2022-03-24:

Fri:
Had some work today. Christina came over to talk about SNMP and the tool we were using to test the new feature.
I was on the right track to figuring it out, but got distracted by Don kermiting about some penalty we would have to pay for not doing some work. It was all over the place and I still don't understand it, so I tried reproducing the problem. I said "here's what's happening, is that what is happening for the customer?" and he's all like "I have no idea!" Uh. What?
Did some writing! Didn't quite finish the chapter so I'll have a bit more work to do on it.
Did the shopping, saw my parents.
Came back here, checked sites, are we doing game tonight? There was no confirmation in discord and usually there is.
They must be cutting the big tree across the street down. Most of the branches are off it. Too bad, bye big tree.
I guess we are not doing game. Why do I not remember anyone saying anything to that effect? Odd.
Watched the rest of ladybug, this season at least.
Finished up the chapter I was working on earlier.

Sat:
Cleaned up the house.
Ordered RAM for my grandfather's PC. It had 2GB. Yes, 2GB! I got an 8GB chip for it so it'll have 5x as much. It took about 5 minutes to boot, no lie. I eventually gave up and yanked the drive out to get his stuff. Dell, how is this acceptable? I know, it's a 9 year old machine but even this, shouldn't this have been unacceptable? No? Okay then.
Checked sites, videos.
Called iMac lady. Her machine was hanging up, spent an hour or more trying stuff. It didn't seem like hardware. Made a new user account and it was fine. Odd.
Went to set up the printer. Why did you buy a crappy Epson (are they still in business?) inkjet if you're mostly going to do black only? Seems like a total waste to me, but it's not my money. Or my nozzels, that will inveriably clog because you don't use the color and then you can buy another new printer, this time the correct one for your printing needs.
Then over to iMac lady. Figured out (in the end) it was google drive hanging the machine up. Didn't think that was supposed to happen. Really though, how did google drive opening screw up the machine so badly I had to do a hard power off? Seems like they should have tested for that at the OS level, I mean they all these memory protection and scheduler algorithms a badly behaving app shouldn't take the whole system down. This isn't OS 7 anymore. Got back at 2:00, I went out at 11:00. Ugh. She did give me extra, though I tried to dissuade her from this course.
Ate lunch.
Took apart my grandfather's old PC. Less than 500GB of RAM. Wouldn't turn on, the capacitors were pretty messed up.
Parents came for movie, then I watched some other stuff when they left.

Sun:
Watched some movies, including one my parents gave me.
Straightened up more digital files. The list is finally shrinking.
Made a pie.
Did the usual sunday stuff, like watering plants.
A guy called that wants me to set up his mouse? By remote? Uh, dude, how are you going to use your PC if you can't use the mouse?
Two other calls, the guy down the street with passwords, again, and something about his printer. And the last person that wants photos taken off some iPads and an old PC.
Watched another movie.
Mouse guy it seems just didn't turn the mouse on? He was in his car and I could hardly understand him but I think that's what I got out of it. Going to see passwords guy tomorrow, should be "fun." Didn't reach the other person. Went to bed.

Mon:
Looks like the cloning test stayed "running" all weekend. There's no sort of timeout at all? Really? Seems like a bad idea but then, XDM was pretty badly programmed from what I saw when I was testing it many years ago. And we haven't upgraded the thing in a few years.
Got a new build of the ID card copy stuff, so loaded that up and took a look. The bug we ran into before is indeed fixed, so we were able to get through the whole test. It looks pretty good, the usual amount of visual problems like bolding and possibly wrong fonts. But it works, we sent the issues to Gina to ask what/if/when we should write things up.
That took most of the day, I was just proofreading didn't want to start a new chapter with only an hour to go.

Went to see the guy down the street. Just a few questions, luckily nothing that took too long. So I got back pretty quick.

The big tree is totally down. Apparently my batteries have been delivered, but when I went out to get my mail I realized my mailbox was gone. Uh, where is it? I guess they needed the space so they took it down as well. I hope they put it back! They're just cutting up the large part of the trunk now.

Checked sites, ate dinner.

Hey they're putting my mailbox back! That's nice of them.

Got the pictures off my grandfather's other drive.

Tues:
Ran some card reader tests, that was the only real work thing. Two worked, one didn't.
Also had a brief meeting because I guess some people were let go yesterday but it could have been an email.
Oh, talked with Christina about what testing I may need to do when she's on vacation. Hopefully not too much.
And got more cheese.

Went to savers and good will, got a few things.

Came back here, had two calls. The second person needed to hear the words "open Libreoffice."
The other was going on about random stuff so I'm going over there tomorrow. She's down by grandma's old house.

Wed:
Not much exciting at work. Fighting with the kofax websites. There's apparently three of them, they let me re-license our equitrac server despite it being out of service on their end but when I went to the site to get the serial number it claimed my password was wrong. So I set up a new account figuring this was a different site maybe I needed to to that first. I had done it with the other two. Nope, already an account but I only used the one password. So I hit the link for forgot password. Nothing came. They did get back to me and the tech support guy sent an email to another tech support guy (this is why companies have so many support costs, their tech support people only serve to contact other tech support people) and I didn't hear anything after that. Great.

No card reader stuff, Ted didn't get back to me.

Looked to see how much paper we had in storage. Not too much, actually.

Wrote the next chapter of the book. The first house got destroyed and the first mystery begins. It'll actually be solved super easy, barely an inconvenience but at least it's a bit of world building. Things can be not what they seem.

Went to see the confused lady, she gave me fruit, onions, and potatoes. This was after I worked on her stuff of course. Couldn't get QR codes to be read by android, had to download a 3rd party app for it. Great job guys.

The guy dropped his laptop off so I opened it up. Still not the right battery. See, he told me the wrong model number of laptop. I have written down it's a 450 but it's really a 540. Slight difference, no? So I've spent about $50 in batteries I'll never use and are too expensive to return. It's not worth it. I really hate this job.

Some callers today, and I reached the guy from a few days ago. He's bringing some stuff to me, doesn't even know if it works or not. Neat.

One person, the person that yesterday needed to be told "open libreoffice" today needed to be told "hit enter." Apparently despite being old enough to have witnessed the introduction of the typewriter she had no clue how to make the cursor go down a line. Spectacular.

So at the moment it's smooth sailing tomorrow. Going out to lunch for a retirement dinner, and I get to come right home. Could life be better?

Thurs:
Did more of the card reader stuff as Ted was around. Figured out how to get at the logs that might have some clue (they didn't) so thanks Chris. Still no idea why 2 of the 3 card readers allow us to log in. He said he tried it on another server and it worked. Okay? I'm going to try some software tool to fake a server tomorrow.

We had the lunch for our person that's leaving. Then back to do the status meeting and then boom, time to come home. No time to write anything! Work work work.

Just one call when I got home, so that's not too bad. Haven't reached him as of yet.

Got the iPad and PC dropped off. The question is answered, the iPad doesn't turn on. Not much I can do in that case. Got the pictures off the PC though. Goodness USB 2 is slow. Yuck.

Checked sites, not really hungry but had some pie, watched videos.

Let's look to the future. No parents tomorrow, but I'll drop stuff off. Shopping, might just go to the bank now that I think about it. Looks like we are doing the Friday game it was confirmed by netcraft.

Saturday is the Emberhaven game, looking forward to that. Not sure about Sunday plans.

Ah, he called me. Somehow he had gotten a demo of Office on his machine a week and a half ago, and it had taken over his document preferences. How did he even do that? I took it off.

So that's that. Another week successfully navigated. See you all next time.