2020-02-27:

Fri:

Still haven't quite gotten NDES to work. I got closer, but I just have more questions. Recall that for whatever reason a request was made to / when XDM first starts the whole process. I was getting a 401 error which I finally realized was authentication error. Turns out because my browser was remembering the password I didn't remember that you have to log into the site to get there. So I turned on anonymous access and that step went through. But then I realized, wait, I give XDM the username and password so why isn't it just offering that when it logs in?

Fred had no answer to this question.

Anyway, it got passed that and made the request. But then it tells me "private key not available" or something like that. So now what? I checked the templates and the certs and yes, they allow export of the private key. And my manual test still works just fine. So why doesn't XDM?

And USDA still doesn't work, I can't log in with any method. They're trying various things but didn't get back to me to load anything.

Came home, got the estimate on my garage floor. $3000. Yipes. What does it have gold flake as part of the sealant?
Went out to put money into IRA, did the shopping, got gas, and saw my parents. No problem.
Back here for a bit and then out to Sean's. Did my game, we got up to meeting the Dark Night at least from a distance. He showed up and it was 11:00 so we called it there. I think they stayed on track fairly well.

Sat:
As my family graciously agreed to pay for my garage floor, and a big thank you to them for it, I called the guy back and said let's do it. He's coming first thing Monday to get the paperwork signed.

Called one of the many people that had called be at this point. (Four, if you wanted to know. Yes, it's crazy. What the heck?) Went over there, cleaned her machine out and started the Win10 upgrade. Her son has a crappy old XP machine I said to dump in the trash, it's worthless. I'm finding him a replacement.

Back here I ate lunch, then spent an hour on the phone with someone having printer/iMessage trouble. The printer stuff was solved by just unplugging her router, the iMessage stuff we went back and forth with in the settings and finally got it so both devices she uses sent and received at the same time.

Had about half an hour until my 2:30, building someone a machine.

His main problem was not reading the directions. And me trusting that he had. His motherboard needed to have more power fed into it, and he hadn't hooked the cables needed into the power supply. Didn't even have them unpacked. So once I figure that out (by reading the manual) it booted and was fine.

Back here I finished up the night watching the latest season of Agents of Shield, at least part of it.

Sun:
Mostly just finished up the season. I did go out at 4:00 and do a "job." There wasn't much to do, honestly.

Yeah, not much to tell about today. Usual stuff, cleaning and the usual Sunday stuff to get ready for another week.

Mon:
More messing around but really no steps forward in the whole NDES saga. NSED? SNDE? Something, I don't even care. I hate it. I'm fairly certain it's a bug in XDM but how to prove it, that's the question. Didn't get anything in the USDA department, they're still trying to figure out their cert situation. (And yes, it seems certs have caused more problems than they have solved, but whatever) So it was basically me banging my head against the wall and of course Fred didn't get back to me so I sent him a little reminder. "uh, please help?"

Came back, the work started on the garage floor. They sanded it down, and have applied some sort of paste to the deeper cracks. He said it would take another day and he wouldn't charge me more but he felt he should do it. Showmanship to make me think I'm getting a deal from something he was going to do all along or just him doing the right thing after some consideration? You decide.

The other concrete company got back to me. Uh, 5 days is too long to wait, dudes. The other people have already done part of the job!

Oh, and I lost $700 in the stock market. Yippy.
Thanks, Trump. I know it's your fault somehow...

One call, but he wasn't available so I'll try him back tomorrow.

Found the people from Thursday a laptop so that should come in soon. Has an SSD already so I don't have to mess around even. Sweet.


Played a little mass effect and went to bed.

Tues:
Huh, lost another $700 in the markets today. Neat!

But at least I made progress in other areas. Not that pesky NDES stuff, I left that behind me for now. Instead I worked on 5.4 stuff, uh, after getting to work. I waited until 9:00 for garage guy to show up, but he didn't so I had to call him. His kids missed the bus and he had to take his brother somewhere. Thanks for letting me know, dude.

Oh, and they did no work today because the patch they used wasn't cured yet. But whatever.

Back to 5.4, I did what I could of two separate tests, completely finished a third, and figured out I couldn't do a forth at all. Card doesn't work, they never added the string to the file that make it work. Silly. That was a good chunk of it. If I can get some direction I can easily finish one of the tests, but the others are all blocked for bug reasons.

Stayed until 5:00, came home and called the google drive lady. She got drive installed on her one machine, but couldn't find the same exact download link on the other machine. Really? It's the same google page. Honest. It's right there, gotta be.
She had to go at 6:00 so I get to call her tomorrow, too. Nifty.

Then dinner, sites, etc. Got ready for bed because Halo tonight with the gang.


Wed:
We got through half the game! Are we just that good or is Halo 4 really short?
Anyway, worktime. Once again waited until almost 9:00 for the dude to show up. Called him. No answer. Left. I had the USDA meeting to get to. I was ten minutes late. And... missed the whole thing. Huh.
Left the contract out for him, which I guess he found because he signed it. Whatever. They proceeded with the next stage, making it look all wet. And I do love things that look all wet.

Because if they're wet, it's too warm for snow.

Finished the one test by virtue of reading the manual which said "secure print is supported by these cards" and this card wasn't on the list. Ergo, it is not supported. Ergo, test over. Tried the one thing the XDM team sent me but it didn't work, so thanks for that. Permissions on some windows folder. Uh huh, that's not going to help friends.

Worked on figuring out what cards we had, wrote them down, I do like my lists of things. Worked with Christina a little to figure out, once and for all, this rollover testing we need to do. It's a lot of cards apparently. But not too many models of printer. I guess?

And then met with USDA folks who finally fixed my cert problem, and the login problem, so I did some testing until 5:00 on that. Sent them the "here's what you didn't fix" list along with here's a few other things I now noticed. They'll be thrilled.

Came back here, ate dinner. Plenty of calls to answer. The 5:30 one which was the extension of yesterday. Oh, you don't know the admin password for the machine? Well, can't help you!

Helped a guy take extensions out of Firefox because they were mucking with his bank website.
Helped a lady figure out a way to determine if her 1.6ghz machine isn't cutting it anymore because it's so slow in chrome.
Helped a guy send email, had to totally wipe and reload thunderbird, which was odd.

Yeah, it all ate up time. It's 9:00 now and maybe I can play a stage or two of Bayonetta 2 seeing that I found a Wii U emulator that seems quite polished.


Thur:
Well, the universe couldn't let a statement like that pass. I tried to load the first level (after watching the 20 minute cutscene of her christmas shopping) and it crashed. Found one other person with that same complaint and they were told to not use Vulkin mode. I wasn't. So for another hour I messed with trying to get it to work. It did not. Sigh.

Anyway, onto the adventures through the cold and the wind to work. Did some card testing today, not that we have all the cards to test with, but we did what we could. I actually got the models without scanning capabilities so basically the test was "does it log in?" Some did, some did not but we didn't expect them all to.

Also had the Thursday meeting, tried the one suggestion for the NDES stuff which did nothing. (They must be in India, there's a 24 hour turnaround time which is really great for problem solving! Soooo great!)

Did an XDM test for a lady to see why it wasn't working doing something it should, because she "wasn't familiar with XDM and didn't have a server." Uh, so why are you looking at the feature? Doesn't make sense.

That was about it. Nothing too earth shattering.

I did go home briefly to give the guy his money. Yeah, remember that "You don't pay me until you're satisfied." Guess that was a lie, there's still two more layers to go. Yes, no work was done today it was too cold. They had a heater in there to set the first layer today. The piece of paper I had stuck to the garage door fell down and got in the stuff, so now there's a piece of paper hardened into the floor. Nice jobs guys. I pulled up as much of it as I could.

Lost another $700 today in the markets. That's about $2300 all told, or what I last put in. Neat. Good thing Trump didn't get rid of all the disease control agents years ago... oh, he did? Well, maybe if he took a week or two off playing golf (at 3 million dollars a day) we could combat the thing making the stock market plummet. Just a thought.

Had a few calls. One person from Monday that they'll be home today, one person that called back to say things were fine, and the last person with a ransomware attack. Wow, haven't seen one of those in forever. Hope you have a backup!

Oh, you actually might? And you were smart enough to unplug it? Huh. There may be some hope after all. We'll see on Saturday.

Helped someone get back on wi-fi for 40 minutes, running the "troubleshooter" said it did nothing but suddenly his networks were back in the list. Go figure.

And got a printer printing again. All in a days work I guess.

Looking forward, as we do, to the future: Tomorrow perhaps more models of versalink testing with cards. Seeing my parents, shopping, no Sean as Jon's car broke down apparently. I guess he just doesn't want two people remote like I was fine with?

I am going over there Saturday for something with Stan/Other Sean maybe my old Supernatural game? Been 16 months so I vaguely recall it.

So just the one for Saturday and hopefully the workman finishing up the garage. Then a quiet Sunday? I'll have to do some paperwork, my annual sales tax has to be sent in. Yay. Need to take pictures of comics, I have a whole stack of them because I didn't do any for two weeks. What a slacker.

As for the rest of today, let's get ready for bed and play some more Halo, on a Thursday even. Sean is doing RIT stuff late and thus isn't doing his normal Thursday thing either. Works out for me.

Feb is done. Over. Oliver had 9 observed attacks, it's bitterly cold out, and I'm losing money like a house a fire. How did it go for you?