2021-07-29:

Fri:
Nothing exciting at work, wrote a bit though. Not much.
Found some cards for a guy, he wanted to borrow some so I let him. Turns out he had borrowed them before and I never updated the list when I got it back, so it still showed he had them. No real moral to the story, it's just what happened.
Finished making the changes to my blind troll character, if we ever get through the current adventure and get to playing with new characters.
Got cat food over at the tractor supply store. Litter too, and a bag of dry, but I didn't need it. Already had one. Whoops. Well, they have dry for the rest of the year I guess.
Got groceries.
Went to the bank, put the money into my savings for later putting into my IRA.
Saw my parents, figured out a tree for her? At least a similar tree, using the new identifier app I got.
Came back here, put stuff away.
Sites, and then game. He hated my newest technique as I expected, so it's getting changed. As I expected. Being able to charge energy just doesn't work in a setting where the strength of your magic depends on how much energy you can spend. It should still be okay though, in the end. Even if he nerfs it I'm still doing up to 6 attacks at once with a chance to drain energy and electrocute for a lot of damage.
Wait, what stops me from casting a spell to let me charge energy? It's the same thing, and I can give it to other people so they can do it too...


Sat:
Found and told Sean about another exploit using an ability he gave my character. Ridiculous damage was possible for very little energy cost. Which I love of course, but he doesn't.
Wavlink investigate - Mac seems to read both drives perfectly, so it works just fine. Can windows not see two drives at once with this unit? Seems odd. At least it's not broken.
Thanks windows, you're a peach as always.
Looked for berries to pick - a whole bag of blackberries again. Never had this many. Ever. More will get ripe too. Not too many more but some.
Moved the mouse into the other cage. Secured it with, of course, magnets! How do they work?
    And he almost immediately got out. Luckily I saw it, and his name is Houdini now. He didn't use the door, apparently some of the back bars were bent just enough that he could slip out between them. Sigh. How did he find that so fast? He wasn't in there two minutes, and it was at the top section as far as I can tell. The other mice didn't figure out how to get up there until I put them up there a few times (as far as I could tell) and made them climb down so they got the idea. (The food and water is up there so I wanted to be sure they could get up there) I ordered some steel meshing, I'll cut it and somehow?? attach it to the inside, so hopefully he won't be able to just slip out like that again. Silly mouse! He's back in the tank for the moment. Sorry if you're bored, but you did it to yourself!
Had lunch.
1:00 appointment - set up the laptop, it was actually her desktop with the issue. Whoops. I took a look at it, the thing would boot but then not finish booting. Explorer seemed to be running, but no windows came up and there was no task bar. I tried some things, ran Mbam from the command line, which showed a bunch of stuff, but didn't actually solve anything. She was getting the laptop anyway, so I just said scrap it. Put her stuff on there, took the PC stuff off the desk, and set it up instead. You'll be happier, it's a much faster system, believe me.
4:00 game - got there at 4:40 because of my stupid late appointment, which was fine. We only got through half the adventure anyway. Sheesh. We were facing a whole section of city crawling with vampires to find an item that could be anywhere all while saving humans in pens. Naturally plans were not forthcoming. And everyone was talking about other stuff, so we got started really late, but whatever.


Sun:
Did the back lawn.
Wanted to make ice cream - whoops, forgot to freeze the chamber last night so that's not getting done. Put the chamber in the freezer.
Sites and videos.
Put up some photos for Ellen's site.
Then played my little RPG I was working on. Thought I had won it. No, it said "go get the 7 relics anyway!" so I get to do that now. I got a few of them.
Got ready for tomorrow.
Dinner.
Made phone calls, handled both over the phone so at the moment it looks like I'm free tomorrow.

Mon:
Had work for today, we got a D2.9 build and a D4.0 build. The D2.9 we don't actually have anything in, but there were some bug fixes. I checked the one, the xml list for what the descriptions were. It was, uh, a mess? How hard is it to look at one document, match some numbers up, and copy the strings from that number's column to the file? Because apparently it's really, really tough. They couldn't do it, there were all kinds of mistakes. Even spelling mistakes, how did that happen? I wrote up a bug with this huge list "and there may be more, you figure it out." Honestly. So dumb.
But the D4.0 stuff looks good. It's just the config sheet, and they should have solved the problems in D5.4 before/while/during development so yeah, it should be perfect. And it seems to be. No new bugs written there.
Wrote the first chapter of the Tayna story. I don't know how long it might be (and yes, I should finish the Herman story but as Herman is dragging on for at least another 3 weeks) I just wanted to get more of a sense of who Tayna was, and this was a good way to do it. She's just talking with her agent about a new movie she can audition for, I'm thinking she starts filming and the main lead is murdered? Sort of a murder mystery? But I have no clue yet! I only had the idea for the first chapter. But I did learn more about her, she's close with her family, doesn't know what color is, has an OnlyFans, what her agent's name is, that sort of thing.
No job, so came home. Picked berries, only a few more and I'll have another full container of blackberries. Crazy. I hardly get 1/4 of a bag and throw them in with the rasperies. This year it'll be 3 bags!
Made ice cream, but it still needs to freeze it's basically a really thick hot chocolate right now. I could drink it like a shake I suppose...
Got the SSD in for the Mac. Didn't shave much off the boot time, honestly. I guess we'll see how it goes.
No calls today apart from a "have you lost your eyesight due to medication X?" sort of deal.

Tues:
Finished up the config sheet stuff and had the usual voice system meeting. They claim to have fixed most of the bugs, and were working on the last few. No new build yet, they wanted to get everything done. I respect that. So nothing new to test there, but maybe in a day or two.

Nothing much else. Made a few tweaks to the new story, have no idea where it should go from here.

Came back here, set up the iMac on my desk, we'll see what I can do with it that my other machine can't. (I am starting to run into software or newer versions of software it can't run, like my openEmu emulator system)

Sites and videos, had ice cream, and got ready for tomorrow.

Wed:
Nothing work wise.
Nothing story wise, thought about it a lot, maybe too much like Blood Rites, the Dresden files book. Probably where my brain went, having read that. I mean mine would be quite different, being told from another perspective and I would have different things happen but the basic setup would be the same. Came up with another glimmer of an idea.

Came home, one call. Setting up a new PC.
Worked on the squeaky dehumidifier, I think it was squeaking not from the compressor, as I first believed as it was only squeaking when that was on, but just on some support structure. I sprayed it with the oil, glued fabric to the inside of the case, and it's been silent ever since. I don't have to keep all those macs around it trying to keep it steady! Yay!
Ate dinner, sites.
Made sure the PC was up to date, and a good thing I did. The Dell I grabbed, thinking it would be the one, didn't turn on. Whoops, no drive. Why did I keep it up there in my selling pile? I do have a similar HP though. So I switched to that one instead. She won't care.
Got ready for tomorrow.
Xbox stuff, more warframe for a bit.

Thurs:
Some work stuff today. The meetings, of course. Checked a bug in a recent build, looked good. Got the interim build of the voice system. And they broke everything. I can log in, sure, but when I do I'm told I'm not logged in. When I try to do something, even when I flip the switch that says "you don't have to be logged in" it says I can't do anything remotely. And of course the guy is out until Monday. Neat. So that's not getting tested and the system drags on. Helped find some machines for the inventory for Don.

Got a little farther in the idea, like maybe one of the actresses finds a piece of jewelry that's magical and someone is trying to get it back, but where does it go from there? Is it something dangerous? Does it help keep something dangerous at bay and the force has already taken out the person that had it before? I'm just not sure. Maybe I'm just out of ideas forever.

Went out to the lady way down 490 but of course the one program she uses, Quicken 2011 she doesn't have the disk for. Oh, she has quicken '98 on a million floppies. And '06. That'll help! But nothing for 2011. Great. So I drove back, having sold her nothing.

Checked sites, videos, ate dinner, the usual.

What's going on soon? Tomorrow I'll do the usual stuff, get groceries, see my parents. Maybe game? With Neil moving or packing or whatever he's doing probably not the usual stuff. Don't know if Jon is joining right now or what. Maybe xbox?

Nothing big for the weekend yet. Finishing up the berry picking. Maybe starting Neil's gift? Have to get on that. Lawn doesn't really need it yet. Have my parents over for a movie. That should about do it I guess. Oh, I got the wire mesh so hooking that into the better cage for the mouse, so they aren't so bored. Can't forget that.

So that's the last week of July huh? Cold and rainy for the most part. Stay safe out there everyone and I'll see you all next week.