability.

Ugh.

Got ready for tomorrow, Sean wants to do more Xbox Takes Two.

Wed:
Caught another two mice last night. Yes. No need to try and count it up, I have you covered. That's 8 mice since I started catching them. Didn't want to release them without at least giving them a night off but if I catch another two there was no way I was going to fit 4 mice into my little holding cell. So off they went to the woods in the morning.
Had a meeting about PJL commands, well a demo I should say. We just added another directory I guess. It'll be an easy test, if test there needs to be. There's no record of this on the backlog.

I did get some weird backlog request to see what "messages" I get when using OCR. It was very vague, and I put a comment in asking for much more clarification. Nothing back yet. Thanks Karen. Don't email or chat and say "I'd like you to do such and such" just put in a task with a bunch of gibberish (there are no "messages" that's what I'm talking about) and hope I see it. Well done.

Finished the pony story content I have. Still need to read it over.

More reading.

Went to email guy. His problem was not email. His problem was he somehow, and don't ask me how, reloaded his machine or something, wiping everything out. So it was much more complex than anything I had bargained for. Naturally he did not know his email password. Naturally, he did not know the email address listed as the recovery account. Naturally his recovery phone number was a home phone, and the only available option was a text.

So maybe he just doesn't get that email account back?

I filled in the form, we'll see what MS says (it's an old Hotmail account).

Back here, checked sites, had dinner. Oh look, my portfolio is down $8,000 since the beginning of the year. So this is what winning feels like? Thanks, Drump! You're sure are making that 'merica great again jes like you promised. Yeeehaa.

One call, the lady from yesterday. Still can't find her documents. Ah, there's a reason for it! Apparently I didn't look in her onedrive folder because she wasn't logged into onedrive. Turns out she had stuff in there. And it was "skydrive" according to libreoffice. Anyway, moved her stuff over. No problem. Other than time.

Looked into dungeon design for the game. I want to be sure I have the "combat" dungeon ready for them if they get through the learning dungeon quickly. Ha! I know I'm dreaming but it never hurts to prepare.

I wonder if it'll work, the sort of idea I have in my head. I want my dungeons to be a source of mana expansion for the players, of course it could be higher level monsters than slimes, that only gave 1mp. This could feature tougher monsters, just not as tough as the later 5 level dungeon that completes the "journey through the dark."

Thurs:
Perfectly ordinary day.

Had the usual meetings. Onedrive and the planning meeting. Karen is out next week but we're still having the onedrive meeting, curse the luck. No response to me comments about the onedrive OCR test and "messages" and whatnot.

Otherwise, worked on the dungeon a bit. Got the outline for the first two rooms done. Of five. Still perhaps more work to be done but I have the encounter, the stats for the creatures, it could be enough.
I have a neat theme for it, so the combats should be interesting. They are thematic to the location, not just random giant bugs or whatever from like a random dungeon generator. It's not a typical "dungeon" in that sense. And they get to meet a mouse or two, squeak. They've been on my mind lately.

Oh, no mouse caught last night. Reviewing the footage showed they were in and out of the trap. What's the point of a trap that doesn't close!!!!??? So yes, conflict continues. Please go into the traps. I really don't want my kitchen smelling of mouse poop anymore.

Proofread the chapters I finished yesterday.

Then drove far too long because my directions were not even really close, thanks google maps. Not remembering which side I needed to get off 104 and onto 390 didn't help of course.

Anyway, finally made it. Physically took out his old wi-fi adapter so it won't activate (perhaps one of his problems?) Lengthened the current adapter with a USB extension. He has 41 nearby wi-fi signals? No wonder his machine keeps dropping it. Can you say interference? I knew you could.
There's little I can do. Hard to run a cable out there, and we can't really move the router. I put in an extender (because why not add more noise to the mix? Wheeeeee) so maybe it'll work. Of course it was working when I got there, so it proves nothing. Next steps would maybe be to get a pair of (expensive) coax adapters and run the signal out to the garage that way, as there is a coax cable out there. Gave it a tug, didn't budge. Hard to put an ethernet cord in its place.

Had a choice to make coming home. It was 5:15 so it was going to be busy on the expressways. I decided to take the back route across the bridge. Took half an hour. Was this smartness or madness? Only the other versions of me in alternate dimensions know for sure. Perhaps they are cursing their decision, still stuck in some kind of freak traffic. Sucks to be you, alternate versions of me in other realities!

No calls, thank you, universe. Thank you.

Checked sites, had dinner.

Got ready for tomorrow.

Tomorrow will be work on the game, if I can get it mostly done I'll feel much better about next week and can take it easier there. Then bank, shopping, and seeing my parents and sister. No game.

Saturday is the color game, otherwise my plans are really to play FF7 because I haven't all week. I'll have earned it.

It's 8:00 now, evening went somewhere. I'm going to work on room 3 of the dungeon and go to bed.

I leave you now, an older but probably no wiser man. See you all next week.