2020-01-23:

Fri:
Spent the day trying to make the other FX machine work. Think I actually managed it! Not really on official request yet, it's sort of "we would like to see if this work done for this machine can be used on these machines" and Don is all like "we need to enter a project for that work" and I'm like, whatever. I need to know how to set those machines up anyway I might as well take the opportunity. So I did. The email server is being rebuilt but I got card, scan to home, address book search all to work. Why do we need all these different, yet vaguely similar UIs anyway?

Not much else exciting.

Then dropping stuff off, bank, groceries, just made it on time, Jon was late.

Saved some people, but honestly how are we going to deal with a huge lifeform near the center of the planet? We can't. But make a wormhole through (possibly time?) and space to get some (possibly ancient?) genetically engineered soldiers fighting a bunch of robots (who should all be dead?) to loan us some troop transports and do a mass evacuation? Oh, we all over that.

Sat:
Made tons of phone calls in the morning, only reached two people. Upgraded one to win10 and helped a guy change his return address on his envelope template. Those still took more time than you can possibly imagine.

Spoke too soon, everyone called me back, so I was on the phone doing stuff until 12:00. But at least I didn't have to drive anywhere, it's snowing and nasty out!

Looked at the guy's PC from Thursday. Strangely, I think it was has HD or maybe he was infected by something? Or windows had just gone nuts? I ran Linux on it for a bit and it seemed fine (it crashed not 2 minutes after I turned it on at his place) so I reloaded windows onto it. Been running fine for three hours now. *shakes head* (Spoiler: It's going to crash again)

Played a little borderlands, farmed Killavolt a bit more but still no Transformer shield.

Checked sites, watched more Key and Peele.

Played Mass Effect.

And then more Borderland with the crew. We got through the takedown, victory was ours! It was a hard won battle, believe you me.

Sun:
PC crashed. Took out the video card as it has built in video and the somewhat useless wireless card. We'll see how it goes.

Got 3 transformer shields in a row, so sent two to Sean, if I had known I would get 3 I would have sent one to Mizzy because it's more geared towards her character but I wanted to be sure Sean got one.

Then I went and got the original sniper I was going after! Sheesh.

Sites, videos.

Cleaning up a bit.

PC still hasn't crashed as far as I can tell.

Whoops it did.

More Key and Peele.

Played more Borderlands, tried to get through the takedown just by myself. The end boss stopped that dream, those robotic dogs just swarmed me.

Nothing too exciting, it's still fairly bad out, so I just chilled at home. Thank goodness Ellen wanted to move the appointment. Much as I wanted all of Monday to myself I would rather let the weather settle.

Mon:
It did! Nice and sunny out, not that the snow is melting or anything.
Ran the PC some more but it crashed again. Even during the memory check.
So I reseated the processor (I was looking in my bucket to see if I had one, I didn't) and it ran the whole check perfectly. Maybe that was the issue? That would be nice, I hate getting rid of stuff that could still be used.

Finished Key and Peele, sheesh there was a lot of episodes!

Did the driveway so I could get out and see Ellen, which is of course of utmost importance.
Thought about and made more notes about the IV campaign for this week. Don't know if it's Friday or Saturday at this point...

Went to see Ellen, got the list finished and the Cd made, she's going to take the 64 pages to be printed instead of doing it at home.

Finished Gears of War 4, now on to Halo 4.

Tues:
Day went downhill pretty quickly but at least there is some brightness at the end of the tunnel.

Came in and figured it was USDA all day every day so I loaded the latest release on 2 machines because we got the app from the 3rd party and I knew he would want me to test with our little app too. Well, I went to make the certificate (because it's always a certificate) and my templates were gone. Apparently turning off the old sever made them disappear. Neat. So I set about trying to figure out how to get them back.

Turned out there's some AD "registry" like app that can totally hose everything if you do something wrong. Super! There was a missing entry and when I added it, the thing listing, uh, sorta crashed. Whoops. I changed permissions, I looked at other entries near it, nothing helped. Finally (after Christina left) I checked our other domain to see what the entry looked like over there. Ah ha! There's an entry for (you guessed it) a certificate! In hexadecimal! (For reasons) So I copied the numbers out from another entry and pasted them into the right place in the entry I had made. Boom. it just works.

Wait, that's not at all correct. I hate windows in new and different way now. Here I was, thinking after so long I had found all the ways to hate windows. No friends and fam, I'm just getting started. Cool.

That took until literally the last second. I went home right after that. It took about 7 total hours of messing around. (Of course our so called "lab manager" was useless.) Maybe I can test tomorrow?

Went to see interrupted update guy, his machine is really dragging. The drive? Took it back here.
Then went to set up the wireless extender, which should have been a 5 minute job. Nope! Apparently you can't extend an airport base station with anything but an airport? It's just a standard wi-fi, it go in here and comes out there. What the heck, Apple? Why you gotta be messing with me now?

Came back here, at least the drive had transferred to the SSD. It seems better, it's running the big update to windows 1903 now. 71%.

Getting ready for bed and maybe playing some Halo.

Nope! Battleborn. Mizzy didn't have the 4.6GB update that was required.

Wed:
Nope, didn't test much today because some other issue happened. I figured out how to make the cert yesterday as you'll no doubt recall, and when I loaded it into the machine it gave me an error. I waited for someone to tell me what to do about it. Basically you punch in the IP address of the machine into the thing you load on the device. But then it was like "I can't establish trust with that device because of..." (you guess it) "cert problems." When the guy finally got back to me (at 3:40 or so) he was like, "oh, we don't actually put the right number in there, we use 8.8.8.8." For reasons, I guess? Sure, why do the thing the printer is telling you to do? But then I couldn't access the device, just booting it and trying to log in gave me "too many incorrect logins." Uh, what? Is it trying to log in? I don't think so, because I unplugged it, and it still happened. Well, the box probably isn't trying, maybe the app I loaded on the device is? I don't know.

All this could have been avoided with a few lines of "here's how to install the stupid thing so you can test it!" But no, why would anyone do that logical thing? So I did a few upgrade tests on another machine (which should be done by the more general machine testers but whatever) and tried to set up equitrac and helped a guy with cards (why did the certs need to be installed again? We didn't uninstall them, I don't even know how to do that! But the card wouldn't work until we did it again) and had the USDA meeting and such. So it was a fairly busy day, and I got nothing of real importance done! Sweet.

Took the PC back and set it up, then came home. Did the usual home stuff. Ordered some parts. Ate dinner. Got ready for tomorrow. Got caught up in Hero Academia.

Thinking of going to bed a bit early. Hey looks like the PC didn't crash. I'm going to call that a win.


Thurs:
Progress!

After resetting the machine totally and reloading everything I was finally able to get to work. Felt great to write bugs again, 13 of them, to be exact. Honestly, just set me down in front of something ready to go and stand back. All this setup garbage should be done by someone who is really good at setup.

Also did more setup, tried to set up equitrac but it needed SQL installed, which I just managed to do before I left. Other things I did, attending the weekly Thursday meeting, taking certs off of cards, setting up a machine for the "typical" "can you see if this thing works" Chris was enthused about. That's about it.

Tomorrow I'll finish (hopefully) equitrac, the Vinu test, check the servers to make sure they got all their monthly updates (again, there isn't some automatic way of doing this??), more upgrade tests if a certain machine is now free (they were all signed out) do the shopping, see my parents, and run game! Just your average Friday.

Not.

Went out to Victor, a half hour drive (or more when you miss the turn somehow, but that's to be expected with me). Her machine doesn't really have anything "wrong" it's just slow. Yeah, it's a 5400 RPM drive, what do you want. Oh, you want my $30 SSD? Oh, sure, I'd love driving all the way back here. It's fine. Totally fine.

Took it home and got that done, because there won't be time tomorrow and Saturday is also filling up (with the hour+ journey over there) I needed it done. Disassembly didn't go too badly, and I didn't have to pull the whole mother board out so that's a nice touch.

Before (when I was there at the house) it took I'm going to say at least a half hour to run the mbam scan. It was a long time. Oddly, her husband's machine only took about 4 minutes, and that was with a spinning rust drive. Now it took 9 minutes. A definite improvement, but not as much as I was hoping for. It's a 4 core processor. Only has 4gb of RAM though. I'm going to see if I have more and do another test. Nah, put 2 more GB in there and it wasn't really any faster. 8 minutes so shaved off a minute. Interesting.

So looking to the future (unlike last week) I want to look over my notes for game tomorrow, make sure I have everything I need. Then go to bed. Friday is the usual stuff, then at least two jobs booked so far Saturday and probably the return of this machine late afternoon. Happy Chinese new year!

Hope you all had a good week. Even with the day off it's been fairly hectic for me, but I suppose I'm getting into it now? Setting the machine up for the card test (err, it didn't actually work so I did something wrong so take with a grain of salt) wasn't too long, so at least there's hope I'll eventually figure out my new place. See you all next time, peeps.