2022-09-01:

Fri:
Had a meeting about Gabi, the results and what to do next. I'm still not sure if I should dismantle the thing. Oh well, we don't need it for anything at the moment so it can stay hooked up I guess.
Cleaned up the other side of the lab, put up a table and straightened out the consumables. They had just been sitting on a cart randomly for months. Our "lab manager" may not care about keeping things neat but I do. Moved a printer to put the table there, generally straightened up. Wheeled one of our baskets down to the paper recycle center too. Bye, full load of paper! There was no one there, by the way. Parking lot was pretty empty when I arrived too. I would said next week was the day to take off, as you would get a 4 day weekend. Why take this Friday off? Weird.
Wrote up a bug against Gabi or our devices only searching the address book sometimes.
Went to the bank, didn't go shopping as I only need milk. I'll stop by tomorrow when I get the driveway stuff.
Saw my parents.
Came back here, checked sites.
Did the adventure, stopped something going on at a graveyard, we aren't really sure what the guy was in the middle of it and didn't get a chance to monolog. The school will have to look into it. How long does it take crops to die just from moving a ley line? Weird that no one noticed this joker there for days or weeks and called the police.

Sat:
Went out to change the guy's drive. 15mb/sec for the main partition which jumped up to 50mb/sec for the other partitions? Took an hour and 45 minutes? Neat. According to my tests it should do about 2GB/minute as the test I did copying 95gb took 46 minutes so 50gb of data should have taken, oh, twenty minutes? Clearly not the greatest drive Dell. But what's weird is it did get the 50 at the end. So I know the drive is capable of it. What exactly was going on with it? BTW I hooked it to my laptop, as just booting his was so painful I turned it off again, figuring it would never finish. So it was my dual drive enclosure gizmo that was doing the copy. Oh, and to pour salt into the wound the laptop has a M.2 slot. Dell chose to outfit their laptop with an M.2 and a controller for a backlit keyboard, and then provide neither. Neat. Why bother, in that case? Thanks for the great "experience" dell so glad you care about customer satisfaction. I mean isn't it far cheeper to make a single small circuit board than a whole hard drive nowadays? You need metal, and magnets, and wire, and a circuit board to control the dang thing and testing or a bit of silicon and it's much faster for the customer. It just doesn't make sense to me why any company would choose the slower, worse, more expensive? option for their product.
Okay so I find on newegg the "Silicon Power 256GB NVMe M.2 2280 PCIe Gen3 x4 TLC SSD" for $21. The cheapest 256GB hard drive I found was the "TOSHIBA MK2546GSX 250GB 5400 RPM 8MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5" for $19. And keep in mind 5400 RPM drives are the worst of the worst. It's actually odd to me that you can get all the components for a drive, and there are more than a few you need mind you, for that kind of money and still make money selling them. I mean what did it cost to ship that drive from China? But I digress, economies of scale and all that. So for $2.00 (all things being equal as Dell can buy in bulk and get much better deals, obviously) you totally frustrated your customer SO MUCH they had to have me change the whole drive out, increasing E-waste and costing them more time and money. And will they buy another Dell? Odds aren't good, as they had such a bad experience. Nice job, Dell, well to go. Changing the drive made a huge difference, by the way. It was the drive, not anything else.
Bought the driveway stuff. Yucky liquid patch jug is all they had, not the better stuff I like more that's in the tub.
Got milk too.
Came back here, had lunch.
Worked on my new starship some more. Got it all repaired but one slot. I need a special kind of Copper for it that I can't buy anywhere and haven't found. Weird. Still a lot more slots than my old ship so I'm pretty happy with it. Flew it around, haven't gone into space with it which will of course be the ultimate test.
Alyx canceled at the last minute, I was going to go over to Sean's even though Stan wasn't available so we wouldn't do Pyrehaven. Kim was going to come and we would have a board game night. I guess Alyx didn't feel well in the end. So I didn't go over there. But he wanted to do No Man's Sky after dinner so no movie night, but we'll still do stuff. Can't wait to show off my base!

It didn't work! It's glitched out, didn't want to download, so all he saw was rock. Even when we did walk over and then was able to teleport into it, he had to cut his way though it and it was all glitchy. Did the developers, who, having given the game a tool to dig into the ground and create bases, not think, hey maybe someone will want to build a base... under the ground? No? Didn't occur to them? Or did I just make it too complex or something? But there was no warning "you are about to exceed the threshold of complexity and other players will not be able to interact with your bace." So bizarre. It's so cool, and he couldn't even see it! Aarg!

Sun:
8-10 did the driveway. Had a little speed patch left, whoops. I mixed the remaining speed patch (which still looked okay) and the remaining goop bottle stuff so next year we'll use that not that it will cover everything. Well, maybe if it's just one year, the coat we do this year should last a few right? It usually does. I can just paste over the inevitable cracks like at the very end where that huge one keeps coming back, I can throw more stuff in there.
Rested.
Then trees, moved both some small and some tall ones. I'm more hopeful about these because the ground they were in wasn't choaked up with stupid lilly roots. They came out much easier. So hopefully it won't be as much of a shock. Watered them. Still more I could get but they are pretty tall already. Sheesh, it really got overgrown back there. I could, at one time, simply walk to the drain pipe back there. Not so much now. Maybe I should just clear the whole thing, start over. Eh, it's not hurting anyone. Maybe someone will pay me to not cut anything and claim it as a carbon credit?
Lunch.
Made sure the list was complete for labor day.
Fixed the cloth bag, took 30 seconds. I found it at york in the garbage and wondered why they threw out a cloth bag. There was a small hole where the seam was. "This could easily be fixed" I thought to myself. I realize though not everyone has a sewing machine or the inclination. Which is partly why we're in the mess we're in now, to be totally fair to everybody no? Well, I did, and did, so it's back to being a usable bag. Take that, landfill! You shall not have this bag today!
No Man's Sky. As the others each had 3 ships Mizzy gave me the one she found so now I have three also. A nice silver ship! I had the materials so I fixed it up pretty easily. Problem: it's a cow of a ship. I don't like flying it, you can't easily be in 3rd person! Because of how it sits "upright" like a cat and is so huge, you can't see where you shots are going, for mining or combat. Maybe I'll get some screenshots of the thing?

Here, this is what a normal ship, sorry, a "normal" ship looks.


See how I can tell I'm shooting at a rock? The white circle is over the rock. That's where my laser beams will go.

And here is the new silver ship.



You can just see the white circle, right at the blue tail. What am I shooting at? Can you tell? There is a rock there, am I hitting it? Who knows???? Did no one fly this ship in development and think, wait, that's not right?

Getting into a space combat with pirates made me wish I had either of my other ships. (and I had no missiles, sigh) Star Fox this 'aint! But I lived, fixed the shields, put the missiles on, maybe I'll fly it when I need an empty one for a mining run or something. It's so silver! (can't change spaceship colors, so my other two ships are stuck red) Aarg! Why does it have to have that crazy shape that is dumb? Also why is it a better class than my other two but has less slots? Weird, what do they base class off of anyway? I notice it does use a bit less fuel taking off... Well, I mined some stuff, put things in my new locker, made some money, and that was that.
Picked more grapes for my mother. Got all I could with the ladder I have. Many, many more much higher up. Need to bring them down to earth somehow, this vine has been growing for years it really produces, but I can't get them! Got a nice amount though, she can make plenty of juice. No berries this year but grapes... Lots. That's just the way.
Helped Alyx with their computer, it was booting from the old, external drive instead of the SSD for reasons? We worked through it though, and everything was fine on the SSD, making us both breathe a sigh of relief something more serious wasn't wrong with it.
Watched part 4 of 6 of Lord of the Rings.
Got ready for tomorrow.
Made calls. "Oh, my 10 year old machine is slow and hangs sometimes." You don't say? How shocking this is, that a PC isn't holding up very well? How can this be so? Maybe the crappy components it had at birth? Hopefully can convince the guy to just buy my refurb PC rather than struggle through another two hour SSD switch out. I got it updated and will be sure to put it in the car tomorrow. It's just not worth saving a 10 year old machine, not a crappy PC anyway that started out wrong. If he chooses not to replace it I'll just have to do the drive. Of course he's 30 minutes away, so bringing it back here is out, better to sit for 3 hours there than two hours driving around, no? But $100 for a drive replacement or $250 for a new machine? (a new refurbished machine but still) We'll see what he says.
Reached the other lady, at least at first, the address book didn't get transfered by the "geek squad" and she said she was 5 minutes from home. An hour later I called her back (she was supposed to call me) and there was no answer. Huh. Never called.
Warframe with the others.

Mon:
Worked on tracking down a machine in the lab reporting security warnings. It's an old Mac. Emailed what to do about it, but Ken is out. This is medical leave, so I'll allow it. Christina is also still out apparently, maybe coming back from the camping trip today? I don't know how far away she was going.
Not much else to do, nothing has come in yet. No haul in the morning, so at least nothing sat in the can over the weekend like last time. Gimme stuff tonight!!!
Nope.
Went to second work, it sucked. Machine wasn't as old as I thought but was still from 2013. I was thinking of his older machine. Changed to SSD and got back here at 7:30. Ugh.
No calls, but did reach the lady from yesterday. She wasn't dead. Moved her address book over. That didn't take too long.
Ate dinner, checked sites.
Got ready for tomorrow.
Did a little No Man's Sky. Wanted to check out the planet we found Uranium on, we didn't stay there long and I just bought a better radiation shield so let me at it.

Tues:
Still nothing new coming in at work. Don was in, he drove the hour to hand in his laptop, the old one. Had a talk about how to performance test the onedrive app. We really can't but maybe some approximation?
Otherwise nothing. No haul, nothing fun.
Went to good will, got two goodies.
Then home. Finished up the base so it has solar power now so we can use it, if needed.
Checked sites, ate dinner.
Got ready for tomorrow and made a call, as I got the keyboard in for the lady. No answer, as expected, and her mailbox is full, as expected. I'll bring it with me tomorrow and just call after work.
Did some warframe and then No Man's Sky with the others. And a half hour call with a guy who didn't want to pay me anything, clearly. Not an android expert, you can't expect me to solve your stupid space problem (an 8GB device) over the phone if I can't see it.

Wed:
We got actual work? That doesn't seem right.
Yes, apparently without fanfare yesterday we got the new version of versalink both 2.0 and 1.5. Neat. So in the afternoon I started my final test of the erase jobs on logout feature. I got three models tested, it's not like they fixed anything so I'm just making sure they didn't screw anything up. Christina started looking at 2.0.
There was some concern of not even bothering until they put out some kind of statement telling us it's ready, as they have in the past. But we decided better to get started.
Otherwise, called keyboard lady, of course no answer and still a full mailbox. What, are you running from creditors or something? Answer your dang phone!

Came home. Made two other calls, both not picked up. Huh.

Checked sites, ate dinner. Then No Man's Sky.
Checked out the planet "behind" the one with all the uranium. It's full of sodium and copper. And alien eggs that you don't want to mess with. No air, not many plants, just deposits. Spent some time there mining I can tell you that.  I got 4000 copper I'm going to split with Sean/Mizzy, and a ton for myself... which I got rid of repairing another ship I found. It has a bunch more slots, but now that I think about it, I should have checked it against the silver one. How many slots does it have? Crud. If they're the same or similar I just wasted my time. Oh well, I can always trade it in for money. I spent all mine at the moment fixing it up. So next time it's into space to do some space mining, at that seems pretty lucrative. I still have a few more parts to buy before it's totally fixed as I can make it. Found more nav data, a floating rock, a portal, all kind of stuff.
What I'm saying is this game is Skyrim in space. It totally is.

Thurs:
So the testing I did yesterday was deemed adequate so I closed that task off, finally. Christina said she didn't need help with the 2.0 stuff, so there wasn't much until the afternoon with the solid meetings.

Met with the onedrive people, our date is still the 8th for the next version. That meeting went on for an hour, then there was the hour status meeting we still needed more time for because the list is so freaking long. And going to get longer, as it's not done yet there are some things that need to be added.

Then plants, and then leaving.

I did reach the lady for the keyboard, popped that right in and made it back here before 5:00.

Checked sites, videos, and ate dinner. No calls, but still two to make. Called the lady, got her spreadsheet printing right and found her old mail in thunderbird. No answer once again on the second guy.

Took some screenshots of the ships in No Man's Sky to illustrate the point above. Looked at the new ship. Whew, it's much better than any of the ships I have, space wise. "SLV Hauler" has 27 general slots, 8 tech slots, and 8 cargo slots. The "Regret" (I haven't renamed it in case the original pilot wants it back) has 17 general, 4 tech, 4 cargo, the "SLV Mystery" has 15 general, 4 tech, 3 cargo, and the "SLV Momentum" (my current ship) has 22 general, 3 tech, and 3 cargo. You don't care, do you? Well, anyway...

Looking ahead no idea what I'll be doing tomorrow at work. As we finished up what came in for the moment. But I will go shopping. No bank. And see my parents.

As no jobs and rain 40% likely Monday I'll get the prep work done Saturday. I have to wash the deck, clean off the driveway, and vacuum the rug. Shouldn't take too long. Then Sunday we can do the stuff. Hopefully that works for my parents.

I think that's about it for now. We've begun September, it's all downhill from here. See you all next week. I'm going to explore the other planets in our "home" system, as we haven't really done that! Yes, we stuck to the one planet we started on, and didn't bother with the others. Maybe activated copper is out there, just out of reach. I'ma go see, and mine some gold to sell and make back that money I spent on the new ship. (And maybe get more parts I need for it)

Bye!