2020-12-03:

Fri:
Put up the tree and other decorations, cats are ignoring it for now so that's good.
Whoops it's 10:00 already? Called my 10:00 appointment that I would be right there. Usually I'm better about that but not this time. I guess it comes from not really caring.
It was just to transfer files from his old machine, I didn't turn it on. The whole bottom came right off so that was nice of them, only two screws. Two! Can you imagine it? No clips, no prying, just two screws and a bit of a shove and it came right out. This is logical design, friendos. And as I had previously put an SSD in this machine it didn't take forever to transfer his stuff, oh, and I didn't have to do it outside, paranoid lady! I at one time saw transfer rates of 200MB/sec. Nice! I think his new machine had an SSD as well, but I didn't really care to look too far into it. He's stuck with whatever he has, which includes a crappy trackpad. Seriously, only used it a few minutes and was like, ah, it's one of those crappy trackpads. Nice.
Wegmans - was trying to use up a gift card a customer had sent me, so I picked out items I was sure would be more than $25 so I would have to pay just a little to make sure I wasn't paying too little off the card and it had money left. The total was $22 so I had $3 left on the card. I figured that couldn't be right so when I got back to the car I looked the receipt over. She didn't charge me for the nuts! Now the moral thing to do would be to go back in, say "you didn't charge me for the nuts!" which would be nuts, right? The easy thing to do was throw the card away, so that $3 (approximate cost of the nuts) will never be spent. They have that money anyway, right? So it's basically the same thing.
Then did the regular shopping, no surprises there.
Lunch!
Nap. Don't judge me.
Control. Still just as crashy as ever.
Reading a litle of the star trek stuff, then giving up on that and continued proof reading book 9.
Game! We did part of the adventure after making our characters, I won't say any more.

Sat:
Finished proofing book 9, made PDFs and epub to put on the site and in the dropbox.
Control for a bit.
Cleaning as usual as parents are coming for movie.
Control.
Two movies! The first one was a short one, so we watched the nativity story. It literaly can't be a more Christmas movie than that. You have to wonder, at the end of the film the king orders all kids under the age of 2 to be killed, right? In an attempt to kill Jesus, so casting a reaaaaaaly wide net there. He's like a day old at that point. Maybe he thought his solders couldn't tell the difference between a newborn and a 2 year old? What happened to all those families? Were they just like, "oh gosh our wacky king is at it again!" and go on their lives? At that time there would be a lot of kids that age that were killed. You're telling me the whole town didn't, at that point, take up arms and finally put an end to their corrupt king? What would it have taken, exactly? Did the king really have an equal number of soldiers to peasants? And did those soldiers not think, you know, maybe our king is a bit *coo coo* and maybe I'll just forget to lock the gates tonight because he made us all kill little babies so really, is anything off the table? I mean when neighboring towns heard about this they didn't say "enough is enough" and everybody had fun storming the castle? It's just a weird part of the story that we swerve into slaughtersvill, take in the local sights, and then pop a wheelie and get out of there, never to look back. There seem to have been no reprocutions to that in the story. I guess it's good to be the king? Very strange. I mean, sure, in the story you have to show how "evil" the bad guy is, but the guy coming to "save his people" was a baby. The king was fairly old at that point, right? By the time the "main character" is old enough to do anything about it, the king would be dead. Lifespan at that point was 50? At best? Right? He's got 20 years more before he has to worry about it, he'll be dead before it becomes an issue. Anyway...
Moved the old Susan's Chronicles into separate books so I could find Sailor Moon part. I want to see what I did with the Tenma in that story so I can continue it now with Lysanias. As I'm still leaning in that direciton for the Tenchi book.

Sun:
Finished moving Chronicles, it's 14 books, though some of them are shorter than others. Especially at the end. Still, counting the original Harry Potter rewrite that puts my total at like 40 books written. Go count them for yourself, you'll find I'm right. And take a look at book 9, up now, link over to the left.
Put them up on the website, as well as the latest book in the Lysanias section. It's just easier to digest them in this form. Before it was 3 volumes 100 chapters each, pdf files. Ugh. Now it's both pdf and epub, so you can use it on readers. Thinking of breaking out the original story that way too.
Played Control, so crashy. Got to the end, though there are still plenty of secrets to find and the 2 DLCs to play. So I'll probably be playing it more but not right away.
Cleaned up from yesterday.
Got ready for tomorrow.
3 calls total. Two were "no problem, figured it out" which I always enjoy. The third was dentist guy, complaining about his hindge again. Yay. Dude, I just replaced your cover. How did you break it aleady? So I'm going there tomorrow.

Mon:
And we're back! To having nothing to do at work. It's only 15 more days until a whole week off.

Had a bit of a shock today, Adnan was like "did you get an email from CTG?" and I looked and yes, yes I did. It start with "it is with heavy heart that I inform you that..." And I was thinking, oh great I'm fired. Why am I fired? There will be work to be done there just isn't right this second. But then it was just about CTG people being moved to yet another stupid contract place. Why? This will be the third one in my 5 years there. That's like a year and a half per place. It's so stupid. The letter, then, became hilarious because it went on like CTG was apologizing for killing my dog or something. So weird.

Otherwise, broke the first Susan story into parts, and read a bit of the Sailor Moon adventure to make sure I get the facts right. I did a spell check of it, just in case. It found some things, sigh.

Went to see dentist guy, his bottom cover suffered damage too, a tiny piece of the plastic that held a screw in broke so it was a bit wobbly. Also his power connector got unplugged from the keyboard? We ordered a new laptop and a new TV for him. *shakes head* So I get to go back and set all that up at some point. The man has 3 TVs that I can see, do you really need another one?

Back here at 6:00 finally, sites, ate dinner. No calls? What a great day this has become.

Ordered the bottom plate for dentist guy and a laptop for a lady that called me before thanksgiving, the lady that's sending me her macbook that doesn't turn on.

Tues:
Found some things to do today, continued the card test, though Joe didn't actually say one way or the other if we should or not. Christina was doing a machine so I figured I would after she was done. (We only have one set of cards) It, uh, didn't work out that well. Loaded it up and when I log in with a username and password, I get full functionality from the machine. When I log in with the card I do not. Clearly a software bug, it was the latest daily build and they've put a feature in they haven't told us is ready to test yet, and yes, it relates to the card. So I emailed him "do I go back before this, wait, or what?" I did the D2.9 machine as it was all set up. So at least I did one machine and she did one machine. Equality!

Installed the latest voice system stuff, but it also didn't work out. Still says the queue is empty. We'll have a meeting about that tomorrow.

Finished the sailor moon chapters. Didn't have too many "named" Tenma in the story at all, just Dolands and the three girls that attacked her and got away. So I don't have to worry too much about it. I just hope I have their stats and what powers I gave them, I liked those girls.

Got gas, apparently my station has been sold, again, and doesn't seem to offer the ethanol free anymore. Sigh. It's a sanoco now, I think? Verify when kitten is not on lap.

Checked out good will again, and got a thing for Heather. Came back here, four calls? Well, one was a literal Karen, calling about "the transition" so she's from my new contract house. Two hang ups, and one question about buying a used Mac.

Sites, ate dinner, now to come up with plot for the next book. Still leaning towards Darkbolt, could be fun.

Wed:
Today was brought to you by not getting the full speech system running. Sigh. We tried though. We took some baby steps, there's a config file and it had the IP address in it but the equitrac app had the hostname and you know it didn't like that! And there was SQL garbage because of course there was, so we had to solve that. But he says he's still seeing a null value in the log which shouldn't be there, so we're trying to tackle that. He was supposed to get me a newer build with more error logging, but he did not! Silly.

First real snow of the year when I got up. It was mostly all gone, but not from the roof which is good, shows the roof isn't getting warm from heat leaching out of the top of the house.

Apparently I'm being shuffled between contract houses because of Covid concerns? But that makes no sense because I'm not taking up space at the contract place, now am I? No, I am not. So that rings a bit hollow. But they (the new place) do offer a 401k so at least that much will stay the same.

Wrote a bit, got through chapter 1. We're on our way to solving the mystery of the Missing Tenchi.

Two calls, dentist guy trying to compare a piece of crap $200 laptop to the one I got him. Sure, if you want a piece of crap laptop go for it, dude. If you want something decent, use what I found you. You're the one that paid over $200 for the extended 4 year waranty. And a person with a slow PC. What a shocker.

Thurs:
Lots of meetings today, and we did finally get the equitrac system releasing and deleting jobs. But that all, there's still work to be done as this is basically just the "proof of concept" as they say. Who says that? I don't know, people.

Had the Joe meeting, after that I made some test cases as a spec had been approved. It's for a pretty straightforward test, but I wanted to say "yeah, I did it." Which I did, later at the weekly meeting.

Watered the plants. Wrote chapter 2. Did some voice testing to make sure I could, in fact, release and delete, both for card users and alternate log in users. Closed a task or maybe that was yesterday because the guy said they were happy with the voice testing I did up to that point on the system in the other room. I know that was yesterday, I moved the machine back yesterday.

Went to the lady with the slow pc. It was originally a vista laptop, it had 4GB of RAM but some moron put the 32bit windows on it (it's a core 2 duo, could that only be 32 bit??? I don't know!) so it could only access 3. But more to the point she was trying to run Windows 10 on a 13 year old laptop. I mean it ran surprising well, but not that well. It had basically nothing on it, scans showed nothing, it's just her.

She had a one eyed, 15 year old cat that came right over to me and lay down on my lap. "Oh, you're a human? This is my spot now." Then later he got up and peed on the rug. So it was a mixed bag.

Came back here, 6:00, dinner, sites, made calls, just one new one today in Victor. Sigh. Wireless issue, like I can do anything about that. It's invisible waves in the air, what do you want me to do, exactly? And dentist guy, again no answer. Yay!

Sean wants to play Borderlands, on a Thursday? So I'll do that soon.

Looking to the future not sure what I'll do tomorrow. Shopping, see my parents. Then the Friday game.

Saturday, one job in Victor. Need to come up with something for my sister for Christmas. We're doing the Saturday game so we'll see what Neil has come up with because he wanted to do something I think?

Probably more writing, maybe some wrapping, we'll see. 11 more work days until my week off, stay safe out there everyone. See you back here next week at this same time.