2020-02-13:

Fri:
A little messing around with card readers, but I didn't do much today.

Left work, saw my parents because they hadn't gone anywhere due to the snow. It was pretty bad, but more on that in a moment.
As I had told Sean "no parents" I thought we were doing 5:30. We were not. John told us they were moving his schedule and that it would be after 7:00. But either I didn't have my book and that's why I didn't write it down, or I just figured I would remember, or something? But I did not. I figured I would bring food but texted to make sure Mizzy wasn't making something. That's when I learned of my error. Sigh. But I met them for dinner, and while driving there the sun came out! So the warning about 8 inches of snow? Nope, it was clear and sunny. So there.

We tried out the new system, which worked better than I thought it would. I had misunderstood what his complaint was with the kids on bikes system, it doesn't work like that he was saying something else about it. Who knew?

Sat:
Got up and got ready to go see the guy with no internet. I don't know if he did or not, I just unplugged everything and plugged it back in. Oh, of course I cleared my driveway first.

Back here I kicked back, tried a new Fl4k build combining both my radiation stuff and crit damage. That radiation shield is just too weak, I hardly got through the door of the takedown. I got to the mid point with my Transformer on but still got mobbed by the Valkyries. Sigh.

Otherwise watched the marvel movies for ideas for technology to use the in the game.
Yeah, not much to write about. Sorry.

Sun:
Made a lot of things today!

I baked a pie, still have two more I can make. Had just enough flour for the crust, meaning I had none for the pie or for the rolling pin. So I substituted graham cracker crumbs for part of the flour. Seems to have worked, the crust held up and it's tasty enough.

Made soup so I'll have that all next week and probably beyond. Of course I sampled it, yummy as always.

Made corn bread muffins.

Worked on my mother's valentine's day gift, got it finished.

And watched more movies.

Did a little cleaning, the usual Sunday stuff, though I didn't put the comics into the database today. Checked my sites, the usual there.

At least the driveway stayed clear. Looks like rain but no snow into the next week.

Mon:
Did some work for the present and some work for the future today. Started with the future, set up a machine for the card test I was dreading before. It's all working, except for one very odd thing. You log in with the card and go into email, right? It shows a field you can search for address. You search for one. It says the certificate is invalid. But you hit the little button next to the field, do the search there, and it says the certificate is missing. Why can't it make up its mind? Is it the card? We have no others to test, because that's a thing. So I have no idea if it's something I did wrong, or the card, or what. Everything else seemed to work. It was weird.

I put that aside when Don handed me the new SD card for the little box USDA is going to use. Put that in, tried to set it up. Naturally, it didn't work. Got all the way to actually finding the little box, and it couldn't be found. It's running, I hooked a monitor up to it. I know the address of it, I can ping it. But it doesn't respond. Can't log into it, don't know the password. There's a meeting with the other company tomorrow, we'll see what they say.

And tried to figure out why I can issue certs as the admin user but not as any other user. Some template nonsense that could have any one of a dozen causes because hey, microsoft! They're the best. (at making easy to screw up things)

That was it for today, just those two things. Came back, watched more movies, checked sites, the usual stuff around here.

Tues:
Minutes before, or maybe a minute before the meeting with USDA I figured out the server issue. Or really I worked around the issue, I'm not sure that's solving it or not. Having poked at everything all the sites I read said to, making it worse, undoing those changes, issuing certs as admin even though I was logged in as someone else, etc. etc. I finally realize that, "hey, there must be some difference between the admin user and the other user that the other user can't get permissions to see the folder with the cert templates in it." This despite the fact I have given "everyone" full read permissions on the thing, which should have been overkill but fixed it. Nope. I tried moving it, assigning a new owner, nothing.

So I started adding the "groups" to the user. And by golly the... huh I forget the name of the group that made it work. But it did! Stupid thing.

Then we had the meeting and the guy got my little USDA box all set up and working.

I then made some notes about what I had done for the next poor sap that has to go through all that, and went to lunch.

After lunch I ran the full USDA test, and there are some problems. Like it won't let me log off via voice, I have to poke the screen. And asking for "3 copies" returns "you would like to make 3 copies?" and then only gives me one copy. Little stuff that's sort of important.

Wrote everything down, we'll talk about it at the meeting tomorrow or I'll just write it up or whatever. With that done not sure what I'll do tomorrow but I'll probably find something.

Oh, and Christina says she fixed the mail server. I haven't had a chance to test out this claim, but it's good if she did!

Left for my after work job. She just needed a little tutorial. She actually impressed me, I showed her how to do something, and then (and here's the shocking part) she did it. Without prompting or twenty minutes of staring at the screen or anything. Marry me!

Came back here, checked sites, ate yummy soup, going to get ready for bed as Sean wants to do some Borderlands of all things.


Of course I got a call at the last minute, more Carlos and his amazing password issues.

Finally got to play.

Wed:
Got the meeting with USDA out of the way and they're going to look into my mountain of issues. Also tried to make Don a network share you didn't need a password to. I don't think you can do such a thing. At least not across domains, when I was on the same domain it let me in no problem. But other machines (such as my laptop) did not. Huh. Then did some more testing of USDA, came up with many more issues. Sent them in. Are they testing this as all on their end? I mean, they must have testers there, right? Why am I testing code not written by us? Weird.

So that was today.

Came back here, did the usual stuff of checking my sites. One call, I just needed to run the updater again so he got LibreOffice back.

Continued the Marvel movies, not many left now!

Going to snow again? Maybe 6 inches by tomorrow night? No thanks.

Thurs:
Shouldn't have worried, it doesn't seem to have materialized. Of course, there's always later tonight, so who knows.

Managed to crash the USDA stuff a couple of times today. Basically trying to do a fax job (which is really just a scan job) while not logged in. I shouldn't be able to do it, but I can. And the little box doesn't seem to like when I do. Maybe it's shutting down in protest that I'm using the fax app?

Other than that, I messed with all the options, telling the box to set quantity a million worked just fine, but telling half the available options was ignored. Also some options in the manual the box doesn't even offer. So there are still many issues to work out on their end.

Had the meeting, wrote up the fact the icon I'm expecting from the celiveo box doesn't show up. (I gave the company time to read the log and get back to me but I didn't hear anything so whatever)

And then came home. Did the usual things, and some unusual things too. Wrapped my mother's Valentine's Day gift, cleaned up a bit because I invited my parents over for a movie because no Sean. Ordered some shaving soap. Last time I ordered it was in 2018, which surprised me. I mean I know the stuff lasts but that long? Huh. Then got ready for tomorrow.

Having the farewell lunch for Diane, you won't be missed as much as Chris I'll tell you that. Ted is bringing breakfast, next week is my week. I'll poke at Gabi some more I expect as well. Then go shopping, see my parents, and then do a movie night.

Nothing for the weekend at this point, no calls today so maybe it'll be verrry, verry quiet.

So that's half of February gone, in case you missed it. President's day is coming up, and it seems we still have *that guy* meaning there isn't much to celebrate but try to keep a stiff upper lip, and all that, what?

Otherwise, tell the people in your life you love them, and have a good weekend. See you all next week.