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    Spyro, BBQ, Robotics, Movies, Computer & Drobo Upgrade, Star Citizen, Health, Pokemon, Power Outage

    By Derek | May 24, 2020

    Monday. (18th)

    Slept in a bit. Got up and worked in my office for a bit, before I exercised. 
    Worked in my office a bit more. I’m still trying to get it organized. 

    Jill and her sister went to Tractor Supply. We’re trying to buy or build a coop for our backyard chickens. 

    On the way to take our older son to work, Jill’s AC compressor “turned off”. I think her AC system needs a recharge and it was getting frozen up. 

    Worked in my office a bit more until our older son was done with work. 

    Stayed at our older sons house and chatted with him a bit after we dropped him off. 

    Came home and played Spyro Reignited Trilogy until past my bedtime. I’m about 45% done with the first game. 

    Tuesday. (19th) 

    Slept too late. Got up and exercised. 

    Took the family to our favorite BBQ place for lunch. 

    Our robotics parts came today. We got our field extension and the new field elements for this year. We opened up the field elements and assembled one of them, just to take a picture of it near our team’s robots from last season, so we could send it out and they could see the size of it.

    Watched Highlander

    Our younger son’s new SSD drive came in, he was running out of space on his computer (250G), so he bought a larger drive (500G). He bought an NVMe, the 250G is a standard SATA SSD. So, I used Clonezilla (in Linux) to clone his 250G to the new 500G, then used GPartEd (in Linux) to grow the partition size. We’ll give it a week, and then we’ll wipe the 250G, plug it back in and use it for something else. 

    In addition to that, my mSATA drives came in. I ordered a couple of 64Gs to place in the mSATA bay for my Drobos. This gives the Drobo a Hot Cache so that it can build a list of the most used files and speed up access to them.
    I was able to upgrade one with no issues (my Archive drive) but when I upgraded my Plex drive it gave me a fright. 

    When I booted the Drobo back up, it came up with zero hard drives listed. I removed the mSATA and rebooted a couple of times, no luck. So, I set about to research why that would happen, and I didn’t really find any good information on line. As this Drobo is about 4 years old, and out of warranty, I ended up disassembling it completely, and cleaning it really well. The fan is still working, so no trouble there, but it was very dusty inside, including where the backplane meets the motherboard.

    So, I got it all cleaned up, and put back together, and it’s working great again. Whew. 

    Wednesday. (20th)

    Regular work day for me. Wednesday is meeting & planning day for my team. 

    I also found out today that myself and my co-worker will be moved to the engineering team for our product, under the engineering manager. This takes effect on the 1st. My current manager is moving on to head up another team that will be dedicated to a very large customer contract that our company just signed, one of the largest in our history. A bunch of good news today. 

    After work, we took our older son to work, then came home and I exercised before dinner. 

    Watched Highlander II: Renegade Version, aka Director’s Cut. If you liked the first movie, you owe it to yourself to watch this version, if you haven’t. It’s not a great movie overall, but this version fixes many of the issues with the theatrical release. When I say not a great movie, what I mean is that it has just the right amount of 80s cheese, despite being released in 1991. 

    Played some Star Citizen with my younger son before bed last night. We played in the Test Universe, so it was a bit buggy, and they rolled out a patch while we were playing, which disconnected us and we had to wait for the servers to come back up. They’re working to get ready for the free fly event next week.

    Thursday. (21st)

    Regular work day for me. I’m still working on re-kicking our old, now empty hosts to the new version of our software, so we can put them back in rotation. It’s a fairly large job, since there are tons of hosts.

    Watched Highlander III: The Final Dimension (also called The Sorcerer)

    Watched Highlander IV: Endgame

    We took our older son to work, then came home and I exercised.
    Took our older son home after work, then played some Star Citizen in the Test Universe with my younger son before bed. 

    Become a Star Citizen and get 5,000 free Credits 
    https://robertsspaceindustries.com/enlist?referral=STAR-H4F3-KZZH

    Friday. (22nd)

    Today marks the 30th anniversary of Microsoft Windows Solitaire, and the 40th anniversary of Pac-Man. Yes, I’m older than those things, I can remember when both of them came out. 

    Got up sleepy, and too late to exercise before work. Regular work day for me. 

    Watched Highlander V: The Source. Now that I’ve seen them all, I would say the universe is interesting… essentially, the first two movies, 1 & 2 (renegade) are probably best viewed as if they happen in a different, alternate timeline of the latter three (III, IV, and V). The backstory changes, and becomes a bit confusing if you try to put them all in the same timeline.

    Technically, III mentions the final event of 1, so I guess you could just have 2 in it’s own timeline. Who really knows. For the most part, they are fun action flicks, I guess, if you don’t try to take them too seriously. 

    Watched Red Sonja. Another cheesy 80’s movie. It’s in the same land as Conan, and has Conan in it, but he doesn’t play Conan. Heh. 

    Played some Star Citizen with my younger son before bed. Still played in the test universe. 

    Saturday. (23rd)

    Slept way in. Exercised first thing. Worked in my office a bit before we had to leave. 

    Went to a wedding of one of Jill’s friends from high school. The wedding itself was outside, so it was super hot, but the reception was in a very nice hall and the food was great. Geronimo Oaks in Seguin was where it was at. 

    They had live music and an open bar. Very nice. The band was very good. I miss my friend Stephen’s band. 

    Stayed pretty late, then came home and went to bed. 

    Sunday. (24th)

    Slept in. Exercised first thing. 

    We all left the house to run some errands, and play some Pokémon. Today was Community Day. Today’s Pokémon was Seedot. Not really a great Pokémon, but ok. 

    We ate lunch at Whataburger, yummy. Then sat in the parking lot across the street and caught Pokémon. Once we left there, we went to park at the back of our friends’ BBQ joint, since it’s usually a great place to catch Pokémon, and there are a couple of Poke stops to spin. 

    We found that one of the owner’s cars was in the parking lot, so we thought we’d call them and let them know we were hanging out, so they wouldn’t freak out when they came out. They’re closed on Sundays, but we thought the might be there working. 

    Turns out, they went to Trader Joe’s and asked us if we wanted anything. Jill asked for some “dirt mints”, then had to explain that they’re actually called Green Tea Mints. Our niece thinks they taste like dirt. They definitely have a strange taste. The name stuck. 

    While we were waiting for our mints, our older son asked us to bring him some Barbacoa tacos. We grabbed a couple from the Mexican place next door and ran them over to him. 

    Once our friends showed up with our mints, we went back to the house. 
    Our younger son and I started playing some Star Citizen, until the storm came and the power went out. 

    The outage lasted maybe an hour and a half, then everything came back on. We had shut down most of the electronics earlier, in preparation, and gotten out our batteries and flashlights. We were ready. 

    Time for bed. 

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    Topics: Entertainment, Family, Food, Games, Health, Linux, Me, Microsoft, Movies, Robotics, Star Citizen, Technology, Work | No Comments »

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