2020-01-30:

Fri:
Lots of things done today, mostly simultaniously. Because that's my life now. Doing six things at once like I really like or wait no I hate that I want to do one thing, finish it, and then do another. But whatever. Did more USDA upgrade testing as I found a free machine. Also worked on the card test for Vinu, I had something silly wrong with the first machine so I got that done in the morning right away. Tried to get the other type of machine set up and use a card I knew worked. Turned out they had all expired. One of them that very day! Uh, whoops? Not sure what we're going to do about that, actually, we have a cac-"like" card that works, a "rollover" card that may work in the future, and no "piv" cards. So we're doing real good. Have to talk to Don about that Monday. Also did the server check for this month, make sure everything is updated. Had a muffin for breakfast. Helped Christina setup her machine for another card test Don wants us to do.

Did the shopping, saw my parents, my father isn't feeling well. Hope you're better by the time you read this, dad!

Dropped my stuff off and went out to Sean's. Stayed on track fairly well and they gave me an idea for the next adventure. Mizzy got some fake teeth for a guy, and they didn't even get to the base so I have that in my pocket still. Nice.


Sat:
Slow internet day today for some reason. First person had a speed of 22mb/s which is awful. Or so I thought. Anyway, cleaned her machine out and suggested an SSD (as always) which she was interested in. So I'll have to go back. We left it with her on the phone talking to Spectrum to get her on a more modern plan that's 100mb/s instead of 30. I mean after all this time, you have to be kidding me, but they haven't moved everyone over yet?

Came back here, ate lunch, then went out again to set up the extender for the second time. Worked fine, as it was airport through and through now.

Then to the next person who had 1mb/s internet! WIPES. She wanted to upgrade to win 10 which I suggested... no. Maybe not so much? She also is going to call spectrum and see what can be done.

Came back here again. Checked sites, videos, went out again at 5:00 for my 5:30. It was supposed to be just dropping the laptop off. Guess what? No guess. It wasn't. Guess what time I got back in? No guess. 9:40. When I got there and turned it on it was hanging. Yes, hanging. It had run perfectly for me, I ran mbam twice while checking to see how much faster it was. But no suddenly it wanted to hang? I ran chkdsk which took far too long, it finally booted again, so I opened word just to see what would happen.

Long, long, story short, I ended up unable to open word, or reload it, so I wiped the whole thing, reloaded windows, and copied her files off the old fastioned way.

Why is the answer to Windows always to reload it? Why is that? It's been 25 years MS has had to work on it. Why does it still suck, and why is the only recourse for that nuke and pave?

Looking forward to tomorrow I have a 10:00, a 1:00, and then a lady who is again having problems with windows update is calling at like 3:30. SO FUN.

Did not do any Halo, Sean actually couldn't saving me from telling him the bad news I wouldn't be home for hours so that worked out.

Sun:
Did two jobs on the road and one at home, let me tell you all about them:
The first one with the keyboard and mouse not working and install SSD went fine. I booted into Linux to look up some things, found one possible fix, booted back into windows, and they both worked. Huh? So I proceeded with the SSD, which went a lot better than the last one let me tell you something.

Had a quick lunch at home and then went back out again. Her laptop keyboard seems pretty dead. Part of it was sticky trying to pry it up and it had a stain like appearance on the bottom so something was probably spilled on it? I ordered her another so I'll have to go back.

Back here I cleaned up, put some comics into the database using the new table (finally) and then at 3:30 took the call about the windows update. Stopped the service, wiped out the folder, started it again, and it worked. Only took a half hour. Sheesh.

Got ready for tomorrow in case Sean wants to do Halo tonight.

And watched a sick Super Metroid speedrun, of a ROM modification that made the original game even harder. Wow, someone played that game way too much, to not only know exactly where to go but just surviving where he didn't have the items the game normally gives you to survive. Props. I needed that down time.

Made some notes I thought of for my next session in two weeks.  I had a pretty neat idea, just have to develop it a bit more.


Made my calls, nothing for tomorrow? Can this be true?


Mon:
With the USDA stuff done to my satisfaction for now I moved on to a different type of card test. It's with one of our newer machines, to make sure code we ported into that "line" survived the transition. Both for practice on setting up the machine and seeing what happens and because it will ultimately have to be done. I think I managed it with a few odd things happening.

For instance, if I use the older card I can sign and encrypt an email. But using the card the test focuses on I can only encrypt the email. Not sign. Weird. Machine tells me it can't sign. What the heck? So as the other card works but this one doesn't I don't think it's a machine problem. Another thing is it won't find the home directory to scan to home. It started complaining about the USB drive being taken out but I'm not scanning to USB!

It took all day because I'm not sure if the problem is with the setup, or an actual bug in the code. So I spend a lot of time puzzling in my puzzler.

Otherwise it went fairly smoothly. I'll ask Christina about what I found and I did write some things up regardless. So there's that.

Came back here, checked sites, ate dinner. Thought about a new character for Sean's new "card game RPG" sort of thing. I don't know, didn't he hate Kids on Bikes because it was all just "make up whatever!" But that's what he's doing... weird.

No calls today, that's a treat.


Got to play some Mass Effect.

Tues:
Spent the morning finishing up the card test. Talked with Christina about what I ran into, then wrote some bugs.

In the afternoon didn't have much to do, actually. We've pretty much finished the list for now, so I was helping get a machine she was working going. Nothing too exciting. Weather was terrible on the home. Just warm enough to be both raining and snowing, so it was nasty all around.

Once home I did the usual stuff, sites and dinner.

Then checked into what pieces of gear I had in Bordelands, tried the takedown again but hardly got anywhere, and played Mass Effect. Seriously, did they scale it back up 4 people early? It should have been scaled to the party (of 1) for another few days. But enemies just kept coming. Felt like it was way harder than when I tried it the first time.

Wed:
Spent the majority of the day trying to get Equitrac to work. I'm convinced it's the device and potentially a bug because it won't install properly. I can install it (sorta?) on the older device. No problem. (There's a problem) But the newer one just errors out. Weird.

The problem with the older one is I send a job to the printer, and it just prints. Equitac is supposed to hold the job in the queue until I get there, for accounting and stuff. Because printing is really expensive! So we have to track every little page, because why wouldn't you do that? So it just printing sort of defeats the point. I asked "how does it know?" and explained with Thinprint it took over the queue so it knew what was happening. The guy helping me didn't actually know. Super. Thanks. So we're going to ask the others in the lab tomorrow.

Christina made a little progress in her test, finding out how to sign and encrypt email. But only without securing the channel between the printer and server, which is not how Chris detailed setting things up. What a scamp! Little rapscallion.

Hey, I spelled that word right on the first try. What a... great... speller I am.

Came back here, did the usual stuff. One call. A good one! That lady in Victor, you know the one. That I went back to, and stayed there for hours on end and reloaded the machine in the end? Yeah, that one. Good news- I get to go back there. I won't get the smaller drives in until Monday, so that means tomorrow I get to go over there, replace her SSD (that I ran for days in another system I wanted to see if- well, you remember the one) with one twice as expensive, eat the loss, and do the reload again. All for free! So great. So that's tomorrow afternoon and evening shot. You know, I just had a crazy idea.

So crazy, it just might work. Here's the setup: Bring along a desktop PC. Plug her old drive and the new SSD into it. Do the transfer that way, using SATA3 speed instead of USB (2 probably?). Then pop the new SSD into the laptop. Naturally I would do a disk check on the old unit, but that would also be fast. Problem: I have no drives put into the desktops I currently have, so they don't boot. Solution: Make them boot by popping in a spinning rust drive and installing windows on it.

I'm a problem solver.

Now if I could just solve the problem of having to go over there in the first place...


Thurs:
You didn't think that would actually work did you? But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Today was somewhat of a success at work. Did another test of the USDA project, but there will be another build tomorrow so I'm not sure why I bother. Found a few more issues, and mostly the same old ones.

Then fought with Equtrac some more. Found the right boxes to check to actually make it, you know, work, so I could finally send a job to the device, and boom, it didn't print until I wanted it to print. Finally, something I have control over!

Wrote up the bug about it not installing over on the other machine, went to the meeting, looked at why the email about what work is available and the board we use to show what work is available are not the same, and left for *shudder* Victor.

It didn't work. I pulled the laptop apart while it was copying (at 60mb/sec. I remind you that SATA III max speed is 600mb/sec so figure that one out) and then popped it in thinking about how clever I was and how smoothly the whole thing had gone.

The universe couldn't have that.

The machine immediately BSOD complaining about a "missing file." Uh, no, I made a carbon copy of the other drive, they're identical now. What the heck are you talking about? So I ended up, you guessed it, wiping and reloading. I got home about 8:30.

Made my two calls, remembered the movie with Dad (if he ever gets back to me) on Saturday so I called the guy I said "I'll come Saturday" to and moved it to *ugh* Sunday, and booked Saturday morning a guy right down the street who moved his desk and is somehow unable to plug his stuff back in. *shakes head*

So it's now 9:00, I haven't eaten, but I did feed the kitties and get ready for tomorrow. So I'm going to post this, watch a few videos while I eat dinner, and go to bed.

Fun!

Tomorrow I'll try the new USDA build, then maybe tackle some trunk stuff. Do the shopping, see my parents, and go over for Sean's game.

Saturday some work and seeing my father, Sunday more work and then watching the Big Game. Are we rooting for anyone? I have no idea.
So that's this week. The end of January and now with only 11/12ths of this year left to go. Am I going forward or backwards?

See you next week, loyal readers. (All two of you)