2020-03-26:

Fri:
So we've suddenly shut down all business today around noon. Great.

But backing up to the morning, yeah, not much to do, cleaned up from yesterday's test. Helped Adnan set up a machine for his test. Looked into cards and why my spreadsheet said one thing and not another. General stuff. Nothing of real note.

Then the order came down to close all business, but we weren't sure if it was life saving only or essential to the running of the business or what. I still don't have any clear direction. Don was all like, oh, we should put in a ticket for that VPN thing that doesn't work for you. And I was like, maybe you should have told me to do that two days ago when I told you it wasn't working? But I did, and after some fiddling around with remote desktops IT support decided I didn't actually have access to VPN. Like, why didn't it say that? Oh, right, shoddy code everyone "expects" to work but in the end doesn't. So Don was right there checking up on me every ten minutes so I put the IT and him together in one window and he was going to send the form to get me access but he couldn't send the form because the system told him the form had already been sent and why isn't there a "resend" button because shoddy code everyone "expects" to work but in the end doesn't. So finally at 4:10 I said "so it's not me, you two are going to have to work it out" because the IT guy put in a ticket for some other person to look into why the form wasn't sending (it's an efficient system) and "what's he going to do Monday if we don't get it fixed" and finally at 4:30 I was like "so you really don't need me here... right????" And Don was all like "I guess not" and I finally got to leave.

And I aint' going back! Until I'm told to. Or whatever. I checked my corporate (not my incorporate) email and a decision of "how we are going to respond" isn't finalized. They say to check back later. Huh.

Went shopping, got most of what I wanted or substitutes. Still nothing in the paper isle. At all. Then gas, then went to see my parents. Petted a Gabe, and came back here.

Got game ready, cut out the chibis for the map site.

Jon was still at work at 7:00 so we sort of postponed game until tomorrow, I guess? It's 8:00 and we still haven't.

We postponed until tomorrow. I got the laptop ready for the guy as I got it.
Got ready for tomorrow, I'm going over there at 1:30.
Then did some more Mass Effect.

Sat:
Tried getting on the VPN and it worked so they must have gotten it straightened out.
Worked on the chibis for the game tonight, in case we do get it do it.
Sunny!


Then I went out to put in the power button. Guess what? It didn't work. Oh, you guessed? Yeah, the machine would turn on when it was first inserted, for reasons? But then after I closed it all up (and screwed it all back together, I might add) it did nothing. So I tore it all apart again, turned it over, wiggled it, nothing. Why me? I did find a work around though! Poking around the BIOS I found an option to turn the machine on when AC power was detected. Also it could turn itself on at a certain time. I enabled both these options so as long as she just puts it to sleep it's fine. Stupid thing.

Of course that took far longer than I expected so I came home, grabbed the laptop for the next guy, a few cupcakes, and left again.
He didn't have internet at the business so after getting the HD from the old desktop (a really, really old compac with like a 1.X GHz processor) we took it to his house. Got Quickbooks installed, his stuff moved over, and figured out his passwords for RR and Google email. Went through some boxes of stuff so they could get rid of things, and finally came home.

That was about 4:00 so I ate "dinner" and had about an hour before the game.

Which worked! We got through the adventure, though without as much the dark knight smashing stuff up as I would have liked.


Sun:


Started the day with a hearty "I'm gonna get that doorknob changed! It'll be easy, right?"
No. I even found an old doorknob I had in the basement from somewhere, so I had choices. The one I found had three keys but the one dad gave me only had one. Now, in my mind three is better than one, unless we're talking about getting limbs cut off then zero is really preferable. But I digress. Long story short, (yeah when does that happen around here?) the center piece for the one I found was too thick, and also too long. The center piece my father gave me was simply too long.

Because why make it a standard thing? Nope! HA HA


Checked sites, did my sunday stuff like watering plants because at least I can't mess that up, right?


Then went over to do taxes- er, watch my mother do my taxes. A few times. It was all my fault, I kept on saying "what about this form I have?" Going to write up a "lessons learned" so we remember to do things in the proper order next year.
Thanks mom!

Also was informed that the door handle had a locking in that could be used to shorten the mechanism. Who knew?

It was about 6:30 when I got home, so I put the door handle in.

I think I'm going to be allowed back to work tomorrow. Huh. If I get "written permission" which "may not arrive by the morning." Okay?

Got ready for tomorrow and played some Mass Effect. In an ironic twist, my current mission was "contagion" and forced me all over the galaxy tracking an infected woman before she spread it. How did it know?

Mon:
Day one of the lockdown, how did it go for you? It actually seemed to go really quickly for me!

Started the day here, at home. Figured I didn't have much to do, I would go through all our projects and make sure they had repositories for test cases. Most didn't. Sweet. I made them, linked them, and it was about 10:00 ish when I got the okay to go into the office. I figured I would go after lunch, there wasn't anything on my plate anyway.

But then a little after that I got the "urgent request" to see if a bunch of cards worked before close of code two days from now. Uh, not leaving it to the last second are we? So after I got done reading the email which consisted of AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA *inhales* WHAAAAAAAAAAAA I said "I will eat an early lunch and head over there to do this oh so important test I have been presented with."

So I did. Went over there about 11:30 as I ate at 11:00 and there was one car there. One.

Went to the lab, there was the one developer guy in there, but he vanished after that. The only other person I saw was some dude when I was going from one lab to the other. Otherwise I was there alone. Got the test done. Added the strings so the printer knew to use the cards, and found a card Joe said we didn't have. So of the three possible cards to test two passed, one failed. Got the login prompt but couldn't log in. The others were fine.

Of course the setup took some messing around, it wasn't logging in with the right values, and I was messing with the stupid LDAP strings and suddenly it worked, despite those same things not working before? Odd. Whatever.

Emailed him the results at 3:00, didn't hear back. Looked into more commands to try and figure out if I had done something wrong, I had, but it didn't mess the test up. (You have to use this command line command to work with the card strings, because it's 1995 or something) Apparently -g gets a setting and -s sets a setting. I had examples of both, but it wasn't really called out so I didn't make the connection right away.

And it was time to go! I walked through silent, empty halls and wondered if maybe the rapture had happened and all this "covid" stuff was just a cover. I guess we'll never know. No movement, no sounds, and the one car was gone so my little car was lonely out there.

Came back home through the snow and the rain yuckiness and ate dinner.

There were a lot more cars on the road than I would have expected. Where are all you people going?

After dinner I used an e-file service to submit my taxes. I figured if I was going to copy all the values into forms (they sent me a nasty mail two or more years ago that something wasn't readable so since then I've typed it into new forms and printed it again) that I would just fill the forms out online and have them submitted instantly.
It wasn't exactly that easy. It was more of a question and answer format than anything. Still, I had all the numbers they wanted thanks to the hard work of my mother so I was able to answer all their questions. They put things in some odd places, included a form or two we didn't, and my return was larger. The bad part is they wouldn't allow it to carry over! What? So I guess I'm getting money back. I mean I suppose it's better to earn interest on it but now I'll have to send estimated payment where I wasn't going to before. Ah well. It's submitted, software did it so maybe another software will like it better, and maybe I won't have to wait 3 months for them to get back to me that it's wrong. I'm saving the return separately, I won't count it as my "spendable" money so in case I screwed it up I've got it to send back. But if they send it back that means they accepted it, right? They wouldn't come back on me after that?

Had to switch over to Firefox to get it to print, but it did. At least we can look at it and see what they did differently.
Reminds me to write up the lessons learned!
Did that, but after spending 45 minutes on the phone with a lady getting her to remove and reload her ethernet card. Oh windows, you scamp.

I can't remember the other thing to write! I emailed mom, maybe she remembers. Sigh.

Watched some of a movie and went to bed.

Tues:
Day two of lockdown. A man with a rusty knife lunged at me out of an alley back of the restaurant I often visit because they keep their dumpsters unlocked. So much food waste, even in this troubled time. I was holding the discarded wrapper of a cheeseburger which he mistook for toilet paper. I managed to get the knife away from him but in the scuffle he wound up with it in his own chest. An "accident" to be sure. Poor bastard. I left the alley as if simply stopping there to urinate on the walls, the sounds of sirens getting closer. I didn't rush, I knew they weren't for me. The cops have their hands full trying to quell the riots from the news of the latest "stimulus package" from the government. Apparently what with the move to synthetic diamond by most millennials the De Beers Company was in danger of maybe becoming less relevant and we couldn't have that so they were getting $100 million in free money while meanwhile people needing ventilators died in the streets. What a world this has become. What is tomorrow going to bring?

Or wait, that didn't happen at all.

Went to work as normal. There were more people there! Christina, and Adnan, and that Italian guy! and no one else. (spoiler: he dies in the next episode)
Christina was like "hey, you need help with anything? I've got nothing, give me something to do already!" and I like "I hear ya."
Anyway she tracked down my little booboo with the scan to home function. Somehow file with a kerberos ticket (yeah, I don't know what it means either) had gone from "prefer" to "never" instead of "always." Wha? How? So that's why it didn't work. Thanks for the clear error message that led to that. Yeah.

So I finished up that test by whacking all the printer drivers on my PC and just loading the 6655 driver so I could do secure print. That worked, I could do it again, so that test was complete. Checked another card for him, I guess because why not?

We got the incomplete software with all the changes in it early so I looked into loading that somewhere. Got it ready for the test, and had a bunch of questions I emailed Joe. Like what plugin, and how certain things should work. We can't test all the new feature that will go into the software because they aren't in yet, but at least we'll have some stuff to do tomorrow.

Came back here, did the usual checking sites. Looked at the PC the people from a few days ago gave me. It won't turn on, I tried another power supply but no dice. I mean it turns on it just doesn't do anything. Too old to really bother with, but it did have a 240GB SSD which is exactly what this HP I have needs so I put it in there and got that ready to sell.

Had one call, probably something I can take care of over the phone so I'm calling her back tomorrow when she's at her father's, where the problem is.

Played mass Effect, still a lot of that game to go.

Wed:
Day 3 of the lockdown. Things are looking more grim by the day, even the clouds seem thicker, the light dimmer. All around me the faces of the people I see are downcast, their eyes hallow and haunted by the things they have seen. I thought spring was around the corner, what a joke, global cooling is the real threat to our existence. They called me mad, but I know the truth. They seek to distract by talking of global "warming" but does it seem warm to you? I didn't think so.

A woman holding a young child stopped me on the way back from the dumpster. Someone had cleaned up the body, or maybe they had just tossed it in with the other refuse. I don't know and I don't care. She pleaded with me for a crust of bread, anything, to help feed her hungry child. But I didn't have any crust. All I had was a whole loaf, and so I could give her nothing.



Wait, sorry, that's just me being dramatic again, can't help it. Sorry everyone, back to the normal stuff.

Seems like it's starting to hit Xerox, learned today that Giuseppe is on "hold" for three months, along with some other members under whoever his manager is now. So that leaves one person to do any tablet stuff. Guess how many bugs are going to be found now? That's right, none. Ah well, if that's what they want. Still, sort of a crappy way to learn, Adnan said he was called yesterday by his contract house and basically told today was his last day. I guess he gets to walk himself out? No managers around to do it. Weird.

Anyway, with the new software I tore through a bunch of tests. Various printing tests, which we don't normally do, tried to do the card test but the plug in isn't ready. Got through most of it, would have finished the last one up but had to go get the kitten to do the curbside vet pickup. Christina had picked something she said "I thought would be easy" but apparently there's so many problems she hasn't gotten through it.

I only found a few things, so that's good. Less for us to test later I guess. Still, getting it all done I'll once again have nothing to do!

Gave Squeaker over to the tech, who took him inside for the checkup. He's still fine, so came home.
Checked sites, the usual stuff. Called the lady from yesterday about her father's email. Spent about an hour and a half tracking down a registry setting and changing it from a 4 to a 2. True story. See, this disabled her windows firewall from running. Which, apparently, is vital to the operation of built in windows apps, for reasons. So it was trying to do an update to the crappy built in email the man was using because he didn't know any better, and failing. So he couldn't open the email program, and of course the error message was less than helpful. You can see why it took more than an hour to trace that back, not helped by the fact crappy Avast wouldn't go away and uninstall itself like a good little program. All this because a 4 was a 2. Microsoft? Buddy? I hate you. More true facts.

Finished up getting ready for tomorrow. No Mass Effect for me tonight I guess. Didn't even offer to send me anything. Thanks for nothing. Oh I would have refused, of course, but the thought would have been nice.

Thurs:
Did a bunch of things all day today, like I was at work or something.

Went around and watered all the plants on my way in. I noticed one was fairly droopy and thought, "I bet no one is watering you little one." And I was right. Some were better off than others, I found one tiny bonsai looking tree dead already, but the rest should be fine. The little bonsai probably needed watering a lot, it didn't have a lot of dirt. Moved some nearer to the window, some lights go off when no one is around so I figured they would need more light. Turned off a score of monitors just sitting there, wasting power being on. *shakes head*

Finished up the white on black printing so another one of the early release tests fell. Had the meeting. Looked into the next thing I'm going to do. Got a wireshark trace for an old bug I wrote. Replied to emails. (so many emails...) Finally finished up that card test from Tuesday as Christina remembered a thing about turning the DoD stuff off for some cards to do secure print. Lots of little stuff, probably not remembering it all. Tried to upgrade another machine to do the color table test, but couldn't so I addressed an envelope with two sheets of paper in it. We really couldn't just send them the scan? It looks like crap, do you think they'll really accept that as okay?

Came back here, sites and dinner. Got ready pretty early as Sean wants to do the new Borderlands content tonight.

So let's look to the future. I'll set up a rather annoying test tomorrow and hope I can get through it. Shopping, wonder if the bank is open yet? I have enough to deposit. Huh. Seeing my parents. Then back here for Sean's game.

Then hopefully a quiet weekend. Probably more Borderlands, we won't finish it tonight.

And so that is that. I'm going to finish up getting ready for bed, so I'll see you all next week. Stay distant, stay safe, hug your kitty or puppy because unlike a human, microscopic organisms won't jump out of their bodies and try to kill you. (In most cases)