2021-02-25:

Fri:

So it turns out it takes a week to get my 401k money in. The amount showed up in my account today, which is wayyyyyyy slower than the other company. Everything about my employment is a scam. Xerox is scamming me out of money so they can't claim me as an employee for reasons known only to them. Then the contract house scams me out of my earnings a whole week because I'm always 3 weeks behind, so they're making interest off my money for at least an extra week. Then money they take out doesn't make it into my account for yet another week, meaning again someone is profiting off that money for that time instead of me doing so. It's not a physical thing, the numbers could vanish from one place and appear in another in less than a second. It taking so long to get me what I have rightfully earned is planned how could it not be?
Meeting about auto copy, machines don't come on when asleep if you put paper in the scanner part. Which they shouldn't, because we're trying to meet strict energy saver rules. So you have to hit a button to wake them up before you can use the auto copy. It is what it is.
Otherwise nothing much exciting.
Few notes for the game.
Got a router, groceries, saw my parents.
Home. Got ready for game, set up the battle map. Game.
They didn't get to learn about everything because Neal beat the shadow's check to steal the egg, but oh well. It was introduced they exist, they learned about the things they can do while in the dream world, and the NPC guards I carefully crafted were irrelevant. Seems about right.

Sat:
Cleaning, as my parents are coming over later.
Sites.
Clearend the driveway out. Is it spring yet?
Had lunch.
Out for router delivery. Why does your Win7 system have XP on it? Odd. I told him with some work it could be upgraded again, then moved to Win10. His system would support it, barely as usual but it would be more useful and less bad for the environment than just scrapping the whole thing. If I was just handed the system I would add an SSD and maybe a bit of RAM and it would be fine to use. He said no at the time. Fine.
Called laptop lady, no answer.
Came back.
Made game notes, have to keep track of what the shadow has seen so it can't be hurt by that every again.
Was going to do a little warframe, but the first place I went to had a boss I could only at first damage every minute or so. They gave me no ammo for my primary weapon, I had removed my pistol so my whip leveled faster, and the whip wouldn't hit the thing in the hitbox the game wanted. I could only damage it with my most energy intensive ability (500 damage) after a lengthy recharge. Then the "real" boss showed up and I couldn't damage it at all. So I quit. Every time I try to play that game single player I have a miserable exprience. So guess what I'm not going to do anymore? (But I did)
Parents came over. Watched funny cat movie.
More warframe.

Sun:
Driveway and snow off roof. Sunny! Lots of ice, why does that still happen? I have an air gap between the roof and the... Lower... Roof. Stupid water, damaging everything. Who needs it!
Warframe.
Sites, videos.
Sunday stuff in general, nothing much exciting to write home about.
One call. Says after he boots the machine hangs up, can't even shut it down. I guess we'll see.
Ready for tomorrow.
Warframe with Sean/Mizzy.

Mon:
Two work things!
The first thing I did was try to save two machines. Looking around at the lab machines Friday I noticed a ton of machines just plain don't work or had error messages. Many of them I don't care about because they are too old, we don't really test them. But two, one that was hung up and one that was endlessly rebooting I did want to look at. The one was an easy fix, just an altboot. The other I had to struggle with a bit, it didn't like the normal way of doing things and I had to use the back way to start it downloading and upgrading. I did it though!

Oh, and we had a directive to switch masks to "medical masks" from on high so we got them today. Made in China. Clearly on the label: "Non-Medical masks." Uh, what? They're also supposed to be "3 layer" but I'm pretty sure they're not. So are they really better than the one I was using? I'm not so sure.

Helping Adnan move a machine was the second thing. Exciting, I know, he wanted it in the same subnet for a test.

Otherwise nothing exciting.

Went to see "cursor spinning guy." Had some trouble with safe mode, his wireless wasn't working but booting normally did work. I did what I could for it, and it seemed fine at the end, but I have no idea what was wrong, if anything.

Came back here, the usual sites, eating dinner. Don't know if we're doing Monday games or not, there's been no news.
We did not, played warframe.

Tues:
Thaw!

Got some actual work to do today. We got in a new build for upcoming machines with a new scanner element due to a fire and short supply of the old element. So I tested two, well tested is a strong word I sanity checked them, because Don is worried they might have missed something in the new build. Why would they do that? Well, anyway, it was fine. Got them loaded up and checked out.

Before that we had a meeting about what to actually test. We don't really do anything scanner related, but it was good to make sure the build loaded and everything I guess.

Oh and I altbooted another machine that had an error message and wouldn't boot. Of course someone changed it to another language so I could only get the gist of it but whatever, the cure would have been the same. I forgot to go see if it worked. Whoops. (It did, I checked it Wednesday)

After work I went to buy cat treats, and stopped in at goodwill to see if they had anything good. They didn't. Boo. I did pick up a new iPod speaker charger thing as mine is busted. Last time I went to use it sound came out, but you could only hear it if you put it up to your ear. Not exactly the best way to use it. The replacement I got is huge! Oh well. Not to say I couldn't have gotten a smaller one, they had them. But this one was the only one with a cord. Why? It can't be removed! So I could at least see it power on before I bought it. It works!

Sites, dinner, getting ready for tomorrow. No calls today, yay! Whoops, someone called later. Just as I had sat down for warframe at 7:00. He just wants a checkup I guess, so it's back to basically the same place I went yesterday, it's following the same route. Weird.

Then did warframe. In 24 hours I'll have my new little robot companion. Finally. Opened a new planet and got lots of Nightwave credits so yay?

Wed:
Why is it going to be in the upper 40s? Almost 50? Not that I'm complaining it's nice to see that ice and snow melt it's just really weird to have that in Feb.

Mostly looked at routers and trying to do the ipv6 test today. Our network just doesn't seem up to the task. So the plan is just to get a small router, not hook it to our network, but plug it in to a laptop and a device and do just do the test with that amount of limited network.

Finished a chapter.

Did look at the voice stuff, apparently I was wrong about what the guy did, he replaced the weblet files to make it work, I thought he was changing printer files. So I closed that bug and told the voice people about it, that they needed to fix it, not us.

Nothing else exciting.

Went to see guy that kept calling his flash drive a "memory stick" so I thought he wanted a RAM upgrade. Finally figured out what he was talking about, and checked his system over. No problems.

Came back here, sites, movies. Got ready for tomorrow, wrote Sean a long answer to a question he had about my character. Remember the guy last week (or so?) that called and said he fixed his issue with system restore? He called back, apparently now his machine won't take the latest upgrades. Neat! Been on the phone an hour an ten minutes now, we're trying the major update, just to see if it'll take that. Oh, and we had to use system restore again because it wouldn't boot. Such a great OS. Why am I doing this again?

And now it's coming up on two hours. Yay! Doesn't this machine have an SSD? I'm sure it does...

And we're finally done at two hours and forty minutes. His machine finally came up and showed no updates. Why do I do this again?

Thurs:
Christina found a router laying around in the lab so she was able to get IPv6 DHCP addresses, so we can do our little status page test. So that's good.
Meeting day, had three meetings today, the normal Joe one, that gets shorter all the time but not any faster to get through, the DHCP meeting which she said "I solved it" two minutes before so that was short, and the usual weekly status meeting before I go plant wandering.

Wrote the next chapter.

Work wise still not much to talk about. Won't get anything new for a bit still.

Came back home, the usual sites, watched videos. Got ready for tomorrow. Was going to do a little warframe now that I got my new companion, maybe some of the easier stages so I'm not frustrated. Nope! LOL Xbox sign in is down, so you can't play any game because they all need you to be signed in of course. Remember when you could just put a cartridge into a game and just play it? I do.

One call, a lost cursor? Could she have turned her trackpad off?

So what's coming up? Annual sales tax, so on Sunday I'll have to do that. My paperwork for this month, then figure out how much I need to send them. Isn't there some kinda form I need to fill out? I only do it once a month, you can't expect me to remember. Oh, what's that, you do expect that? Oh. My bad.

Otherwise probably at least one job over the weekend, I got the keyboard in for the laptop I just sold the guy, so I'll probably pop that in. And maybe my call for today.

Tomorrow will be shopping, getting gas, seeing parents, running game. Maybe challenging them with this mission? Who can say.
Then jobs saturday, and doing the iron man game. Nix invited us all over so she's probably going to kill us all. I suspect poison.
Then paperwork Sunday and generally lazing about? That's the plan right now.

Huh, I was doing some updates as they hadn't been done, and it's stuck at 10.7% now. Oh, no, it went to 10.8% but it seems like it's really slowed down.

So that's February folks. Did you enjoy it? Hate it? Did it mean anything to you? I hope at least one good thing you weren't expecting happened. That's it for me, I'll see you all here next week for the first week of March. Could spring be just around the corner?