2020-05-14:

Fri:
USDA came through, so I did more testing of that.
Slight mixup of passwords, that caused some issues. When he set it up he used the default password, I of course had forgotten or wasn't paying close enough attention and didn't correct him that it was changed to keep people from India off my machine. So of course everything was busted. I realized it quickly enough but it was still annoying.
Meeting about RTW. That's "return to work" which I wondered why we needed to be a part of because we never left it. He just wanted to know if we had any questions or concerns.

Rest of the day after work went as usual. Shopping, gas, parents, then back here for game. We finished up the adventure relating to Mizzy and are back on the main mission of trying to put the planet buster monsters back to sleep. But where did the rest of my crew go? Seems no one ones.

Sat:

Nothing too exiciting to report about today but my one little story for later. Spent the morning doing a few things
Cleaning as usual, my parents are coming over later.
Took PC apart. How do some PCs even manage to keep running?



Snow. Like, lots of it.
Wanted to cut the lawn. Then this happened.



It all went away, then it snowed again and then that went away. Can we have some sun, please? Please?

Then wasted an hour of my life but it makes a great story! I went down to the retirement home to set up the new router/Modem whatever this lady wanted. She somehow has just spectrum phone service? Odd. Anyway, should be easy right? The box is right there, we'll just switch it out. Of course, this piece of equipment is not "activated" because reasons I guess. I mean they pulled it off the shelf, they could have it activated and ready to go, right? Right. But moving on. I go to the URL they tell me, which BTW proves I'm on the internet. It wouldn't work otherwise. This activation stuff is policy, not technical limitations. Moving on. The site still doesn't have a simple "press me to activate" button I have to call them. Of course the phone doesn't work because the equipment isn't "activated." Moving on. I use my cell phone and the algorithm lady tells me she has "sent the activation signal" and it could be up to ten minutes. I wait for (shocking) 10 minutes. Nothing. I reboot the equipment. Nothing. I call the number back. Now algorithm lady helpfully tells me that due to an outage of "spectrum TV Apps????" my equipment can't be activated. What? Are you talking about? So now I have to hook the old stuff up again (the phone modem thing) so the automated system can call her back when the outage is over. Why couldn't you have told me that when I called the first time, rather than making we wait the first ten minutes? Why does a TV App outage affect equipment activation? Why does it have to be activated at all? It's your equipment, obviously it's supposed to be on your network.

So now I get to go back there another time. Thanks, spectrum. You're a real peach, and not the royal kind.

Finished Future Cop (with a bit of help, that last boss fight is impossible). I watched a video of it being done and they had chosen different weapons than I had. Their "heavy weapon" was a long range grenade type of thing. Mine was the "centered on you" outward explosion. He/She took the attacking machinery down in a couple of hits. I stood there and triggered EMP after EMP and got nowhere. Well, I wasn't going to slog all the way back through the stage to change my loadout so I got the cheat code working and just beat it. Maybe not legit but come on, I just wanted to finally say, after all these years, that I had beaten it. Sean and I were obviously on the last stage, us playing it one more time probably would have done the job.

Looked through my other playstation games. Played a bit of a few, just to check them all out.

Watched the movie with my parents.

Then some Equestria girls.

Sun:
Wrapped my mother's gift. It was perishable so I had to do it at the last minute. At least it had come yesterday. I'll have to not cut it so close next year! (If we're all still alive)
Put the last comics in. Back to regular old books for me. Think I'll start at the top of my Kindle, which is 1984 so I'll be interested to read it for myself.
Sunday stuff, the usual watering the plants and whatnot.
Videos and sites.

Then went to see my mother.
Two calls, the lady from Saturday so I get to see if her problem really is fixed and if her equipment can finally be activated, and two machines Tuesday a half hour away. The pain is back ladies and gentleman, and it feels real good!

(That was a lie by the way)

Watched the second and third equestria girls movie. Both good, but now there's no more Ponies to look forward to. Boo!
Got ready for tomorrow.

Mon:
It was USDA, all USDA day, all USDA time. No really, I just tested the voice system today. Added another 3 pages of notes if you can believe it. I know, it's a big shock.

Later, having finished everything I thought I could do, I clipped some dead leaves from the plant in the lab. There were a lot of them. I water it every week but it still looks a bit wilted. How dry is the air in there?

Spent an hour and a half setting up the modem for the lady. We were able to activate it after talking to a person. But then it didn't work and it had to be released from "quarantine" by agreeing to something but the guy on the phone said he could do it. Then her verification number to set up her account was her cell phone she didn't have anymore, so I had to call back and get that straightened out. While all this was going on I updated her machine and put in Chrome Edge as she was in Windows S or whatever it's called and can only run apps from the windows app store. Whatever.

Finally got home. And tomorrow is going to be even worse? Great!

Still rainy and nasty out, by the way.

Had dinner, checked sites. Got ready for tomorrow so I could do nighttime games with the crew.
Did one call, just needed him to reboot after a BSOD.
Good start on my prep for the game this weekend.
Got ready for bed.

Then the next call. About a half hour of reloading a print driver, it didn't install (thanks HP) so we just plugged it in, window update did some stuff to it, found a "universal" one, then I changed it to the one I downloaded. That still didn't help, so I upgraded foxit and that did seem to work? I guess we'll see.

Then did games.

Tues:
Nothing to do, but I did find one thing. Having gotten the VBS for an upcoming task I wrote some test cases. About 50, who's counting? That took most of the afternoon so at least I wasn't totally falling asleep after lunch.

Worked a little on the next adventure, which doesn't seem like it's going to happen soon. That's how it goes. Sean wants to finish up his adventure so he can then focus on the game he wants to release before the deep space series. Which is fair. It would be each game once every three weeks otherwise which is fine with me from a planning standpoint because it's more time to, uh, not work on the adventure but also increases the likelihood we won't recall what's going on. So I'll just finish up my notes on the subject for now so hopefully I remember what I wanted to do a few months from now (or however long it is).

The job wasn't as bad as I feared, she didn't find a power supply for the one. The other needed very little, and the third had 4,500+ things removed by Mbam. She was trying to install a .Net upgrade (good old .NET!) and it would BSOD on reboot, and have to roll the changes back. Here's a tip for malware authors. Don't give anyone a reason to do a scan if you want your stuff to stay in the machine longer. And oh, nice job McAfee keeping her machine clean of those 4,500+ things that MBAM found. You're a real trooper. I left it slowly grinding through another three updates, figuring it rebooted once and was fine, it would reboot the second time and be fine. It was coming up on 6:30 at that point and I had other things I wanted to do with my life than sit there and watch a percentage count tick up very slowly. Like burn myself with acid or snort gasoline and then set the inside of my nose on fire. Sounds way less painful.

Got back just at 7:00, made my one phone call, ate dinner, got ready for tomorrow, and then did Borderlands. Sheesh. Got the new skin so we did everything we could for the cartels event. Have to check my sites tomorrow.

Wed:
Thought I would at least have the Vision-E meeting to look forward to. Nope. It was not on the calendar anymore apparently they didn't have anything they needed to discuss, though he did send some questions. Only one for me. So that didn't happen.
I did get some more updates to the VBS from yesterday so I made a few more test cases. Mostly just making sure the error screens came up when there was an error.
The only other thing of interest was Kathy finally getting back to me, er, a little. I still say the first test fails but she had no opinion to give on that. Guess it's not coming off the list any time soon. Isn't she working from home? How busy can she be that she can't take 5 minutes to look at my spreadsheet and say "yes that failed" or "that didn't fail because of X?"

Otherwise nothing too exciting. Did some writing.

Came back here, checked sites, waited for the lady to call she finally came after 7:00 where she had said it would be 4:30 she could call and come over. Whatever. Had to get her back into her system.

Another call about facebook? Yup, somehow they closed her account. Neat. So it took a half hour to take a picture of her driver's license, email it to herself, and for me to upload it. (Guess which part took 10 seconds) Hopefully she gets the account back.

No Sean, he didn't want to play tonight so I finished up my notes on the coming adventure.

Also someone stopped by and I took the password off their machine because when she set it up she forgot it. Nice job.


Thurs:
Again, little bits and pieces of things. I think the EIP bug I've found impacts what I'm doing with the USDA stuff, I have the same issue where I tell it to make a 1->2 sided copy and it just makes two single sided copies. So thanks for letting that one get by you, Kathy. Wrote that up. Wrote up another but this one I think she's right about, it's a misunderstanding on my part.

No new USDA build, he promised tomorrow so we'll maybe have that to do.

And a little of the new scan to home test cases worked on, but it wasn't much. Did some writing otherwise, I had a good idea on how to proceed once he starts sealing Mana away.

Came back here, 3 calls so that should be fun. One is a TV remote control? What do you want me to do about that? Seriously.
Checked sites, got ready for tomorrow so I can get my calls done and play We Were Here (or whatever it's called) with Sean.

Can't really tell you what's the weekend plan yet as I haven't made those calls. Doing this early to get it done. But tomorrow is the usual stuff of shopping, I'll probably get gas though I have a half a tank. Seeing my parents. Then we're doing Sean's game, not mine.

Then whatever jobs the calls I made tonight generate all of which I'm sure will be fine.

Maybe it'll warm up soon, but I'm not counting on it.

Stay safe everyone, and don't inject any bleach.