2023-03-09:

Fri:
Loaded 4.0 and finished that test. It was a quick one to be fair, just a login basically. It worked. It worked before. There was no reason it shouldn't work. And it did.
Spent two hours watching some dudes try and get their solution to work so they could test it. They did not succeed. They were trying to get it to work on my server, but then they tried to get it to work on their server. Nope. We get an error message, and the guy at the company making the thing was stumped. Neat.
What did I do in the afternoon? Only one thing of note. Showed Gina and... Uh some other guy... Gabi. He also fixed my card reader not being seen by turning off and then on the USB ports. Of course, why didn't I think of that? We're doing another demo Tuesday for some folks. So looking forward to it.
Went shopping. Saw my parents.
Came back here, put stuff away. It was totally clear.
Went to Sean's. The driving got steadily worse as I got closer. It was awful as I neared his place. But I made it. Somehow.
We played a dice game, then the worst game.
Let me explain. We played Red Dragon Inn. I dislike everything about this game. Let's begin with the mechanics. The premise of the game is you are an adventuring party that has come back from the latest job and are having a drink at the tavern. You D&D'ers have done this a million times I know. It's the sort of thing your DM would skip over, saying "you rest for the night at the inn and it's the next day. What do you do?" Right? But here our task is to "accidentally" or on purpose shoot, stab, or otherwise maim our follow adventurers. All while getting them so drunk they pass out and then you steal their money. The money you earned, side by side with them, just that day doing whatever job is was you came back from (possibly risking your life and theirs in the process.) If this was happening in a D&D game any player in that game would rightly be justified in saying "I'm not turning on the party like this, I go back up to my room before it escalates further let's skip to the next day." You don't turn on your party. We've been in enough games to show exactly how bad an idea that is. So you can see where this may be distasteful to me. When we could play any number of games where we are helping each other. For example rescuing people from a burning building. Trying to figure out a murder. Exploring a haunted house. That sort of thing. Not actively trying to murder each other in a bar.
(As a side note you may recall a game where "we" were trying to burn down our fellow fire watchtower forest ranger's towers. That game I had less of a problem with because I could mess with it. I deliberately played against the game, putting fire down where it would do the least harm and putting out fires so even if I put one down, I had taken three (for example) away so it was a net loss of fire. It made the game take three times as long but at least I was doing my "job" as a park ranger. I got to troll the makers of the game and my fellow players despite knowing it was for naught, the fire would take us all in the end. I wouldn't want to play it again, but it was interesting to play once and keep thinking "did the makers of the game not playtest in this way? They are dumb, this game is dumb." Back to the story.)
Another way to go out of the game is to run out of money. To that end there's a gambling mechanic. Because the thing you want to have a bunch of bleeding, drunk people do is gamble! I happened to win a fairly nice sum on my 2-3 turn, I forget which exactly. This was of course unacceptable to everyone who decided to gang up on and destroy me. They did this with haste, meaning I got one-ish more turn before I was out of the game. Yes, I only got four turns total in the game. Which then went on for another forty minutes. Nothing like sitting around watching others play a game to further cement in your mind what a terrible game it is you aren't playing. There's nothing you can do about it if everyone just decides "we don't want you in the game anymore" and works together to knock you out. You just, and this is key, go out. So they divided my gold up. What did them ganging up on me get them? Get ready for it: one gold. Yes, one. That was it. It doesn't matter how much you have, the game has you halve it, and then distribute the rest equally. So you're getting no more than two no matter how much a player has.
So that's Red Dragon Inn. A game Sean for some reason seems to love. There no randomness to it, you choose who you like least in that moment and try to wound them, then buy them more booze so they get sloshed faster so you can rob them. Games where the game is making bad things happen is part of the game. You having to choose who to attack, and it's either attack someone or gamble, there is no other action you can take, makes it somewhat incompatible with me. Am I blowing it out of proportion? Do you think I'm in the wrong? Leave a comment below and remember to like and subscribe, hit that bell icon to be notified-


wait where I am?

Sat:
Back here (Yes I got home after midnight luckily it was only raining at that point but it had really snowed! The roads were okay) I went to bed.
Getting up later I finished up the stuff I didn't do last night, checked sites and videos.
Did a little warframe, I need 5 shards I can only get by killing the sort of raid boss that only exists at night. I killed him once, had 10 minutes of night left and decided to go public to maybe get it done a second time. We managed it, but didn't get the basic drop I wanted I got the better one? What? I can't use the better one. Thanks. Nice if I could trade the better one for, I don't know, two worse ones with an NPC. But I can't. I guess I have to do it solo? Also why is it night for 40 minutes but day for 1 hour? Do they not know how time works? Started Fate unlimited blade but felt I had watched it before. Oh, it's just the same story as before but told from the girl's point of view and not the boy's? Why put months of effort into animating the same story from a slightly different perspective? The same things happen, it's just the girl going to school and finding the barrier, the boy gets chased, the girl saves him. I've seen this already. It's pointless for me to watch it again. I should have watched it first, well, second, and skipped the middle one. Why did they do this?
Started a different show. Maybe it won't be something I've seen before, but from a different perspective.
Ah.
I am disappoint. It's just card captor sakura, with different characters. And the boy in Card Captor is a girl now, to make it "different." Sigh.
Well, my time was up so I attempted the raid boss again. Had I not died one time I would have gotten all the items I needed to do the rank up. I still need one more though. I can get it tomorrow. Stupid timed events. What's the point? If it's going to take me 3 in game hours to do what I want, why make me break it up into 4 40 minutes sessions? Just let me play the game when I have time to.
Went to Sean's for game.
It went pretty late, he threw a lot of high "level" "peons" at us even I was barely able to damage. In fact, I killed half the mob myself as the others could only wound them, leaving 3 to vanish when the sub-boss was killed (by others) and we couldn't scratch the boss and had to use a special summon to get rid of it. We might have had to retreat otherwise. I mean I've heard of power creep in anime but that was a little ridiculous. It went from "one shot, one kill" for everybody to "only Robert's character can take anything out" I mean Alyx [sic?] hit the boss with a "level" 8 blast and it ignored it? Seriously? My attack is a 3 and this thing is completely ignoring an 8? How are we ever going to get to a level we can hurt things like that? We also played with the new "wizards damage themselves to cast spells" mechanic. Neat. Thankfully I had already made a character that only needs one spell in battle (and I didn't get hit really because it's long range and I stayed in the back) but if one character can get hit by a sword 6 times before "dying" and another can only get hit three times because they cast a few spells beforehand, does that seem fair to you? Though I suppose shadowrun has something similar, but you can avoid most of the "backlash" with dice rolls and I don't think it's physical damage. I don't know what it is, it's been too long since I played that. I mean you can have an infinite amount of "fake damage" so as soon as you have 3 you may as well have a million because at that point you can only get hit 3 times and you're done. The extra million fake stuff is meaningless.

Got home after 1:00.

Sun:
Got up and farmed the last item I needed to rank up. I remember when that thing was terrifying and I couldn't hope to beat it myself. Thanks, Mirage and special bow, you're the best! I can take a part of the boss off in two good hits, or about 4 decent ones. Of course he runs away so you must repeat this 4-5 times but at least it's possible. And quite satisfying, thank you very much. To quote a man that is he, "I have the power!" Maybe I should try an arcon hunt by myself?

Checked sites, watched videos. Ate lunch.

Did the driveway. Yuck. It's still melting, so it's the worst. We had that ice rain, then that day of very heavy snow for a few hours, then more rain. So it's just a slushy mix on top of ice. Neat. My snow blower could barely handle it. The battery ran out so I started it charging and did some by hand.

Did some checkbook stuff. Paid my home insurance bill.
Finished the one anime. It was Sakura all right. Just shorter? There were only 7 cards not a whole book of them. Started the one after it.
Finished the rest of the driveway, not the whole thing but enough so I can get out without issue. (I hope)
No calls over the weekend, nice!
Got ready for tomorrow.
Went to bed early.

Mon:
Started looking into making test cases for the next release. They are simply adding some features to the existing code they put into this release, so I just needed to add some more. No big deal.
Then had a Gina meeting about bugs we've talked about several times before.
Finished up the updates to the test cases. Humm now what?
As it turns out, not much. The machine I need for the demo tomorrow is being used, I can't get that ready until the morning.

I did find a good haul. Another two boxes of food. 3 salad I'll eat for dinner the rest of the week. Another 6 blueberry packages which I'll bring home and eat for breakfast as clearly Christina isn't going to. More vegi boxes. One mac and cheese container. The usual complement of sandwiches. Sheesh. I brought some home, but still plenty for this week and to bring to my parent's house. Had a sandwich and some blueberries for dinner at work.

Came back here, no calls. Checked sites, videos.

Had a brilliant idea re: blueberries. I knew I had some blueberry muffin mix which contained no actual blueberry! But, I thought to myself, what if it did? And given the date on the package I really did need to use it up. So I did. Both packages of mix and probably half the berries. So I can have muffins in the morning, future me can thank current me later.

Finished series 2. Humm, there are two more series? Finding such an old series online could be tricky though.

Tues:
Spent the morning setting up the machine for the demo later. Stupid gabi, I added something to the directions to avoid errors, of course I spent twenty minutes or more trying to search emails (search in outlooks sucks by the way) because I knew I had run into it before. Finally remembered the check box I had to hit to make the error go away.

After that it was just waiting for the demo and then doing the demo.

Came back here, checked sites.

Two calls? No thanks. Someone with "a few" problems and a lady with a Mac having trouble with updates? Uh, okay... If you say so.
The first guy is out by Sean's, he wants the weekend so sure. Mac lady admits to using an old mac so she's probably just having browser problems. She wants Thursday, so nothing for tomorrow I guess. Naturally both are 30+ minutes away. Oh, oh, maybe it'll be snowing out just to really make it special!

Wed:
But there was work stuff, at least some of it.
OneDrive stuff mainly, they could reproduce most of my bugs (great going, their QA department, shouldn't you be finding this sort of thing? What are you guys doing over there if I can use the software 5 minutes and point out 10+ things that are wrong with it?) but not all. They wanted more videos. That meant setting up the machine again, (Christina had used it for something else) which meant rebooting it a bunch and messing with it to actually make it work. Reproducing the bug. Getting the video. Putting it on another device to make sure it wasn't just that device (it wasn't) and sending it to them. Sigh. Final version. HAHAHAHAHAHAH you're killing me. No seriously, this project has been going on for months, you're literally killing me. Can we please have a release that fixes more bugs than it creates? So we can finally give it to our disappointed customers and let them tell you (for example) scrolling sucks and you need to fix it and maybe then you'll listen and actually come up with a solution?
Had a meeting with Don about what to do with Lexmark bugs as we can't give them access to our bug database and so they're forcing (a select few not us) to use theirs. So we have to put bugs into our database and their database? How is that better? Just spin up a "fresh" copy of Jira if you're worried Lexmark might see how many bugs xerox devices have and we can both just use that. That's easier, right? Than making two people do the job of one person?

And that's about it. I did get a mini haul. Two bottles of soda, a vitamin water (didn't know water went bad sitting in a cooler but there you are) 6 pickle chips, 2 hot pickle chips, 3 chips that are pickle flavored, one calzone, other chips, 3 apples, a yogurt, I think that's it. Not bad, not bad. $40 worth of food at least, right? Looking back, in the past week and a half alone I've pulled the equivalent of 5 boxes of food out of that place. Think about that for a second. Oh and the popcorn is pretty good. I would have preferred it not be spicy, and the bags are a little too big? But I keep eating it.

Came back here, checked sites and had the salad with a hot pickle chip within, made it good! No calls, thank you.

Got a call after all. Spent about an hour trying to set up a google device, all the while thinking "does google make a wi-fi router?" Nope, they don't. I was setting up a google mini something. And he can't tell me the make of his actual router. He was no help at all. So I'm going there Saturday. I can't even...

Thurs:
The usual meeting nonsense today, we're not getting another onedrive test for another week, and the status meeting. So pretty light today.
Tomorrow we're getting some software from Fuji apparently they didn't bother to recreate the problem despite my clear instructions on how to do so, but they think they have the issue solved. We'll see. Anyway, I'll need to test that. Then in the afternoon (if the software is there in the morning) Karen wants to follow the setup guide for the whole of the onedrive experience, should be fun. So I'll have to wipe the stuff off the server so she can have a clean environment.

A great way to end the week, for sure.

Went out to second work. It was a 2011 MacBook that didn't want to boot. I think the Mac was trying to warn her of this, but of course she was talking about word and couldn't articulate what she saw nor did she take a picture. So yeah, it was just sitting there. I tried the hardware test, came back okay. Tried doing a disk check. Whoops, "get what you can off the drive and format it, I can't repair it." Yeah, no. Not trusting a 12 year old spinning rust drive. Gave her an SSD, installed... what? Mac OS X 10.7? The hell? Okay sure if that's what you want to give it, Apple. Thankfully the new system picked up the old drive (eventually) and let me run migration assistant on it. And it allowed me to choose folders to skip, as I couldn't delete files off the thing it was locked because it couldn't be repaired. That cut the time greatly. Only had to sit and do nothing for an hour. Of course MS Office wanted to be a little... doggy. It wanted to reregister. Dude, you're from 2011 forget it. But of course she couldn't find the box. Got a copy on ebay for $35. So I have to go back there. Sigh.

Got home at 7:00. One call, the guy down the street. Needs help with an apple branded CD drive, despite it being the very definition (of a modern major general) of a plug and play device. So I'm going there on the way home Saturday.

So!

You heard about Friday. I'll do the shopping, I only have three checks I won't go to the bank. See my parents. I don't think we'll be doing a Friday game yet, maybe more Xbox?

Saturday is three jobs. I'll have my parents over too.

Sunday is making a pie. That's all I have planned at the moment anyway. And the clocks of course. Can't forget the clocks.

Time for bed, see you all next week.