2020-07-09:

Fri:

Happy day off. Hope everyone had a productive day of doing whatever they wanted to do. Even if all they wanted to do was lay in the sun.
Picked berries, only got about ten but they're coming in. They've plumped up a bit as well so while I won't get quite as many this year because neigbors, I should at least get a pie or two worth.
Painted the last part of the last piece of Neil's gift. Then started the next pour.
Made muffins.
Made ice cream. Didn't freeze very much, stuck it back in the freezer, let it get cold, then dumped it back in the mixer, which I had also put back in the freezer. Still didn't freeze very much. Weird. Dumped it back in the freezer. It came out really good though, somehow, better than normal though I use the same ingredients every time. Weird.
Watched a movie.
Finished pouring the stuff. Hoping I don't get a dimple.
Sites and youtube, after all the videos keep coming.
Saw my parents.
Did some borderlands, and Neil joined us! Haven't done four player borderlands in some time. Didn't get through all the DLC.

Sat:
More berries, but again not a lot of them. They're slowly coming in.
Worked on the gift for Mom. It's a bit scratched up on the back but what else can I do? I tried sanding it down going from 1500 to 7000 sandpaper twice, and tried dad's scratch stuff. No luck. But I poured the rest of it, hope it comes out okay.
Neil's pour came out well, the divots are still a bit sticky, hopefully they'll harden they came from the same pour. Spoiler: They didn't. Had to clean them off. It's so weird, I did three tiny drops from the batch and two of the three stayed sticky. One hardened. How is that even possible?
Checked sites.
Watched a movie.
Played some arcade games. Won Golden Ax 2 which was really hard. Probably would have spent almost $5.00 if I had been putting quarters in. I could only take three hits from some enemies. How is that fair? I mean it's a four player game but on on.
Saw the fam.
Came back for a bit of gaming.

Sun:
Cut the front lawn before it got too hot out. It was super nice out later, did some reading outside in the sun because it'll be winter in like two weeks something, right?
Checked sites.
Worked on the atari Heather gave me to test. It works for the most part, one of the switches doesn't want to cooperate very well.
Cleaned up after trying to test the Atari system. I had my box of UHF/VHF stuff all over, the old TV pulled out, games and such everywhere. Those were the days. Crappy signal, screwing leads onto little posts, trying to tune the channel with a separate dial. (I had to use the older-old TV that had been left in the bacement when I moved in. I didn't have anything I could use to plug the 2600 into the "newer" analog TV. It only had a coax antenna input not the posts like in the "olden days." So I needed that little converter box, you remember those, with the little switch to go back and forth between "game" and "antenna"? Oh yeah, good old days. Thank goodness HDMI was invented.
Watched more Supergirl.
Picked a few berries.
Made my phone calls. One lady who doesn't know her email password. She called me back once she had it and I set up thunderbird for her. Booked tomorrow (tuneup) and Wednesday (power outage and now it won't boot up all the way, just does the "trying to repair" over and over. Thanks MS your programming is the best) and didn't reach book guy. "Has a voicemail that's not been set up." I guess that's better than him hanging up on me over and over?
Got ready for tomorrow, and back to work that I love so much.

Mon:
Not much to do, really. No new USDA work, we've tested the scan to home thing or at least I have to the point more is hardly worth it. I think I've figured out Mizzy's Christmas present though! That's Sean and Neil done (well, after some cleanup on Neil's still) so I can get started on hers and be ready with plenty of time during the holidays.
Wrote one bug after messing with the new CoLA. I had a few bug fixes (not many) but one of the fixes highlights the fact that smaller machines can't scan LEF documents. When you try the machine is smart enough not to go totally bonkers but you don't get a letter sheet. You get something a little thinner and a little longer than a letter sheet. Maybe A4? Is that the letter equivalent or is that A3? I can never remember. Anyway, if you tell it that the sheet it SEF it scans fine. So why not make that the default so people using smaller machines don't have to change it every time? Those using bigger machines need to learn which way to put the paper anyway, so they can learn to put it in SEF unless they want to change it. Makes sense to me. Not much else.
Checked machine over at my second job, really it had no problems. Got her printer scanning. It's a piece of crap Vista machine so the printer doesn't actually support it, so I had to set up a network share in order to get it to scan. I think she was calling making a copy scanning anyway? Because she clearly hadn't done any scans with it, ever. Who knows.
Got supplies for Mizzy's gift on the way home. I hope it works out, I guess there's no reason it shouldn't.
Came home, picked berries. Got a whole (small) container full. There should be a few more to get tomorrow. The ones right behind the driveway have once again not produced very much. I got a few from where the neighbors missed cutting bushes down, but the ones on the side look about right. I'll take what I can get.
Checked sites briefly, Sean canceled game night with Adam but then wanted to do Borderlands, so I got ready for that.
Got ready for bed.
Games with Sean, we still didn't get through the new content.

Tues:
Another fairly boring day. Spent the morning in, uh, quiet contemplation of what, exactly, I could be doing.
In the afternoon I messed around with the voice system a bit more, didn't really find anything new.
I also modified the file that controls what cards are allowed for Joe, who said a very large installation was being held up because we previously supported a card via patch but that patch no longer works on the later machines. Whoops! We're trying to get away from this stupid .xml file which begs the question why we ported it to the D2.9 product instead of leaping past it and moving to whatever is going to replace it. Rather then porting and testing that old, hopefully soon to be obsolete system. But hey, I'm just a tester what do I know?

Went out to my after work job. Wasn't as bad as I feared once I realized his problem was a) caused after a power outage and b) a BSOD claiming "unmountable boot volume" even after checking it with the boot flash drive and getting no errors. I realized ye old "SATA port type" had reared its ugly head, and set it from RAID back to ACHI or whatever it is. Because even in 2020, you put the wrong BIOS setting on the machine, and machine no boot no more. Great job, MS, you're a shining beacon of hope for the industry.

Got back here, no game, Sean wants to play Control all by his lonesome today. He want to be in Control in other words. I wish I could be in Control. So I watched a daily video (it was long), checked sites, ate dinner, picked a half a tub of berries, and made phone calls. Didn't reach book guy, still "voicemail that hasn't been set up" and York is trying to install a new printer into their windows 2003 system? Uh, good luck with that, you know how many printer manufacturers are going to support a 17 year old OS? None of them. And a lady just wanting to know if classic shell not updating was okay. Sigh, yes, we can move you to open shell later. Again, if MS hadn't screwed up their start menu so badly (as to show you ads, yes, ads in their OS) you wouldn't need a replacement now would you?

Here's something that just confused me. As you know I'm listening to a zillion years of Prairie Home Companion and one of the recurring guests is the Digiallonardo sisters. As I enjoyed their singing I looked into purchasing some of their albums, if any. (because that's how music sharing works, music industy. Hearing music makes me want to consume more music.) They have one album on the iTunes music store, which is odd I expected more. The point is, the album is 9 tracks, each track is .99. But the album is.... $9.99. So wait, if I click buy 9 times I pay $8.91 in essence getting the final song free. But if I click once I pay $10.00. Does that seem fair to you?

Wed:
Another fairly boring day. I did a few things, not really related to any project. I noticed the machine next to the machine with the dead hard drive had what appeared to be a dead hard drive. You remember a few weeks back I worked on a machine and tore the side off to get at the drive? The one next to that one. They're the same model, so it's not surprising the drives (from 2013) are starting to die in them. Replaced it, got it loaded and going again.

Had the USDA meeting. You know the guy they were getting up to speed on the project so they could fix some bugs at last? He got pulled into another project. Oh, okay. So they haven't done much. I was supposed to get a build today, but I did not.

Puttered around the lab, tried not to fall asleep. Plant watering day tomorrow!

Called book guy, same two rings and a voicemail that isn't sent up. So I came home.
Picked berries, I now have two tubs of them and there's plenty more to get out there. It's hot! (Yes, even for me)
Checked sites, got ready for tomorrow. Had two calls, well, three. York called, indeed their printer supports 2008 and up. Not 2003. Shocker. I'm going over there anyway to see what I can do.
The next was what to do about a ccleaner update (ignore it) and a scam popup. Really, if the question is asked "could this be a scam?" the answer is always yes, yes it's a scam. That's all there is to it.
Played some borderlands.

Thurs:
A little more excitement today, but not by much. I got the email with the update to the USDA product after I left, so I fired that up in the morning. ... or did I? Hard to tell, as the version number didn't increment. The top bug fixed was "leds work again." They didn't. So I was like, uh, did it work or not? So I tried the copy function, again that was supposedly fixed, and it still wasn't fixed. BUT it was broken in a different way so I guess it worked? Some of the things were fixed. Some of the things were not. So good work all around.

Played around it it after the morning meeting, wrote up some more stuff I noticed. Had the usual afternoon meeting and went around watering the plants again.

Super hot out, my temperature gauge on the way home said 100. Well it read 100. You know what I mean. Anyway, went to york. I set the printer up as a generic postscript printer so they can at least LPR jobs to it. It won't do anything fancy, but at least it'll work. And I used my knowledge from earlier in the week to set up a share folder so they could have a scan repository. It was easier because they already had passwords so I just stuck the owner's password in there (as he's an admin) and said "fine, just scan and file it. It's better than nothing." So that wasn't too bad.

Came back here, waited until it cooled down a little so didn't get berries right away. One call, I think her battery is dying. It's not charging right. Checked sites, the usual getting ready for tomorrow. Got berries after the sun went down a bit.

Tomorrow more USDA? I don't know what else I would do. But it's a fast paced place so you never know. Then I'll get gas, do the shopping, and go see my parents. Heather's birthday is coming up, are we doing a thing? We'll do game tomorrow, unless it's a Heather present day celebration? Ah, I got an answer of Sunday so that's fine.

Anyway, the future: Nothing job wise yet for the weekend. Work on finishing up Neil's gift, start on Mizzy's gift. Do the paperwork. Lawn doesn't need cutting so that's good. No monster game yet, not for two weeks.

Thinking about a fence in the back, to keep people out of my yard so they stop cutting down my plant life.

So that's a week and a bit of July out of the way. Hot enough for ya? Just kidding, it is! See you next week everyone.