2020-03-12:

Fri:
An action packed day doing, uh, work and stuff. Yeah. My meeting with the USDA was at 10:30 so I had plenty of time to make sure I had nothing to do. Checked everywhere. Yup, still nothing. Anyway, meeting rolled around and he loaded the new version. Still stumped as to why it doesn't work. He was running an older version of software and apparently putting on the later version gave him problems too. So yay I guess? He asked for help but didn't get any. Buddy, I feel ya. It's been a week and I still haven't heard anything from the NDES people about what I've done wrong trying to get it to work. Sent another email. The "gentle reminder" if you will. Included my manager this time.

Oh, not that we use that word now after our latest restructuring. The manager title is apparently given only to those special few. Neat.

Anyway, with that being a bust (and not the good kind, *rimshot*) I, uh, ate lunch.

After that I labeled cards, tried to think of other things that might make USDA not work... writing? No, I wouldn't do that.

Dropped stuff off at my parent's house, Gabe was there. He entered in stages. First under the bench, then I got him into the garage, then finally he ran in when I opened the door and went downstairs. Silly Gabe, it's freezing out there! No really, it was terrible with the wind, and the snow coming down. Yuck. Anyway he's nice and warm now.

Then got cat food, litter, etc at the tractor supply place. Won't be back there for two months! Did the shopping, and came back here.

A few calls, as no Sean so I made a 10:00 for down the street, and spent 15 minutes on the phone with a guy trying to find the power button on his tower. The power. Button. Couldn't manage it. Still hadn't. I told him I couldn't help him further than "hold the power button down for a few seconds, then power it back up." I mean, you've really never had a power outage and had to turn your PC back on? Ever? Really?

Really?

Okay, sure.

And the lady I replaced the keyboard for a month ago said certain letters don't work. I ordered her another one. Weird.

Checked sites, videos as usual.

More Mana.

Sat:
Had two jobs, so I couldn't just sit around all day! The first one was just to make sure her machine was running fine after she got one of those scam calls. Did they... upgrade her to windows 10? Hard to say, given she had no idea what she was talking about. But her machine was fine, ran the usual scans and the usual update package.

The other was just book guy. He had a few minor issues. He could barely walk, and he was really bent over. Fading fast?

So neither took all that long, and they were close by to boot.

What else did I do? Let's see, got the PC ready to go tomorrow. Cleaned off the car from all the snow. It was icy out there! More secret of mana. The usual sites. Found out about buffs to some snipers I had so I checked that out. Before the hotfox they were around 1500 damage, after the hotfix they were around 4000 so that's a pretty nice upgrade. They are all the type that go through ammo super fast, so they're more like super accurate rocket launchers at this point. There is a relic that lets you "steal" ammo by hitting enemies. Maybe I'll pop that one on?

And went to Sean's for his game. Stayed on task well, we got through the fight with no casualties, some property damage though. And me met the guy who was going around erasing people's memories and he was doing it for a "good" reason but we'll see if that story holds up. At least people in high places do know about the coming catastrophe.

Sun:
Did you remember to set your clocks? I hope so, if you didn't what have you been doing all week?

Put everything back in the garage. There's some funny "pealing" sections at the edges and the back corner. Probably where it didn't dry and they put the top coating on. Wonder if I should call and see if there's anything they can do?

Checked sites. Then went out to set up the PC for the lady with the busted monitor cable. That went fine, just took two hours because it took an hour to copy 3.5gb of stuff. You know how fast my machine can copy a 4GB movie from one drive to another? Pretty fast. Not an hour, I'll tell you that much.

Back here I watched more My Hero Academia, played more Secret of Mana, did a little cleaning, the usual Sunday stuff like watering the plants. Nothing too exciting.

Tired. Stupid moving clocks around.


Mon:
Today was broken up into two parts.
In the morning I worked on 802.1x as the machine that was supposed to go to building 209 (but never did) came off the calender. So it was open season on it, and I snatched it up. Go me. I was using the more "automatic" method so things were done in a little different order. It doesn't help this machine doesn't seem to "like" getting an IP address and works best on manual not DHCP. So there were times I wasn't sure if I was doing something wrong or it was the machine being balky. But it worked out in the end and that test passed. I also made notes on the process.

Then the afternoon, which was not a success. I looked into the Blackboard card reader because there's a test coming up soon for that. I wanted to be sure I had the cards and knew what I was doing for it. I didn't. And I didn't. I got a card from Kevin (we only have two?) and set up Equitrac according to Cristina's direction. But I get no traffic from the machine when I swipe a card. I can log in with the enourmously long "pin" that serves as the prox card ID so the machine is set up right. It's like it just doesn't see the reader. It beeps though, so I know it does. Odd.

Came back here, did the usual stuff like checking sites and having dinner.

More playing of Mana.

Tues:
Only accomplished half the things I did yesterday, but at least I can say I accomplished something.
Christina said she would work on the printer thing before I got there. She need not have bothered. The entire process was against us from the start.

To start, we needed a patch that was not disclosed when the guy came down to give me the card. Thanks. Kevin.
Then the patch wouldn't load, and I had to find out on my own it would only work on a specific release. Uh, what? We didn't put it into the mainstream release? So whoever was using it can't ever update their software? That's... odd.
So I reloaded the machine to the older release, applied the patch, and still no joy. Plenty of sadness in the sadness circle though. I said "bring the other reader down."
So he did. We then realized there are two modes for the reader. Normal mode and "can't get out of it easily" usb keyboard emulation mode. The one reader was in the mode, the other was not. Putting the first one I tried into the mode finally made it work. Sheesh. So I finally know what that looks like for the real test in a couple of weeks.
Made sure the test cases looked good for the cards, put them in the right place. (Kevin had nothing in the folder for the project. No specs, no old test results. Nothing. Thanks. Kevin)

Also put up some other test cases I'll need later, there are two closely related projects that are one digit off so I put the folders in place for them. So that's ready to go. Not much else exciting. Got an email back about the NDES stuff, "oh, upgrade your machine." Uh, no. But I made sure it was anyway. Still doesn't work. Good job. Can I get someone in the US that maybe understands this so the delay isn't 24 hours? Is that possible?

Not sure what I'll do tomorrow.

Came back here, one call, the guy I sold the laptop to is having trouble playing DVDs. Uh, what? Playing what? On a crappy laptop screen? Really? Uh, okay.

Checked sites, the usual. Got ready early, Sean wants to skip the rest of Ops and go right to Halo 5. Fine with me.


Wed:
I did another two things today, one thing I was assigned and another of my own choosing as is my right and privilege.

The task I was assigned was to see if adding the strings to the printer (and why don't we have an easier way of doing that?) made a couple of cards work. It did! Yay! (I guess) Of course I had the USDA meeting and the voice people don't have a build for me yet, so I'm still down and it won't be until next week that I'm not. Okay... So that all took the morning and a little of the afternoon.

In the afternoon I looked around for something else to do and you may recall, if I said anything about it, months and months ago that our lab 'manager' brought in two 220v printers, dumped them in "my" area, said "I'll have to find some cables for them" and then... did nothing. So I decided to do his job and scrounge up some cables, and get them going. This, I did. He had a cable, there was actually one back in my area, and with the power strip I also found I got them all going. Neat. Updated the two new ones, (after putting the serial number in so it wasn't just "unknown" at boot and giving an error) so they're ready to use. Thanks for nothing, Ken.

Came back here, checked sites, the usual. Dinner. One call, and I got the keyboard I ordered in, so I can go over there again.

Did not reach the other guy, who just had a question about his router and modem.

Played more Halo with the crew. Twice in one week? How did that happen?
I think we did better. I remapped my controller back to halo 4 controls. Why you have to keep changing it, Halo?

Thurs:
No big revelations or work done today I fear. I did have a small revelation I can share with you though.
I had asked Christina a  few days ago when she said the card we had was the "dual persona" card how she knew what she knew. She looked at the card and decided she didn't know how she knew that.

Well, looking today at another project's word doc that had an embedded excel spreadsheet with some notes on it finally answered that question. Apparently the old login uses the signing cert all of things, not the authentication cert as one would expect. Because, you know, they're authenticating. It had one type of number, while the signing cert had the other. And that's where it came from. So I finally figured out how to tell the "modern" CAC card apart from the "old" CAC card and made sure I had them labeled right.

What else took up time today? I redid the lab map, adding the new devices and making sure it was up to date. I had done it about a year ago so it was time. Named all the new devices based on current events. There's "covid" (of course) "Ukrane" "Impeach," "Biden" and "Sanders" don't forget "23years" just for fun. They aren't official or anything but given how our "lab manager" operates I doubt it'll matter. After all, it was his job I was doing all that time. But as you can tell it otherwise would never have been done!

Had the meeting, despite Don being out sick. Kathy is too. *hummmmmm* *strokes chin*    *oh crap don't touch the face!*

Worked on the test cases for the upcoming card test. We don't even really have a task entry for it but I figured I may as well get it out of the way.

That's about it. Another day older and deeper in debt. No really, the stock market is still crashing.

Installed the keyboard for the lady and came back here. Don't screw this one up!

Usual stuff after that, videos, sites, dinner, getting ready for tomorrow. Huh, Friday the 13th again. March 13. Rings a bell...

Reached modem guy, he had set it up and was fine.
Did not reach printer lady. Why is it always printers lately? Someone has a problem, it's a printer. I'm not printer tech support!


She called me back, it's an epson. Guess what the problem is with it? You guessed it- needs to be cleaned. I told her so.
And that was that.

Finished Mana, the end boss was invisible? Odd glitch. Silly emulators. It was perfect apart from that.

So now we look to the future. Again no idea what I'm doing at work tomorrow. But I'll see my family after, of course, shopping and getting gas. No bank, not enough checks.

Then Saturday, no jobs as of yet, but then over to Sean's for either Eclipse (10% probable) or his RPG card game. One week until I've had Squeaker 11 years!

Otherwise, maybe figure out what the sequence of events is for the book, play some Mass Effect again, play Halo 5 when I get home Friday. That sort of thing.

Have a good St. Patrick's day and it'll be spring by the time we meet again. You hear that, weather outside? SPRING. Get to springing.

See you then.