2020-04-16:

Fri:
Did a few things today. Gabi not done. I still need to get the image for the card, which will hopefully take place Monady. Tablet stuff, Kathy wanted me to try reproducing something. That was a bust for the most part. (mine not working, had to use Giuseppe's as he had stolen my tablet some time ago and we didn't know which one it was) Lots of emails about a bug.

When I went over to the other lab (also empty) that has the windows (and the plugged in fridge with nothing in it?) I saw a snowstorm happening outside. "Yup, it's spring in Rochester," I said to myself.

After work I did the shopping. 50 people at a time are being let into the store. It was fine, I only had to wait a moment.
Got gas, it's only dropped .10 in price and why can I not take a full tank. It stops far short now, has been doing that for some time. Weird.
Saw my parents. No easter, my sister is sick.
Can't get tested? Thanks Trumpy!

Came back, sites, then starship combat. I actually worked against the team. Go me. Not anything I made the character to do. I made her to shoot people in the face. Not press a button and have a starship do something. Sean was all like "just use your skill to do any skill!" Sure, I may roll 2d10 but I subtract 2 from it at the end. That's not going to work in my favor more than half the time!

Sat:

Cleaning, figured my father was coming over but I would have done that anyway as usual. Even washed some of the floors, like the bathroom and the downstairs. I bet he was impressed when he noticed.

Made a change to the paragon app, my character has negatives applied to her ESPer skills because of her one piece of cybernetics. But I wasn't accounting for that and when I rolled a skill I had to go take the -1 out and change whatever it was to be one less. So I made sure it did that for me, making it easier or at least a tiny bit faster to make her skill rolls now.


And played Mass Effect until my father showed up to watch Dr Who. Is that game ever going to end?

Sun:
Still playing Mass Effect. That game just keeps going and going. Sheesh. Played it most of the day. I think I'm near the finish, it warned me when I went on the last mission I was about to do that it would be the end. I was going to get to it and save, but I backed out and saved instead. I think I've done everything else, my quest list is empty and I think I've visited all the planets I can but I'll check again and start it. Can't Monday, we're doing more online stuff with Sean/Mizzy/Kate/Adam.

I did do the usual Sunday stuff but not the comics. Too lazy. But I got ready for tomorrow, ordered an iPad for someone, that sort of thing. Sorry it's so boring.

Mon:
Got the image in the morning so we put that into the SD card and got everything going. I can finally test the whole USDA solution.
Still a lot of issues with it. I spent the day testing it, just writing things down. I'm not sure if alternate login just isn't working or I don't know how to tell the system it should use that method. It always says it doesn't understand me.
It's true, no one does, really.
Most frustrating is the time it gives you to talk to it. Like, none at all. It'll ask me something, I'll be thinking of the answer, and it says "goodbye." Thanks. Also I'm in a silent room, sitting 5 inches from the thing and it can't understand me saying "yes" when it asks a yes or no question. Really? The old voice system seemed a lot better in that respect.
Got my tablet back, he had wiped it so I have to figure out how to put it back on the Canada area. Curse you Giuseppe! Why did you have to do that? Still messed up, hangs totally when it tries to scan. Sigh.
Otherwise nothing else exciting at work, just the USDA stuff, and we got in a bunch of software so I get to do the VersaLink tests I just did a week ago again. Sould be sweet.
Wait is that the word?
Supposedly very windy today, must have been raining I heard our leaky cealing dripping again for awhile. I turned my Macs off just in case before I left home, but it was fine. I don't think it was as windy as they feared. Other parts of the country were, there were some nasty storms from what I understand.

Came home, dinner and sites. Had three calls today? Why? One was dentist guy, the delight of my life. He wanted to know how to scan to email, something I had written up for him some time ago. Guess what? After I called him he looked and found my directions. Maybe, I don't know, next time look before you call? One was a Mac user who claims not to be able to log in because his keyboard doesn't work, the other wanted advice on a machine that won't boot.

Got ready for bed so we could do the games with the crew.

Tues:
As everything has come in at once, I am plenty busy again.
Activities for today were, but were not limited to, meeting with USDA to get another updated version because that's the problem with not using punch cards anymore. People think they can just throw twenty builds at me instead of making it work and testing it once (to be sure it works). Like I didn't have enough to do.
I set up and worked through the first of the card tests easily enough. Everything went fine except for releasing a secure print job using the second card. Odd. First card worked fine. They're set up the same way. How can the second one not work?
Met with Don for an hour to talk about the stupid upgrade test chart. The most efficient way to do the upgrade test would be to simply sign out every machine that's free, take a morning, and send upgrades all day and just get it done. The hour we spent "discussing" it (so Don can feel he is "managing" us) could have seen the test 1/4 over. The upgrades don't take that long, just do them. But no, we have to discuss the pros and cons of doing this machine over this one, and doing this path over that one. Stupid. Just let us test the freaking thing, if that's what you want done. No need for meetings, we're all (both of us) responsible adults that do our jobs. That's why we have them right now.
But the blackboard card test was the most infuriating. The first half went fine. I logged in, did the stuff, I thought it would be done in a snap. Then suddenly, nothing worked. I couldn't log in anymore. I was baffled, what had I changed? I didn't think I had changed anything. So I carefully backtracked everything finally culminating in reloading the printer for an hour. And guess what it was? Equitrac had run out of "licenses" for our "card readers" and so wasn't allowing the digits (or whatever) that it read to be used to log in. See, I could log in with the digits, just not swipe the card to get the digits. It's so stupid, the way that software works. Honestly. I don't know how anyone puts up with it. Anyway, deleting all the "old" ones (it's the same reader, just on a different machine) allowed this "new" one to be recognized and it started working again! Yay! Know how long that took me? From about 2:00-5:00. I stayed late trying to finish it. So I could move on to the chart tomorrow. The precious.
And in between all that I read the USDA manual and sent in a few more "say it doesn't exactly work the right way???" to vision-e making me wonder what testing, if any, they are actually doing over there before sending it to us. We should simply be testing the integration between their stuff and ours, I should not be their main tester.

So that was today.

But the fun didn't stop there. Whoops I forgot keyboard guy, when I saw the keyboard in my car as I was grumpily leaving work. I called him. No answer. Where the freak is he? He can't have gone anywhere! I went home, called again. He was there! I went over there. (It was on the way) Know what his problem was? He didn't put the battery cover on right. See, when I asked him, "do you have a wireless or wired keyboard" apparently that was too taxing for him and he said "wired" despite the fact there were no string on his keyboard. He had a wireless keyboard. And the battery cover wasn't on right. Guess what happened when it was on right?
that's right it started to work again how about that who would have ever guessed the intersection of the event "change the batteries" and "the keyboard stopped working" could be related in such a crazy and bizarre way it's so strange I never would have guess that.
So I left.
Came back here, had two calls. A half hour because someone couldn't click on the start menu anymore. Yes, google "windows can't left click start menu" and you'll get over 500,000,000 results. How can programers at MS be so incompetent they can't make the start menu, a feature that's existed since, uh, 1995, work properly anymore? I replaced it with openshell.

And another person who couldn't get email, said they had changed their password but it didn't work, nor did their old one, nor did they know the answer to their secret question of favorite band. Seriously, why can't they do a call to the number on the account? They have it. Do they really have to rely on this stupid question game that no one ever remembers the answer to anyway? They're only like the largest cable company around they certainly have the means to improve the situation. I mean it would save them money, as now she has to call and talk to a live person.

So much fun today.

Worked on the next adventure for the peeps, figuring out who they would talk to, and what those people know.

Wed:
Snow! Snow snow snow it's all snow all the time!

Still quite busy at work, heck I haven't started being not busy. Started with an upgrade while I waited for the USDA meeting. I needed to take the machine back to an older state. (We're doing this because the FX team that would be doing can't go to work) Then had the meeting, basically them going over my 6 pages of notes from Monday to talk about what they fixed and didn't fix.

After that got busy doing, uh, more of my job testing! In total I did 2 upgrade tests and 4 tests on 2 machines. One test failed it seems they didn't get the fix in before building it. Maybe because I emailed the wrong Don? Having two Dons around is very confusing. Especially when both are emailing me about the same project and I think only one of them is. Need to pay attention to the last name too. Anyway. So I only did that one once. The others all worked fine, no bugs introduced.

Vinu is like "we should test all the cards with my project for reasons! Do we have all the cards? What cards do we have?" So I sent him the list of cards. "What about the two new cards? I don't see them on the list, are they not on the list?"
"No, I don't have these cards you're talking about."
"But the cards, are you saying they are on the list?"
"Dude, can you read? I don't have the cards. I never had the cards. Christina doesn't have the cards. Shut up about the cards. P.S. We're not testing all the cards that's madness."

We'll see what he says tomorrow. Seriously though, we don't have the cards.

Tomorrow I'll probably go back to the older machine tests, I've only done one model there but with Christina helping on versalink we've done I think 4-5 models so that's perfectly balanced. (As all things should be)

Seriously, with 3 projects going at once each one realistically gets a day and a half of my time per week.

Just dentist guy calling again, question about "the cloud" which was fine.

Thought a bunch about the next adventure, I think I've got some ideas for them. Run, run in the world for my amusement! Muahahahahahh.

ha.

Got through the last battle of Mass Effect. There's still after endgame content so I'll have to go through that.

Thurs:
I've done all I can, at least for today. I'm the defender!

Remaining busy at work. Another two tests done on the older products, and Kevin said that was good enough for the one card reader. Nice. So I'll just do another maybe 2 models for the card tests. There's some plug-in coming tomorrow so I'll be doing that at least some of the time. But I'm talking about today! Had the meeting, had to load the machine twice because I picked the wrong version whoops. And worked with the developer to figure out that when the user is an admin user, they can't release their jobs. Huh? That's weird.

Oh and we have to wear masks inside the building now? There's like 5 people in the whole building. Is that really necessary?

Otherwise answered emails, sent a card to Japan for Vinu, you know, stuff.

After the meeting walked around watering plants again. Went over to another section I hadn't been in before, obviously no one is taking care of it. There were the famous "plants in cups" that had fallen over because the water had all evaporated and the weight of the leaves tipped them over. They were in pretty bad shape but I think they were still hanging in there. We'll see, I gave them plenty of water and I'll check back there next week of course. Someone has taken over care of the ones in the front, even wrote on a whiteboard when they last watered so I'm not the only one. The others back there were really hanging in there, not too much wilting going on. Still, those pots were dry so they wouldn't have lasted much longer.

BTW that building is pretty big. I just kept walking and walking and finding more plants... some people put far too much effort into their cubes. I mean sure, it's your home away from home for 8 hours a day and it should be nice but come on.

Oh and it snowed more today. Neat. It's not sticking around but still, it's cold enough for snow?

Came back, no calls, but Ellen wants me to call her, something about importing pictures. Probably didn't set the date on her camera or something.
Checked sites, videos, worked a little on the adventure for tomorrow.

Called her. Apparently her husband died of Covid like a week ago. Yikes, wonder where he got it from. Don't worry, she's still listing on ebay. Photos was crashing during import, very odd. Copied the pictures for her manually. The plaza she owns down in SC is apparently losing a lot of people so her website will need some changes soon, she said.

Did the last of the content and spent some skill points (still have 97) in Mass Effect. Then did a new stage of Shantae and visited another stage as a mouse. Got some heart containers and the "bite as a mouse" power. Power? Well, anyway it's a thing.

Looking to the future, plug in testing tomorrow (that we believe will fail, so that's a thing) and then maybe USDA? I guess?
Shopping, probably don't need gas, but I'll see my parents. Then run game.

And then hopefully something fun over the weekend. Shantae for a bit I'm sure. Putting comics into the database. Petting cats on my lap. That sort of thing.

Keep distancing yourself and I'll see you all back here next week.