2024-01-25:

Fri:
Went to my parent's house figuring it would be worse later, that was probably the wrong choice. Got to work at 8:30. Sheesh. Roads were not terrible but not great either.
Tried to get one of the new machines up and running. It failed the altboot? How can that even happen? Tried to get different software, and the FTP site seems to be down. Sigh.
Did get them on the right network with Ken's help.
Finished the chapter.
Found a package in looking for Joe's package. I emailed the person about where it was. She replied if I could please bring it to the dock or have security bring it to building 209. I was like, lady, I told you so you could come get your package, not to give myself a new chore. I would have picked it up at the time if I wanted to do that. So I went and got it. Thought about the dock but couldn't get their attention (the door is locked for reasons???) and they were pretty sketchy looking anyway. Like they were haulers not in the actual shipping department. So I was trying to decide what to do with the stupid thing, and finally just decided to walk it over to 209 myself. I thought I sort of knew where it was, we had the picnic there I thought? I was right. So I actually did find the 209 dock it was supposed to be at. Go me! So I got my steps in, that's a long ways away, through two different buildings one of them being the entirety of the manufacturing building.
Had a late meeting about onedrive, didn't get through the document. I just sort of read it with an eye towards grammer and such, others were like "oh but the customer might understand such and such wording better." Which is fine.
Did the shopping, it wasn't too bad out by that point.
Got Dad's birthday gift in, looks good.
And the valentine's gift stuff, so things are looking okay on that front.
Came back here, checked sites. Made a new spell. Got ready for tomorrow. Game was late, Neil got back late.
We still did good, cured the zombie plague and only one person suffered for it, but they were dead from the start before we even got there. We tried our best to save her when we realized what was happening though.
Then some xbox, but not much.

Sat:
Checked sites.
Went to see email guy. Another case of spectrum just deciding your snmp settings weren't right anymore and making me fiddle with them.
He had a few other questions. The roads weren't too bad.
Tried to do the driveway. The battery was dead. It was on the charger. I put it back on the charger. It used to have a fan? We'll see how it goes I guess.
Ate lunch.
Battery was not charged. I honestly don't know how long it should take, I never timed it last year. I brought it in maybe not being cold will help? Though it didn't seem to care last year.
Looking at it, the snow was quite fluffy not like last time so I buttoned up the old one and broke it out. I'm pleased to report it exceeded expectations not slipping even once. Even doing the nasty end bits, which I took fairly slowly. Nice! I knew it could handle this sort of thing pretty well so I'm glad I kept it. Battery is still flashing along, so no idea if it's going to charge or not. Sigh. It's only a year old!
Messed with the battery more. Apparently, and this is of course not mentioned in the book at all, green and flashing is good, red and green flashing is a fault. Maybe the contact was dirty or something? So this actually means me trying to keep it charged over the summer completely failed, and I did the first clearing with the battery discharged from the last time it was charged, last winter. That's some staying power. At least now I know and made a note in the manual about what I should be seeing.
Went out to Sean's. The date plan went off well enough I can clean it up for the book and we finished the temple. Not what I expected at all. Did I make up a bunch of stuff for the book? I try not to do that because then it comes back to bite me, like this. Weird. Anyway, lots and lots to write about, but it looks like the next time is going to be March so I have plenty of time.

Sun:
Did the driveway to test out the battery, it had snowed pretty bad again last night. It worked fine. So that's a load off.
Checked sites, did my reading.
Did a little Warframe, I'm looking for something but I discovered it on a silent 4 hour count so I need to wait several hours before I can find it. I did a few minor things in the meantime. Why does one part of earth become nighttime in hour intervals but this is on a 4 hour interval? Are they not the same planet? They're like twenty KM from each other. So weird.
Ate lunch.
Worked on Mom's gift.
Messed with my emulators.
Did more warframe when the time was right. Got what I didn't want twice in a row, then a different thing I didn't want 3 times in a row. Thanks, frame!
Ate dinner.
Got ready for tomorrow. No calls, may be a quiet month. Let's hope that holds for the whole year.

Mon:
Pretty busy all day today. Had a meeting to look over the spec for an upcoming feature. Figured out a few test cases I wanted to run from that.
Worked on the new machines, getting them reset so we can actually use them.
Set up the automated test again, the problem was not fixed. It crashed after 7 hours of being run. Now that's unreasonable of course it's just the fact that one out of how many times running it did crash. Bad news.
Looked at a german translation of something. It used to be many lines. Now it's just one line. Huh. Very odd.
Made many test cases. Three projects worth. I only had to write one from scratch. One is just a modified smartcard test and one I simply cleaned up from Chris, as it's a feature we've done before it's just a new type of adapter.
And managed to write a chapter of the emberhaven story. I think the new content will be two chapters, as I did about half of it I think.

Came back here, checked sites, ate dinner.

One call, something about a time machine. Didn't reach her.

Finished the valentine's gift.

Played more games instead.

Tues:
Not as much work today, and I somehow missed the haul. I checked around noon, bag didn't look taken but everything in the case was changed. The second location bag did look changed. Sigh. They're stocking it more now, there should have been plenty to get. Makes me mad.

Did the server check today. Looked at our exchange server, which I guess ran out of disk space because of all the large emails testing we've been doing.

Had a meeting about onedrive, guess I have more work to do on that stupid project. Why though? It's in the field now. It should be support doing these tests now, not me. See, my job is to test unreleased products. Support's job is to test released products. So it's sort of weird.

Finished the last chapter of book 1, emberhaven. Now to proof read it.

Light snow on the way home, but rain for the next few days?

No new calls. Ate dinner, checked sites. Played a little.

Reached the lady. We finally came to the conclusion that her USB hub wasn't actually plugged in. Pretty sure I was the one that set it up too, so her usb cable has somewhat mysteriously vanished, according to her. Gremlins, perhaps? The 7 gram thief? The world may never know.

Then xbox with the others.

Wed:
Plenty to keep me busy today.

Had a meeting, part two, about the onedrive document so we could be sure it was okay.

Got handed the onedrive tests she wanted done. They exactly met my expectations. I got every file, except those I didn't expect to get because they were too big, and it printed an error sheet to that effect. Why the customer network is losing jobs... supposedly... is not the fault of our software as far as I can see. That took about 2 hours.

After that Don called to discuss the results. Not that he's involved in any way, really.

Got the machine upgraded for a test I need to do tomorrow.

Proofread the first 4 chapters of the book.

Rained today.

As I was counting pieces of paper I wondered why there was not a mechanical aid for this task. There is! I looked it up. They are super expensive. Why? It's just a scanner housing that doesn't scan anything, it just counts. Maybe because they're so niche? Hate it. Counting pieces of paper sucks. Still think you could make a cheaper one, that will deliver you the number of sheets you punch into a control panel or tell you how many you put in.

Came back home, checked sites. Ate dinner.

No calls, but the lady from last night found the cable I said was there. Yeah, it was plugged into her machine, just where I said it would be. So weird how that works, isn't it?

Tried to get more plants in warframe, but no, I'm on the wrong end of the day/night cycle which is supposedly 4 hours but it's 8:30 right now and it's not going to be night for 2.5 hours meaning it would be 11:00 which is not a 4 hour cycle? How does that work? I hate timed events in games. Like, really. I can play now. Not three hours ago. Not three hours from now. Let me pick if I want it to be night or day when I go to the mission. It's not real, you could easily do this.

Thurs:
Got right into the new software. I see there was no demo eh? Okay, sure. Oh, and it broke the device. Great. Glad we have plenty of time to fix that. Wrote up the bug for that.

Also worked with a guy that dropped off some card readers. We just wanted to see if they worked with the device, and they do. Some took a different card but that's probably fine.

Had the usual tuesday meeting, and did the plants.

Huge haul! Two boxes worth. Nice. It was a day early I didn't expect it but there everything was. Some somewhat nasty pretzels, two egg and chicken kits, many calzones, 7 salad!!! Other sandwiches. Brought a bunch of stuff to my parents. They're feeling better but not 100% yet.

More proofreading.

Came back here, gave Tinker his pill. I think it should be like 1.5 hours before or even two? He was still pretty feisty at the vet but he came home and fell asleep on my lap.

Checked sites, had dinner. One call. Just a bit of remote work, nothing too bad. Why is a 70 year old woman looking to get back into the job market after her position was eliminated as she says for being so old. But if you were doing the work... Anyway, take it as a sign from the universe and enjoy yourself. As you say you have no technical skills you are not getting into the job market at your age. But I digress.

Tomorrow will be the usual. Shopping. Not seeing my parents for reasons. We'll have game.

Then perhaps a quiet weekend? Don't have anything really planned. Maybe proofreading, I do want to get the story done in time.

So that's about that. This time next week it'll be month 2 of twelve. Going fast. See you then.