2023-10-26:

Fri:
Attended a demo that was suddenly on my calendar. Usually you get an email about such things, and get to accept the meeting. This just sort of popped up. Weird. It's mostly behind the scenes stuff, but they're going to "get me the tools" to test it again, I guess for reasons. Nope, if you guys say it works, I'm not one to question that. I have no idea apart from watching the demo again and just repeating your actions what else I would do so it's completely pointless for me to do anything with your fixes. Many demos, sure, I can think of other ways to stress the system or do more testing than just one job or whatever. This stuff is bug fixes. Behind the scenes bug fixes. We don't test that sort of thing, Gina!
Needed to do more training, because I might have to deal with privacy law in the EU. Or wait, no I won't actually. So that was an hour of my life wasted.
Got a release loaded on two machines, looked into a bug that was fixed. The only bug from the above meeting I can actually see. Yup, still fixed here just as it was there. What a shocker.
Worked on adding some notes to the optional rules.

Did the shopping, saw my parents.
Came back, we did do game but didn't get very far. We talked about a new game he wants to do. Has he finished the monster game? Or the magical girl one in Demongate High? Hummm. Anyway, something about color instead of numbers which I said would probably be really annoying. I know trying to deal with color in that pepper planting game was annoying as heck. He was like, but color mixing is Kindergarten stuff. Uh, yeah, how long ago was that for me? Let's say 40 years? I'm not an artist, guy, I don't have the color wheel memorized. But we gave him some ideas.
We are down a well at the moment, seeking a baby ghost.

Sat:
Did the pour, still have a tiny bit of the stuff left! An uneven amount of stuff left, worryingly. I thought I had been super careful to pour an exact amount of both into a container so I got equal amounts. But now I have unequal amounts. I hope it hardens.

Went out to facebook lady. Now here's a tale. She got tricked into thinking her account was closed or something, naturally we can't figure out how to articulate anything so I don't really have the whole story. Then, rather than call me right away we proceeded to make three, yes three more accounts! Neat! Only after this debacle was I called, so now the problem is 10x worse, so thanks for that. I first tried to get into her old, original account. Whoops, we can't because the recovery email is her daughter's (why?) old hotmail account, and the recovery phone number is a land line. It'll only do text message. Neat! Because everyone on earth has a cell phone, right? Right? How was it even verified? Oh, it was made 20 years ago maybe? Okay. Either they didn't do verification at that time or maybe they could call in those days but choose not to now? What a dumb system.

So her next account has her phone number in it, again, the land line so it now cannot be verified. But it can't be anyway. The phone number is wrong. It has an incorrect digit in it. It has her email as well, so any "forgot password" using that email goes to this "bogus" account we can't verify and she doesn't want. Neat.

She's signed into a third account on her phone. No idea the password though, and it won't send a text message despite the number being right so it can't be changed. It has 8 friends. How did she get 8 friends already on this account she just made in response to all this? I can log out of this account but I can't log back in, at least not with a password it just logs in with a button. I try to follow some instructions on how to make this go away, thinking maybe I can figure out what the password is by number of digits or something. Nope, not going to let me.

I log into the "same" account on the PC, and it's not the same account, despite it being identified only by the phone number, her actual cell number. Can you have two facebook accounts with the same cell number just with two different passwords?

So finally I just remove all other accounts, (so she can't get into them, they will still exist) tell her to use the one with 0 friends and just re-add everyone. I got there at 10:00 and it's now 1:00 so frankly I didn't care anymore. Not that I did at the beginning but I tried for *three hours*. That's all the effort I can spare you. You made this problem yourself, you then made it worse, you get to remake the account. Had you maybe used your own email address in the main account or, you know, kept your phone number up to date, you wouldn't have to do it.

Of course there's no customer service line or email or chat you can get help from. Thanks Zuck. How rich are you again? How much money does you company make a day? Can you really not afford some customer service script readers? Asking for a friend.
Oh that's right you lost a lot of money in that whole metaverse flop thing didn't you? Fun times.

Got back, ate lunch.
Did a kitty walk.
Checked sites.
Cleaned up. Pour is hardening, so it's a good sign.
Did like an hour of NMS. Hardly worth opening really.
Then ate dinner.
Parents came for movie.

Sun:
Finished Neil's gift. Came out okay, whew! Looks good too, the mold matched up much better this time so it's ready to wrap up. The red is maybe a little too dark? I should have added a drop of the rose red to the red red, but eh, doesn't have to be perfect.

Worked on revamping the magic rules in paragon completely. No more planets. Pluto isn't even one! That took some hours. Sort of came to me randomly last night and I wrote the most basic of ideas down while in bed and developed it from there. It sprung from an idea Neil had about a grid system for dice, (one of the color mechanics suggestions he made on Friday) like in the "stained glass making" game I forget the name of now. I took that and applied it to Paragon spells.

Also checked sites and read stories. Rainy today.

Got ready for tomorrow. No calls to make today.

No kitty walk, it was rainy and cold out. He probably would have been fine but I wouldn't have been! Saw a video on cat enclosures for yards. $700! Are you worth that, kid? I mean he walks fine and I get deer in the yard would they crash into it at night and get tangled up in it? I could see that.

Watched videos, nothing too exciting at the moment.


Mon:
Some work was done today. The server check for one thing, all up to date no problems.
We had another meeting with the DoD people and got their machines registered. Nice. The issue wasn't that they had the services turned off. It was, uh, who knows. We put the password into the file and that worked. It should be exactly the same thing, it either takes one password when you first start or put the password next to every line in the file. It should be the same thing. Yet it was not.

Of course it still didn't work, but that's a config issue I think with their azure or xws or xwc or whatever the heck it uses. They logged in, it let them log in, but it didn't pull up his account. Sigh. I think my part is done though? Yay?

Added a bit to the new dynamic casting system, clarifying a few things.

Got a small haul. The stuff left is dated tomorrow and nothing was added. I suspect it will be replaced all at once. 2 salad, a crap ton of apples, fruit cups, no sandwiches really. Not yet anyway. I brought the salad home I'll eat myself, so there.

That's pretty much it. No writing, I didn't do any over the weekend so it's still the next combat. I should just write the downfall of the vampire, I guess.

Went to the good will, got 2 things, so not much. One little dragon for me, I have 4 dragons now! And then to get cider because I forgot it last week. Dummy.

Back here I did a kitty walk it was sunny out. Then sites, and dinner.

One call, something about gmail. I'll go tomorrow, it's not that far away I guess.

More work on the optional rules, I didn't put in how much the background cost! Whoops.

Bit more NMS. Following the ATLAS path at the moment, not sure the reward is worth it though...

Tues:
Little of both things today.

Gina talked a bunch about stuff to me.

I figured out how to load some software and spent a half hour installing it and removing it from a device. Turns out he had found the source of the crash, trying to use a null value. Isn't it sort of programming 101 to check your function inputs and make sure they are at least somewhat sane? Especially for devices otherwise "easy" to hack? I mean there are reports of printers being attack vectors. Accepting a null value and then going on to use it, I'm ashamed.

Did some writing. We bantered with the vampire and he's combined with his creature and the attack begins. I can probably write that tomorrow it's only one opponent, easy to keep track of.

No haul, the stuff on the 24th is still in there.

Then out to gmail guy. His main "problem" was needing to be told there was a scrollbar at the bottom of the screen. Yup, that's it. He was one old dude, and he had his monitor resolution either way down or his chrome zoom level way up. Of course chrome doesn't realize this, and makes the text run off the edge of the screen. Rather than, you know, reflowing the text to only be up and down. So I showed him the stupid bar. Answered a few other questions and came home.

Checked sites, had dinner.

Took a kitty walk.

One call today, wi-fi I guess. But he had already solved his issue, yay! He just needed to, you know, connect to his (new) wi-fi network I guess his mother didn't tell him about yet. Yeah, communication!

Wed:
Another meeting with the DoD people today. No real progress, but someone is looking at the logs. They see it logging in, so really it's a config issue on their side. Nothing we can do about it.

Did a short check for Joe, just making sure I could email with that weird usb flash drive login thing. Another guy wants me to make new templates for the certs, I guess they're made differently in modern times. That came in pretty late so I'll do that tomorrow morning.

I'm actually surprised we didn't get notified of the last build of D2.9. Then we can finish that off. Oh well.

Wrote the next chapter. Vampire is defeated, for now. At least his clone is, and the battleship was saved.

Came back here, checked sites. Oh hey we have a speaker of the house again, an election denier. Wonderful. What a guy. Wait who exactly is this? Anyway, had dinner. Took a kitty out.

No calls.

But more No Man's Sky. Very close to the end now. I needed blue metal, so I had to find a blue star otherwise I probably would have been done by now.

Thurs:
I tried to do the cert stuff. There's three of them, as of course everyone knows, and I managed to find what settings he was talking about for #1 and 2. But #3 was a bit unclear. At 8:30 I emailed for clarification. I got nothing.

Still don't have the tools for the other test I'm supposed to run. So I can't do that.

Wrote a chapter and a half. Yup, when not in combat and already having the basic idea of how I want things to go it can be quick.

Had the meeting, did the plants. Only haul was one salad and a pair of cupcakes. Well, stuff in there is dated tomorrow, and further on so we'll see what goes on then.

Came back here, had dinner. Checked sites.

Took a kitty out.

Two calls. Keyboard lady finally getting back to me about ordering the keyboard. And someone asking if I changed cell phone glass. No.

Looking ahead not sure what I'll get to do tomorrow, people have to get back to me about things, you know? But we are supposedly getting D2.9 and an early (by a week) final D7.7 so I need to do a few quick tests there. Nothing too major.

Then shopping, yes looks like a bank trip is in order. Then seeing my parents. Game is on as far as I know.

Then Saturday back to the Pyre game, of all things. I know, it's so soon!

Meanwhile I want to plant some seeds I took out of my althea bushes, figured I might try growing some from scratch back there instead of replanting them. I have to write the missing chapter with the drones. Maybe some xmas stuff.

Finished a playthrough of NMS. Moving on. It's a game that just endlessly repeats. Doesn't exactly make sense but sure.

That's it for this week. Not much time left in October. See you in Nov.