Tag: work

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It’s A’parent

We had a more relaxing drive to work today. I got in relatively early and things were pretty quiet all day. Randy came to work at Kyle’s desk again, and he, Maggie, and I chatted back and forth for much of the morning until he left for the admin building. I had some coffee a little late, and I think I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m just brewing too long. I was excited to finally see a scale on Amazon Vine, which also has a built-in timer. Maybe this will let me fine-tune my brew.

Lunch time came around, and Randy met Maggie and me at Skinny J’s. Randy even called Jim, who came to eat with us on his day off. I had the “Heart Attack” burger, which came on Texas toast with an egg on it. I thought it was pretty good, but the homemade chips were a little bland. Maggie doesn’t like it when I use FSD, so I had to drive to and from lunch, which was so jarring after how little I’ve been driving lately.

Later in the afternoon, I finally cracked what I was missing in our KMS server, and I got the Office 2024 license working. Randy left a little early, and then I finally got out of there. Traffic was wild on the way home, and speeding triggered another FSD failure, so I had to pull off at an exit to park and reset so I didn’t have to drive the rest of the way home.

I stopped in Morrilton for some beer and then made it home, where Summer was eating some food truck hibachi. She ate half, and then I finished. Then I took the dogs for a run while she went out to Eaddie’s football game. Jesica thought she would be coming through, but we ended up not seeing her.

The dogs did really well, and then I cleaned up to go to the halftime show. It was senior night, so Summer and I walked onto the field along with Nick to celebrate Eaddie in the band. It was really cool to be right in the middle of everyone when she played the fight song. We left immediately after that, and I tinkered a while before bed.

Easy Peasy

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Chasing Goblins

I woke up to a rainstorm and practically had to push the car through the rain to get to work because Full Self Driving didn’t want to go over about 60. Traffic after Conway slowed down to the 40s, so I showed up plenty late. Randy was the only one there, and he only walked in just before me. A few others trickled in, but most didn’t stick around long.

I ended up sitting in on a quick call with Kyle and Maggie, but that was mostly just receiving a proposal from a vendor that Randy didn’t want to attend. I was just happy my microphone worked this time. Then I sat in with Maggie and Randy when the Acer rep came to talk to us in person. He tried name dropping Russellville as a client, but I confirmed with Gary that they hadn’t bought any Acer stuff. I don’t know if he was just lying or mistaken.

We didn’t get out for lunch because Robin cooked pork chops and baked potatoes for us. You really couldn’t beat it for five bucks. We’ve been eating great every couple of weeks out there. Then I poked around with the KMS server a bit more in the afternoon. I left work early so I could go home and vote, but I had to stop at the old house first. Then went and stood in line at the election headquarters. They were churning people through there pretty quickly, so I was in and out in no time. Then I headed straight home to see Summer before the trick-or-treaters started coming around.

We had some leftover burritos, and then as soon as we got our first group of kids, I took the dogs out for a run on the Onewheel. They must have smelled it in the air, because they took off running like crazy. There were people all down the road, and we flew by without too much trouble. They did want to sniff at people at first, but overall they did pretty great. We stopped by to see Dad, but their street was dark.

From there, we went around the block to Promenade Circle, and that place was packed. There were cars parked on both sides of the road around the whole block, and you couldn’t get farther than about ten feet away from people in any direction. We rolled on through and went around the main circle once before going out to the basin trail. There was nobody out there, so we continued around Vancouver and then came back up by my parents’ house for some water before taking the long way home.

Summer kept handing out candy for a little longer, but then we put everything away and got ready for bed. Eaddie was out all night with Eli at a Tech band concert. I saw her come in, and then went to bed.

It’s like a candy festival of light!

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Forced Drive

I got out a little earlier today and had a more relaxed ride in to work until around Mayflower. Conway traffic was thick and fast, so I was in a mob of cars that were flying down the road at 88 miles an hour. This is both the speed at which you travel through time, as well as the speed at which Autopilot will no longer autopilot. I had to take over, and with such heavy traffic, didn’t feel like pulling over to park and re-engage. Stress was much higher the rest of the way in, which was also the most busy part of the drive.

The morning wasn’t too bad though. Maggie split her biscuits and gravy with me, and I puttered a bit before really sinking my teeth into anything. The morning went by quickly though, and then I had to text Randy to see what they were doing for lunch. He, Jim, and Kyle were at Cary’s Grill and Bar, which was closed the last time we tried to visit. Maggie wasn’t going to lunch, but changed her mind when I told her the place, so we drove over to meet them.

I had a pretty decent chicken fried steak, but the hashbrown casserole was pretty awful. All of the food could have been a bit more fresh and hot, but wasn’t bad. I also had okra for the first time in the day. Maggie was too nervous to let the car drive us back, so I drove to the office by myself, and I finished the day trying to wrangle our KMS server.

Julie called on the drive home to say she wanted to have Kevin’s celebratory dinner tonight, so I called Eaddie to queue her up before I got home. I didn’t have time to run the dogs, but I got cleaned up before picking up my parents, and then had the car drive us to Brangus to meet Eaddie, Julie, and Kevin. Summer came along after we got inside, but then had to deal with an accident at work.

Dinner was pretty good, as Brangus usually is. We lingered a bit longer than I really wanted, since I still had to run the dogs before bed. Summer took Eaddie home while I took my parents home, and then I took the dogs out for an short, alternate run in the dark. They did alright though, and then I had another speed run to bed.

Sure it works, but is it better?

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Hi, Sharks

I didn’t sleep well, and was predictably tired getting out this morning. I was a few minutes late, but showed up as the guys were checking out our new shop building that has finally been cleaned out. Humorously, I was still the first one to my desk to begin work. I had a bit of a false start when I accidentally joined my call with PRTG an hour early. When the call finally did start, I had audio trouble and had to join from my computer and phone for anyone to hear me.

The morning ran long as nobody came around for lunch. I was going back and forth with Maggie about what to eat when she suddenly said David was coming from Howard to treat us to an impromptu lunch at Saltgrass Steak House. I was excited to try that, but she talked him into going to Longhorn instead because she liked their lunch better. My New York strip ended up being absolutely terrible because it was overcooked and unbelievably tough. I had to saw it into thin strips just to chew the thing.

It took us a while to get started because we waited for Jim to join us, and then Maggie behaved embarrassingly with our waitress, asking multiple people for an extra plate and receiving too many, and then getting out of her seat to chase down our server to ask for something near the end of our visit. She’s been a very involved secretary, which I appreciate, but her lunchtime habits are unhinged.

We made it back to the office and I finished out the day mostly struggling to troubleshoot my audio issue. I finally left and made it home to take the dogs out for a quick run. We visited my parents, and then Stilgar had to lay down in the creek for a bit while we were in the basin. They behaved well though, and got hot dogs at home.

Once I cleaned up, I had to pry Summer out of her chair so we could take the Model Y to Superfast and finally fix the piece of the bumper that was out of place. I was right, and it was relatively easy to do, and it should have been done the day of the accident to prevent further damage to the paint.

We took a moment and let the car drive us around town to cool down from my frustrations, and unboxed a couple of fun things from Amazon Vine. Julie called about an earlier text message about a loan to buy an airplane. We discussed that with a predictable tone before I finally got to wind down for bed. Eaddie came in late, as seems to be the norm. I did well to crawl into bed before ten.

High risk; No reward

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Let’s Carve a Smile on that Face

It was a quiet, slow drive in today. I had a little note from Randy in my chair, thanking me for being a part of the team. I figure he was required to write it, but it was nice all the same, and the words felt genuine because they mirrored the comments he’s made to me ever since I started.

The guys came and went, but mostly went, leaving me alone for lunch. I went to Rally’s and had a pretty disappointing burger because they were out of bacon without any recourse for my prepaid online order. I ate it at my desk and waited for others to come around.

Randy texted and asked me to take care of a printer issue upstairs, so I rebuilt that from scratch. The HP printer has an incredibly annoying requirement to read a PIN from a hidden label inside the machine in order to get to the remote settings. It was clear that the initial deployment wasn’t done correctly, or at least not completely. She shouldn’t have any more issues now though.

The afternoon went by pretty quickly as we tackled various puzzles. I left a little bit late, and traffic was relatively light but unnecessarily slow. I got stuck under the speed limit for a few miles, and then got behind a gravel truck that was spewing pebbles through Conway.

Eaddie and Eli were practicing their instruments when I got home. I immediately took the dogs out for their run, ran through my parents’ yard, around the basin, and back home. They did pretty well and got their hot dogs afterward. Then I jumped right into making burritos for dinner.

I got pretty heated at Summer and the kids after I called to them several times. Evidently it’s my fault for not explaining to them that I won’t call them unless I want them to come to me. Nobody offered to help; nobody said they were on the way; nobody said thanks; nobody told me to pound sand.

I ate and excused myself to try and wrap up the rest of my evening. Dad eventually showed up to eat, and then we got to carving pumpkins. The mallet and “cookie cutters” I got from Amazon Vine were ridiculed at first, but ended up being a “hit” once they started using them. They were difficult to extract, but with some care, they worked really well. We got everyone cleaned up and shuffled off, and I made a speed run for bed.

Burrito Stuff

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Elon, Take the Wheel

I let the car take the onramp all the way to the offramp this morning, and only had to intervene once when it stupidly tried to pass in the right lane a block before it would have had to turn into the office parking lot. I just don’t get why it does obviously stupid things when it does so well at other times.

Randy wasn’t feeling well and ended up leaving after lunch. Nobody else came around, so I just went to Arby’s by myself and hung out there for the hour. I didn’t get into anything super complicated, and actually spent most of the morning waiting for Randy to show me a couple things, so I’m still feeling a little bit lost a lot of the time.

The morning happened to go by super quickly, so of course the afternoon dragged on. I decided to take the next two days off for recovery, so I headed home and then immediately took the dogs out for a walk. We went backwards this time, and went to the pond first to get a bit muddy. Then we stopped by my parents’ house before going up the hill and through Pinewood before making it home, where we took one more lap around the block before stopping.

Eaddie and Eli ate salad crap that Summer brought home, and I left out of frustration when I found an empty condiment shelf in the refrigerator. I ended up going to KFC to pick up a Famous Bowl, and then I went to the city park to eat at a picnic table. I sat there and enjoyed the weather for a while before going to the old house to check things out. There weren’t any toilets, so I ended up leaving sooner than I expected.

I didn’t want to go home though, so I immediately started Full Self Driving without a destination, just to see where the car would take me. I wondered if it would choose turns, or if it would just keep trying to drive straight as long as it could. It ended up taking a right at the stop sign, which made me think it was going to default to taking me home. It made it all the way across town, but then took the first exit out of the roundabout, which put me back on 12th Street all the way to Glenwood. There, it took its only left turn the entire night, and took me up to 2nd Street. There, it took another right and got through the stops all the way to the traffic light. It tried to proceed through green, but then hit the brakes hard right in the middle of the intersection because it couldn’t see the street. There just happened to be another car coming from the other direction, so the headlights probably didn’t help the matter. I pressed the accelerator to carefully nudge it through the intersection, and it continued on as if nothing had happened.

It ended up at sort of a dead-end, so it took a right and went nearly all the way to Oakland Heights before it took a sudden right to get back over to Detroit. Then we headed north, all the way over the tracks, and then took the first right out of the traffic circle on that side of town. It took me around the Parker Road bend, then all the way up the steep hill to get to Highway 124. We drove by the girls’ old house and ended up on the intersection of 124 and Weir Road. It took me back toward town all the way to Main Street before taking a right and going all the way over the bridge. After we made it through downtown, I finally told it to take me home, and it did. We made it just over 15 miles over the course of 35 minutes with absolutely no interventions, and I really only stopped because the battery was low and still hadn’t recovered from my drive back from work.

Summer was already in bed. Eaddie saw Eli out, I took out the trash. Eventually sleep.

Adventures with Machines

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Final Test

Full Self Driving took me all the way from the onramp to the office this morning, with only one intervention when it wanted to move into the passing lane in front of a car, but wouldn’t take the shot when the person coming up behind me in that lane flashed their lights to let me merge over. Apart from that, it was hands in my lap the whole way, with only a few directed lane changes by signaling.

I really just tinkered all day again, since I was waiting for Randy to get me some instructions on how to reach our servers that had been migrated to Hyper-V. There were a couple techs in and out of the office pretty much all day, so things were always relatively fresh, though I was still just stuck in my corner doing my own thing.

Summer was in town for a meeting of her own, so she came to the office and then we drove separately to Red Lobster for lunch. I tried their unlimited salad and chowder, but only had time for one salad and two chowders. Our server was kind, but acted like the chowder was somehow being “prepared” in a way that took more time than ladling it out of a crock pot. There is no possible way that endless shrimp is what caused them to go bankrupt, because I don’t think I’ve ever managed to get more than two refills in a visit. They were always so incredibly slow, no matter which restaurant we visited.

The afternoon was mostly dull as I spent my time pausing sensors in PRTG in preparation for our trial license to expire. I didn’t want to be forced to pause 100 free sensors at a time until I managed to find the 100 I was most interested in seeing. Randy, still fresh off of his vacation, was fairly over being at work, so he shooed us out a couple minutes early.

Summer made it home early for Eaddie’s marching assessment, so I stopped by McDonald’s and Arby’s for a couple of deals for dinner. Then I ran the dogs quickly before dark, and Dad came over to get me to go see the band.

Autumn had found Summer and sat next to her, and immediately moved over to talk to me once I was seated. She made a big show about how she wanted to apologize in a blanket statement for “everything” she had done to me, and expressed how it had been weighing on her all this time since we kicked her out of the house. I just told her I wanted her to work hard to be successful, but she was content being an absolute parasite and claiming success in the way of “all As in nursing classes.”

Eye-roll.

No lessons have been learned, and she’s still only apologizing for selfish reasons to make herself feel better. I’ll believe it when she’s not trying to weasel her way out of caring for her two elderly “roommates” that are paying her nearly half of my salary just to carry on existing.

The bands did great, and we squeaked out as soon as UCA finished their set at the end. I could have done without, but Dad drove. I went home with Summer since she drove herself, and then we went to bed as quickly as we could make it.

It’s always Green Hill Zone.

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Second Lunch; Worse Than the First

I let FSD drive me to work today, and I basically didn’t touch the wheel after Atkins. I kept waiting for there to be a steering wheel nag, but it just didn’t happen. I got the typical “pay attention” warnings if it looked like I wasn’t staring straight ahead for too long, but otherwise my hands were in my lap for the entire drive. I intervened once when I was nearly all the way to work, in order to prevent it looking stupid in heavy traffic. Then I had to whip into the office parking lot quickly because it couldn’t find the entrance with an oncoming truck. Otherwise it performed reasonably well on the highway as long as I was dictating lane changes. That’s still an issue that makes it look like a first-time driver.

Randy was back, and full of piss and vinegar, which was more funny than scary. He gets on rants and just lets it fly, which is only different from my usual accompaniment in that he’s much louder. I don’t mind, and I at least feel like we have the same struggles. He sort of helped me with access to stuff I had been missing since he left, and then he hung around the main office area complaining about all the email he’d gotten.

There was a non-union organization representative that brought us pizza from American Pie Pizza for lunch, and it reminded me of Brick Oven. I liked it, but after I’d eaten my first slice and a bite of the second, Jim called Randy and wanted to go out to eat. Randy said we were going to second-lunch, and at this point I’m still mostly in it for the camaraderie, so I summoned the Model Y and we took it across town. Maggie said she was too nervous to ride with FSD, so she drove separately.

The place Jim wanted to go was closed when we got there, so we rerouted to Señor Tequila, which I thought was fine, but not good. I figured it might be authentic with such little English being spoken, but it was just like any other middling Mexican restaurant. The beans were runny and the chips lacked salt. Otherwise the food could have used a bit more kick. I tried the tamale, and it was fine. The restaurant was also awkwardly quiet. I just wished I had stayed with the pizza instead.

We finished up the afternoon and I tried to close out some stale tickets, and then I headed home. I had to stop at Kohl’s to pick up an order on the way, and then I had to take a break before taking the dogs out on their run. It was already getting dark quickly, so we stopped briefly to see Dad and then continued up the hill and around the block a couple times. They did alright, but not great. I was also aggravated to see pots scattered in the yard and the edge of Stilgar’s pool all chewed up when I got home. They got some chews since I haven’t gotten any more hot dogs, and then I came in to clean up and wrap up before bed.

Cornel West, he’s our guy! If he can’t win, then why’d we try?

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Chuy Fajitas

I was super tired this morning, but I managed to get out of the house early enough that I could pick up a coffee from Starbucks. I got a Pecan Crunch Oatmilk Latte thinking the oatmilk wouldn’t upset my stomach, but I still felt a little bit gurgly for most of the day. I was early enough to the office that the back door was deadbolted, so I walked around to the front to get in. I later learned this was unnecessary, because my office door key also opens that door, but I also learned that you have to push or pull the door a bit while turning the key.

Maggie and Jay showed up, and Jay went to the middle school just long enough to decide he wanted to take the rest of the day off. They were having parent-teacher conferences, but he said he just didn’t see anyone around and decided he’d rather spend the day elsewhere. I worked on SCCM some more, but didn’t get very far. In fact, after going to Chuy’s for lunch with Maggie, Kyle, and Jim, I learned that the SCCM server had disappeared from vSphere entirely. It was still operational, but I couldn’t actually remote into it.

I gave up, and Maggie and I left at three. The Model Y got Full Self-Driving in the morning without any warning, so I let it drive me home. I stopped in Conway thinking I had a deal for Long John Silver’s, but after I got there I realized that none of the local restaurants were participating in the deal. I continued on home, brought in a huge stack of boxes of Vine stuff, and eventually got out with the dogs.

They were behaved pretty well, and boy did they want to run. They maintained an average pace of 8.8mph with a top speed of 20.4mph. It was a wild ride, but it was great fun. They just kept going, I guess because of the cooler weather. I thought they would be worn out, but after some treats and food back at home, they got wound up again late in the evening.

Summer got home a little late, but earlier than she originally thought. She has a 5k run in the morning, and then a yoga class with Eaddie later in the day. Eaddie was out late but then came to talk to me for a bit when she got home, just as I was going to bed.

Old people bedtimes

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Remap

I got out early today and had a leisurely drive to work. I made myself some coffee and tried to clear out some PRTG alarms while Kyle and Gary were waiting for the phone call with Windstream and IK Electric. Kyle gave up before the call even started, and went to his office to take the call. Gary seemed to know a bit about the phone, but I thought he was the one who called Kyle about it yesterday for help. Maybe it was Jimmy. I can’t tell any of those old guys apart yet.

I just kept chugging away, trying to be productive. I was on my own again for lunch, so I went to Arby’s for another deal. Then I spent the afternoon redesigning the PRTG map to make it more readable on the TV in the office. Maggie seemed to like the improvements anyway.

Dad babysat the restoration guys that went to the old house, and I left work a little bit early so I could get to The UPS Store back home and return some Amazon items. Coming into the parking lot, I guess the curb was sharp enough to push in the tire, and the back wheel bit the curb. It took a big chunk out of the wheel and also cut a strip of the rubber, though it was still attached. I haven’t been happy with the wheels on that car at all.

Summer was getting ready to settle into a bath when I got home, so I took the dogs out for a really good run, up to the point where another dog chased us from the end of my parents’ street all the way to their house. They were riled up while they sniffed around the yard, and then we continued our usual route through the basin trail. They got hot dogs and new chew toys, courtesy of Amazon Vine. Then I tinkered with the security cameras a bit before bed.

Tik tok, on the clock.