2020-01-16:

Fri:
Some welcome good news and I got to be Chris today. Allow me to tell you all about it.

The new version of software came in today and the big project, the one we were prepping for the whole week and that I most feared... wasn't in there. Apparently they were waiting for some news for a customer site or something, I don't have the full story. Anyway, whatever they wanted they didn't get it, so the feature has been pushed back to a later release. Whew. Gives us more time to get ready and make sure we know what we are doing.

So instead of that I did the USDA stuff and some other cert stuff, the majority of which I actually do know how to do. I ran into a snag (of course) trying to make the certificate to take the warning away when you go there with the browser. The machine can't "prove" it's at the IP address I've typed into the address bar? Really? That doesn't seem right. I followed all Chris' steps but it didn't work. So........ great.

I got to be him at the end of the day when someone came and said "I need to do such and such, can you help me with that." And I was all like "I think I can help you with that!" And then I did. Nice!

With that I left, got groceries, got gas, saw my parents, and went over to run game. We didn't even need the dungeon I had made so I get more time to refine that.

Sat:
Got up and went over to see the printer guy down the street. It was that quick, I got up right before it. His printers were fine, though one didn't want to connect to the wireless for some reason. I turned on network sharing of all things because he had it plugged into the ethernet port on his iMac. Eh, why not?

Then lunch, went out again for the cleanout, a very, very compromised machine. Haven't seen a machine that bad in a long time. How was it even still running?

Looked over the TV the iMac guy gave me. Smaller than my monitor actually, but it does work. But where to put it?

Mass Effect, made it to the third planet and it's a jungle out there. Maybe more like a rain forest?

Then Gears of War with Sean until the early hours. Still didn't finish it, but I think we're close.

Looked up what the CEO of Xerox was "awarded" in his first year. Apparently it's 23,400,0000 dollers. That means he made, assuming he worked a 40 hour week for 52 weeks, 11,250 a week. That means he makes $281 a hour. Assuming he worked the same 7 days I have so far this year he's made $11,250 already. It also means he'll make more this month than I will working the entire year. None of this counts interest from the money he already has, of course. But it also doesn't take into account what he'll loose in taxes but still.

Weird how that happens, isn't it?

Sun:
Mostly playing more Mass Effect and then watched more Key and Peele so I can give it back to Sean. It's a lot of seasons.

Ellen from 4:30 to 8:00. We didn't get the index done because she found more things to put on it. More ivory, and a bunch of "miniature paintings" because sure, why not?

Getting ready for tomorrow.

Mon:

I got to be Chris again today. I think Chris got to be Chris a lot while he worked here. But again that was near the end of the day so let's start at the beginning.

In the beginning there was nothingness, and void, and then for some reason a bunch of energy (and I do really mean a lot here) decided to explode... wait that's too far back? Got busy finishing up the USDA test from last week on the machine I got ready. No problems, discovered turning smart card off to try and test LDAP login made the accounting part not work. Have they, like, hardcoded some part of the behavior of this system after making certain assumptions? That's all I can figure. I don't know why they have that dropdown for other login methods, they can't ever work, smart card requires Kerberos! Weird.

That took the morning, so after that I got busy trying to figure out that next cert thing, why the printer wasn't trusted when I made a certificate that allowed it to be trusted. I added the printer to the domain, set the DNS up for the domain, and made the cert on the domain. It seemed to work! I had two hours at that point and really wasn't ready to face 802.1x that late in the day so I decided to take the card reader inventory I wanted to do and work on the one printer that's next to me that Chris couldn't save. I got only part way into that when one of the developers that hangs in the lab asked for my help getting a card to work on his device. "It's probably certs" I thought to myself. "It may never be Lupus but it's always certs."
Spoiler: it was certs. We loaded the certs from the card (and fixed his device, which wasn't exactly set up right) and tada, like a champ it logged in. Perfect.

I went back to the broken machine but got a meeting request about the newest hot project, which I'm looking forward to even less than the thing I wasn't looking forward to from before! It's a holy trinity of certs, different domains, and XDM. I don't have twelve years experience in this field, dog! I cannot offer opinions. I don't even know what the questions are. Arg this is frustrating. So that's a thing that's coming in the near future. He'll be having more meeting about it.

Came home, checked sites, had two calls, the guy from yesterday said his machine didn't even finish the memory check? Uh, time for a new machine bud. And one person wanting a cleanout. So I'm going there tomorrow, then far away BSOD guy on Thursday. He's a half hour away and wants 6:30. Gonna be so good.

I think they finally deleted my RR account, I can't log into it anymore. Bye, you'll be missed!

Tues:

Another specter of failure has been slain this very day, and it's only Tuesday. I mean come on.
This week I've "fixed" Zinfandel, tested a whole bunch of versalinks, took an inventory, verified one of my bugs was fixed for the USDA project, helped a guy with a card problem, and today managed to, all by myself, get a printer on the 802.1x network. I should get the rest of the week off!

Seriously though, that was scary. I pushed all the buttons and beeped all the noses (wait is that a thing?) and got an IP address over the 802.1x network. But it wouldn't show me the page. I was going back over everything and strangely the authentication type that was in the directions wasn't there, I swear. Then it was! I switched over to it and whabam, I got the page. There was some sighing of relief there let me tell you!

Went to set up the new router for still using frontier lady, she got ~3.5mb/sec and .5 upstream. Gag me. But her machine was fine. She had a very friendly kitty who she said wasn't using the box which is a problem.

Came back here, sites and videos, then made my few calls from today.


Just people I could help over the phone, no big deal. So nothing for tomorrow and I watched more Key and Peele, then played Gears with Sean. Still didn't finish.

Wed:
Is it Friday yet? It is, right? Right? What do you mean it's only Wednesday? I don't know how he put up with it all. Oh right, he left. Spent three hours this afternoon trying to make two cards to give to another person. Three. Hours. We have so few I was trying to be extra careful and follow the directions to the letter because, of course, I've never done it myself before. I was terrified I had screwed up one of the cards somehow, but finally decided nothing was working (reloading software, trying to find a newer version, etc) I would risk another card. It was doing the same thing. The software would see it just fine, but trying to work with it was impossible. Just kept getting errors. What the heck! Finally I tried another reader.

Problem. Solved.

Buwha?
So I made the cards in a few minutes, as I expected. *shakes head*
Then got to work on the email server, which I'm totally an expert in, to see why it's not cooperating now. Ken wants it to work before he moves it to the other building. Why? Who knows. But it ain't so guess who gets to try and fix it? That's right, me.

You would think the lab manager would actually do that sort of thing, come to think of it. But no.

The morning was used up by two meetings, and emails, (there were a lot of emails today!) and upgrading the tablets just to keep them current as I guess they're finally releasing version 6 builds now. My goodness there's still two more days of this.

Came back here, forgot to get gas so I'll have to do that in the morning as my after work job is a half hour away. Checked sites, the usual.

Then I spent a nice, relaxing evening with... how many calls? FOUR? Why you gotta be like that?


40 minutes on the phone with the lady you may recall from some time ago who had many, many GB in her dropbox. Ultimate conclusion? She needs a bigger backup disk.

The other three, perhaps thankfully? didn't answer. But that just makes the pain happen over there in time not making it go away completely. I'll take what I can get.


Thurs:
Not too busy today, as I've wrapped up the one test to my own satisfaction. The certificate request continues to work its magic and I've tested 5/8 total models so that's good enough for me.

Did a little USDA stuff, oh, and got the exchange server to work again. Apparently a lot of the underlying services were just flat out not running. They were set to run, but were not. Thanks, MS. So that didn't take too long to find, thank goodness.

Let's see, had the meeting, and the guy in charge of this one plugin says that FX says the plugin might work on other machines than originally coded for, but they can't say for sure. So guess who gets to test it? But we don't have more than one model of those machines in the lab, so... but maybe we can borrow them? I couldn't set up the machine we had in a week, don't expect too much.

I did get email and scan to home to actually work today, (not encrypted that would have taken certs) so maybe it won't be so bad? I tried after the meeting, it wouldn't even accept the plugin. Huh. Then I left.

Went to get gas, got cat food, came back here, ate dinner. Waited until 6:00 when I left to deliver the refurbished unit. Oh, and I got two calls bringing my total to 5 but I expect to get home about 8:30 so...



NOPE LOL!

I'm home at 11:20. I usually go to bed at 10:30. I am not pleased. 4 hours I was there watching his stupid music colleciton, (160gb) and pictures (30gb) and movies (30gb) transfer.

Anyway, no other news for now, or plans for the future. I made no calls, none of yesterdays, I'm just posting this and going to bed.

Hope your night was better than mine!