2024-02-22:

Fri:
Three hundred. And. Fifty Five. Million. Dollars. In penalties. And he can't run his own business for 3 years in New York. That could have kept me in a good mood the entire day, but I only learned of it later in the day. Still, that's the kinda news I dig, dog. He has 30 days to appeal or pay up. Couple this with the $5 million, plus the $83 million, plus interest, plus lawyers fees, and my friends we're still only getting started with this man's lawsuits. Let's get those federal cases going so we can put this guy away, finally. Like, what exactly are we waiting for?

Still, good news all around today. Yeah, see how far your base your donate to you to pay those judgements. See how far that gets you.

Oh, he spent $52 million in donation money on legal fees last year? That's interesting. Imagine if people had gotten together and said, "hey, maybe we can solve homelessness in this country ourselves." (to chose a random example) "Maybe we don't need "government" to solve it. If we put our funds together how much do we have? Oh, $50 million dollars? Yeah, that's a good start. I bet we could do some good with that money."

And then did some good with that money.

But no. They gave it to a sad old man, who has broken the law and flouted that fact all his life, and is finally facing consequences. Well done, donors, you played yourself. You enriched a bunch of law school "graduates" who, in the end, couldn't defend the indefensible. Do you feel your donation was well spent? Do you feel that the $50 million you gave to try and get tRump out of legal trouble payed dividends consummate with what you have given? What's that? No?

Color me shocked.

(Yes, yes, I know the actual answer is yes, because he keeps grifting people out of more money. You think they would learn. Do they really want another 4 years of what he did the first time? Like, really? Are you that stupid? Kids in cages? That was just fine with you? REALLY?)

Meanwhile, in Robertsville, what's the opposite of a meet cute? A didn't-actually-meet cute? I had one. See, I got the USB scans done for Kevin. We do have slightly different dimensions for TIF files if you do short edge vs long edge feed while PDF is exactly 8.5 x 11". Very odd. Gave him those results.

Then made the two new keys for development. Emailed the person Joe said to email. He was, and I'm not quoting, "I'm just too important to walk over there, I'll send a subordinate." Well, subordinate emailed and said she wasn't familiar with my building, and I said I wasn't exactly familiar with hers either. I thought I said I would meet her nearer her building, in the corridor between the manufacturing area and her building. She on the other hand believed we should meet at the opposite end, between manufacturing and my building.

Now, as a side note if you need any more evidence that I am both face blind and autistic here it is. I looked at her tiny, tiny picture she has in her profile and said "oh, a woman younger than me that's kinda cute. I'll look out for such a person." We passed each other. Naturally as she walked towards me my thought pattern took this form:

"Huh, there's a woman younger than me that's kinda cute. Could this be the person? But no, she's not where I expect her to be so naturally this can't be her." And so we both. Kept. Walking. A "normal" person would have said "hey are you Julia?" because that's her name. But not this person. *points to self confidently with thumb*

Now before you rush to her defense, and I would like to remind you that you're on my side in all this, my avatar picture is something Sean drew. I just stuck it in there, I don't have my face on there. If you've seen it, you know why. So she had every excuse not to talk to me. She is not to blame here. Only me.

Well, I hung around at the place I thought I should be a few minutes and decided, nope, that must have been her, let's walk all the way back. Thankfully she was still there, and I passed the two keys onto her. Whew! She was a good sport about it, but I shudder to think of the names she called me on the way back to her space in the privacy of her own mind. And I deserved every one!

Moving on.

With the keys made I had lunch, and then moved on to test cases. The project is a little bit more involved than just doing a login and then some jobs. In fact we're not sure even where we're putting some of the features or what they look like. So I did the best I could.

Huh, shoot, I need to add cloning and MIB for the feature don't I? Or bring it up. Is this stuff cloned? It better be. Suck an elf.

Then left.

Did the shopping, saw my parents, petted some kitties. Remembered the christmas music this time and gave everyone their gifts. A bunch of hangers for my mother (nice ones in my opinion) a copy of my book, and a slab of metal for my father. Oh and some tubes for a bird.

Back here, no game, Sean called it off. I did figure out what I wanted to do with the house, by the way. Use all that space to my advantage (he said it was various buildings and it did house a whole clan at one time) Turn it into various learning spaces, and have it be "themed" so spirits (i.e. "people in costume") can walk around without anyone freaking out. This will be for after the game is over and the character has graduated school but at least I do have a plan for it. I think that would be a cool game too, running my own facility and still doing supernatural stuff on the side. Checked sites.

Did a bit of gaming, and went to bed.

Sat:
Checked sites, did some cleaning.

Then did more cleaning. Cleaning out some shelves, that is. Of 20 year old receipts, and old glue and whatnot. Old tax return paperwork from 20 years ago, that sort of thing.

Here's something fun I found. A statement from when I worked at Xerox in 2002. So, in April of that year for my 80 hours of work I was doing for them I made $2,228. Seems reasonable. Let's punch this number into an inflation calculator to see what that number is in 2024 dollars. Oh, it's $3,819. Well, good thing I make... huh. Let's look at my last statement from being employed with Xerox today. Same 80 hours, and my pay was $2,769. That seems... less? In fact, accounting for inflation if I made only the "same" amount as I made then, $3,819 I've taken a pay cut of $1,050. I should in fact be making upwards of $4,000 to have both kept up with inflation and gotten a bit of a raise. So glad I calculated that for myself! At least I am finally making "more" than I made back then. For a very, very long time I did not.

Ate lunch. Yes, the shelves were that bad, it took me that long to clean them up. I'm slowly cleaning another one off, BTW by bringing an old, rusting power supply to work to drop in the recycle bin one at a time. I figure another 3 weeks and I'll have that sucker cleaned off finally.

Cleaned the driveway off.

Checked another game off my steam list.

Started another.

Had dinner.

Parents came for movie.

Then back to steam game, I have no idea if Sean will even be back at a reasonable hour, I don't know when his game runs until, and he may be wiped out from running it. Ah, I was correct in my assessment, he never got on.

Sun:
Did my reading.
Then played a bunch of Kingdom whatever it is I'm playing now. Got a little stuck, I think it's bugged honestly. Basically if you don't defeat the bad guy in the first turn, he puts up a shield you can't break. Believe me. I tried. It couldn't do enough damage to me to overcome my healing, and I couln't do enough damage to the shield in one turn (the guide I read said it refreshes every turn? How is that fair?) so I just wailed on it for minutes on end. That's when I got fed up and looked into it more online. (I was at level 25, the guide recommended level 22 so it wasn't that) I even searched with a debugger for various values in the game to try and help (I couldn't find them) but did find a save game editor for RPG maker that works wonders. I gave one character 255 stats figuring that might help me break the shield. Nope. Her damage was hardly more than it was before. So I guess the stats are useless in this game? That seems odd. But that's when I realized beating him before the shield goes up was the only way. I reverted to the pre-cheat save and took him out. Done. Stupid thing. At least I got a nice ring for my troubles.
Got ready for tomorrow, made calls. One lady who didn't need help anymore and one guy that left some kinda rambling message but said he wanted to call me Tuesday? Uh, okay, sure, we'll see if he does. Either way my part of the bargain has been kept.
Some xbox with the others.

Mon:
Sunny! Joe totally ignored my question about cloning so thanks for that, but did mention the MIB spec was being changed, so maybe values would be added there? Not reassuring, let me tell you.

Had a meeting with a lady about gabi, she took far too long to understand what was going on. Maybe I'm just bad at explaining. Anyway, she said she would write an email to Gina. She did not.

Meanwhile, I contacted Ken to have the IP address return to the gabi box and got a little further. It won't do any commands because the admin portal is unreachable and there are issues. Oh, write bugs? They'll love that. Oh man, yes.

So I messed with that. Please, gabi, die. Oh and she wants me to setup older software as well and test the new weblet on the old software. No. Why would I do that? We made the changes for the new software. If they're not taking the new software, we don't need the new weblet. If they stay with the old software, then they won't get the new weblet. It doesn't even work now. Why should I do more work on a product discontinued by the manufacturer? ???? A product that made them no money. Nobody bought it. That's why they stopped. Yes, that two years of work was really worth it. But it's over. Stop making me try and get this stupid thing working.

Also did some scan tests for Karen. With the tiny machine, because that's what the government buys. Tiny, home devices. There were no surprises, it failed exactly where I expected it to. Busywork of the finest order.

I did a little writing but hardly more than a page.

Came home. Checked sites, had dinner. Then back to Knights.

Tues:
Great haul of fire! One and a half boxes today, like the hauls of old. Nice. No salad, but many big subs, desserts, normal sandwiches, hot pockets, apples, lots of apples apples actually, cheese boxes. Nice.

Had a short meeting about lab inventory with Don. Got him serial numbers for stuff.

Had a very short meeting about onedrive, none of the DoD people showed.

Finished the chapter. Maybe one left? Two at most I think.

Did not write gabi bugs. Whoops, maybe tomorrow I guess.

Sunny again, yay!

Came back here, 3 calls? Why? I expected the one, it was the guy that said he would call and he actually did. How about that. Jerry, one of my least favorites, and trackpad lady. She's dropping it off as 7:15 was too late. I said she could wait tomorrow at that time, but I have one night a week to do Xbox and the two calls are going to eat up enough of my time for that tonight so no thanks.

Jerry wants me to come out, so that's 40 minutes of driving I get to do tomorrow. So fun.

Spent over an hour on the phone with the other guy. As far as I can determine, he was upgraded to windows 11, probably not understanding what that meant. But he put in his MS account with a yahoo address not his frontier address. Huh? Of course windows "helpfully" starts encrypting his computer (does Apple do this or does it ask?) and shows a big, scary warning if you want to then switch to a local account. So you can't change the MS account that's being used on the device, you're locked in. This email doesn't exist of course, so he can't verify it.

We finally got it so it doesn't ask when he boots the machine. There's SO many hoops you have to jump through. And why when I turn it off isn't the username the email address? Why is it some random number? That tripped me up as well, as I hadn't seen that before.

The only good thing about this is he's in fairport, down 250s probably about a half hour away. So it basically worked out the same, it just saved me the driving. I got to sit on my couch and work on his device instead of using power to transport myself there.

Then did xbox.

Wed:
So close to finishing the book! Got the next to last chapter done super fast, I knew exactly how I wanted it to go.
Didn't quite get to the end of the last chapter. So close though.

Work stuff, you know?

Not much of it, oddly, but enough. Wrote an email to the gabi people, giving the latest status after getting an email "well, you should consider this and this, that actually has no baring on you because you're using old stuff and not what we're talking about at all" so thanks for all that!

And emailed the guy about the LDAP spec. The developer lady says Tim says they aren't going to write events when doing LDAP queries. Oh really? So then why does the spec say things about queries then? Super odd, that, isn't it? So I asked for clarification.

Oh and the drink machine was down, had to just have plain water. The humanity!

Oh and Don came for more boxes, the usual stuff.

Went out to second work. Put something on craigslist for him, (hey remember that site?) typed up how to do it so he can do it (he won't do it) and answered some questions. He's still living the "asian fantasy" while getting over 10,000 spam emails- it was something around there. Dude, just cancel that service it's clogging up your email something fierce.

Came back, did third work, putting the trackpad in for the lady that dropped the laptop off yesterday. Didn't take too long. I was watching a video while doing it.

Checked sites, ate dinner.

No calls today.

Thurs:
Started the proofread. Got about 1/3 the way through I would say. Fixed a few things.

Work wise, wrote 5 bugs that will never be fixed for Gabi. Had the usual Thursday meeting. Oh and the new weblet doesn't work on the old release. Just say something about the network connection. So that's fun.

Stopped at good will, got 2 things for the game this year.

Checked sites, ate dinner. Did a little warframe, just to start evolving my one knife and raising the level of the one gun I just built.

Spent 20 minutes on the phone with a lady. Finally got out of her that she no longer had home internet, she used a hotspot (why?) and whoops she had unplugged it! Yes, if things are not plugged in, they do not work. You don't have to be "technical" to understand this! No really, it's true. (And I remind everyone computers have been around, in their current form, for 40 years. The 128k Mac launched Jan 24, 1984. You can no longer say you have not had enough time to learn how to use them. After this long, it's on you.)

Let's look ahead, as we always do.

The usual stuff tomorrow, shopping, no bank, seeing my parents. I don't see why we wouldn't do game this week. Then over the weekend have my parents over for the movie. And that's really all that's planned at the current time. Still no Saturday game until next month. No snow on the forecast so the driveway shouldn't need to be done.

Huh, last week of Feb. Soon I'll be 47. Seesh.

See you all next time!