2020-12-31:

Fri:
What day is it? Why it's Christmas Day sir!

They did it all in one night. Well of course they did, they're spirits, they can do whatever they like.

Anyway, not much to say but I had a very nice christmas with the family, and we went to see my grandfather and his somewhat hyperactive pup. He did calm down and let me pet him though.

A big thank you for everything to my family, who has always been there for me. Let's do it all again a year from now, and look back on how great 2021 was. Right? Right.

Played some River City Girls. Liking it.

Sat:
Missed it by that much. A white day after christmas?

Naturally, the first thing to do this morning was... change my toilet seat. This activity raised many questions.
1) Why is the post so long? The nut only grips the top 1/2" of it, having it 3' long (that's what it felt like) seems wasteful and pointless.
2) Why is the nut at the bottom, where it's impossible to get at? Have you ever used your off hand while looking in a mirror to try and unbolt something? Of course you haven't, why on earth would you want to? If the spinning part was at the ttop, not the bottom, it would be far easier. At least the new seat has this design so someone was thinking somewhere.
3) Where can I get a new hand mirror because of course the wrench fell out of my hand and smashed it. My father gave me that mirror. Sigh. I'm gluing it as it only broke into two pieces, it should be fine.
4) Why is the nut both square and plastic? By the time I (figured out which way to) turned it a few times it wasn't so much a square anymore as a blob. I mean it worked, but...

Then the unfortunate and sad task of putting Christmas away.

Got that done, checked sites, ate lunch, did some reading.

Went out to parental control guy. Why does the router advertise this feature but not support it? Showed him how to turn IP addresses off at the router. Started his Win8 machine upgrading to Win10, got her MS account squared away.

Played some River City Girls.

Read When Marnie was there. The movie was very faithful to the book!

Sun:
Tried to use the material mom gave me to fix my cat bag. No dice, sewing machine still won't work. I cleaned a ton of gunk out of the bottom part where the bottom thread is, no dice. I oiled. I loosened screws. I re-threaded. No help. Super. It'll do about three stitches and stop, with the thread all tangled up under the needle. Neat.

Ripped the movies I got from my grandfather.
Played some River City girls.
Looked the Doctor Who book over that I got for Christmas.
May have taken a nap.
Finished looking through book and ate dinner.
Getting ready for return to "normal." No calls so far after Christmas so I get to go home tomorrow. That should be nice.

Mon:
Back to reality I guess. Went to work or whatever.
Did more voice testing, as we're going to finalize it very soon. This was in theory going to be the last build. Too bad the recognition quality has taken a nosedive. Everything seems to work, it just doesn't understand me (I feel) as well as it used to. But isn't that the way? You spend a year with someone, and you talk, and they just pull away from you. Come back to me, Gabi!
We got in a new machine over my break so I set it up, along with moving a busted machine into the busted section and setting up the C8000 that's been sitting there for like a month. Loaded the latest D5.4 on it, still the same problem, can log in, but LDAP stuff doesn't work. I emailed the developer guy Joe had emailed before, we'll see what they say. Maybe time to write it up as a bug.
Loaded the latest D2.9 release to try the auto login feature. It doesn't crash with the FIPS mode turned on, so that's one less bug to worry about. However trying to actually use the feature to print with crashes the machine. I had thought it was because of the "auto" setting that doesn't exist on 6655 but no, it's a crash on color or black and white. Weird. Added that to the bug I had already written previously.
I think that's a good amount of work for today. Or maybe the week?

Came home, saw the snow had all melted and took down the christmas lights. Hopefully this will help keep them from rusting out. Checked sites, ate dinner.
One call, a new setup which I can handle. Got ready for tomorrow and monday game night with the others. The setup lady wanted the weekend, so I get to come home tomorrow. Yay!

Tues:
Had snow overnight, but not enough to really worry too much about.

Not much to do at work. I did figure out I could take the finisher from the dead D5.1 machine and put it on my voice activated machine. Neat. So I did that.

Uh, and nothing else.

There was one car in the parking lot when I got it (which hadn't been plowed by the way) and two when I left. Why am I even going there?

When I got home I did the driveway. Much better this time, I used what I learned last time about keeping the cord on the side and it went much better. I think the snow blower is going to work out, though it's still only a tiny amount of snow it's dealing with at this point.

Checked sites, watched videos. Ate dinner. Two calls, but the second was retracting the first. Yay!

Got ready for tomorrow.

Wed:
Still nothing exciting to talk about at work. Finished about two chapters, that's exciting right?
I did get some news that we can start testing the auto login feature for 4.0 and I didn't expect it for a few months. Weird. Well, there was a bug in the current one he said would be fixed by tomorrow, so I figured I would start tomorrow. Why test software with a known bug? Exactly. So that's tomorrow's plan.

Snow melted, so that's nice.

Came back here, sites, dinner, the usual stuff. I did learn about robocopy and the fact that the windows default file transfer is single threaded. Wha? We've had multiprocessor machines for how long now? No wonder windows file transfers are so crappy. You have to use a command line utility to actually use the proper machine resources. Neat, another reason to hate windows, that's always a good thing to have.

Paid my estimated tax for the year.

One call today, some trouble with libreoffice apparently? Just needed the new version.

But don't worry, we're finishing the year in style. I get to see dentist guy again! Yay!

Oh, and trying to order a battery on ebay my card is being refused. Really? I have $14,000 in my account and you're not accepting my debit card? On the phone for almost an hour to get to talk to someone about it. As there was no info on the site that it even existed. Do they have only one person on the line? My queue was 11 but I suppose it went to 7 for a whole bunch of time, so it wasn't linear. Then it was linear again. So maybe they do only have one person. Ugh. So apparently even though the item is in California, the payment transaction is going to hong kong? And it took more than an hour to discover this and let it go through? Why? So much for the "global" economy. Also, why?

Oh no, got a call at 8:45 that went on for more than half an hour for wi-fi. It was almost 9:30 by the time it was over, and she wasn't back online because she didn't have her network key. So fun.

Oh look, the credit card thing didn't work. What a shock. Was she lying to me? I tried 6 other auctions, and they all gave me the same error. I have no other card to use, and I still can't link the paypal account and the credit union account. What the heck is going on? Of course they're closed now. Yes, a credit card company that closes. So great.

OKAY that was odd. I switched it to paypal, I have 0 balance so it had me put in the credit card, and that was accepted. HUH? The seller is

eBay - 微 江 (qinwei71)

are all these being processed through china somehow? What the heck?

Can I go to bed now? Is it 2021 yet?

Thurs:
One year without Chris! It's come and gone.

Tested out the new D4.0 stuff as I said yesterday. It works for the most part. Couldn't get it to scan, so the opposite problem of the 6655. Wrote up a translation bug, and the fact the save button doesn't do anything when you press it if you've not changed anything in the window. (We have various behaviors for how to handle that across the system) The scan thing he's looking into. Tested two models, same results on both, so we're in somewhat good shape I guess.

Did a bit more writing, not much. Watered the plants of course.

Went over to see dentist guy. The usual amount of nonsense, he shows me the AOL webmail screen and is like "here's the PDFs." Uh, no, that's AOL webmail. It has nothing to do with PDFs. So I made sure, in thunderbird, that his folders were there and again exported his email into folders. I've only done it like twice now over the years? But maybe he's finally giving up this role and so won't need me to do it again? We put them on dropbox, he had previously just wanted them on an external drive. Don't even ask, I don't know.

Made it back just before 7. Two calls, another call and then cancel the call. But I called Ron for like an hour and a half straightening up various things on his system. So tedious.

But it's over. 2020 is gone, the end. There are still 20 days of nonsense but we can power through that, right? Baby tantrums? Twenty days more?

Let's look to the future. Getting ready for bed it's fine.

Tomorrow no jobs, I have to put the books into the app. Put the books away. Do paperwork for December. Then do the end of year stuff, for doing taxes later. Seeing my parents, hopefully Aldi is open to get groceries, and getting gas. Copy the calendar over. That's the only real planned stuff, otherwise maybe some more River City Girls? I don't know that we're doing any game this week.

Saturday is one job at 1:00. Otherwise enjoying my last weekend before it's back to the old grind.

Hope you do the same. See you next week, with plenty of wonderful 2021 stories to tell now that we've turned the corner 90 degrees and everything will be great again.


everything. will be great.









EVERYTHING.