Bill Roper's Journal

I am off on Thursday for the Juneteenth holiday and will be taking a vacation day on Friday, because four-day weekends are few and far between. I intend to use this time to try to catch up on many things that I need to be doing in the studio.

This does not mean that I am not *sorely* tempted to head down to watch what is now a scheduled straight doubleheader between the Cardinals and the White Sox tomorrow afternoon, tonight's game having been rained out. Two Cardinals games *and* the usually better food on the Southside...

I have things to do. :)

Today, I started on the various bits of mandatory training at work. There are a lot of them.

Tomorrow, I hope to finish them. :)

Gretchen spent most of the day driving a long loop to the Loop and back to pick up K after her trip to Ball State for orientation. Like, five hours, which is absurd. She was a bit late getting to the Loop bus station, but the bus was a bit late too, so it sort of averaged out. Meanwhile, it seems like all of the other drivers on the road were intent upon "interesting" maneuvers. But everyone is home safe now.

I spent time looping at work too. Happily, I was able to sort out one problem and characterize another so that someone more familiar with that particular area of the code can do the further sorting that is required.

And then on Monday, I hope to be able to code in a straight line again. :)

No more raccoon noises as of yet. This is encouraging. There's still a trap in the attic and no one has ventured into it either.

The last critical piece of software is finally installed on my new Linux VM at work with some help from one of my coworkers. And there was much rejoicing.

K had an orientation session for her summer job today. She's also taking a CPR class, so that will be two of us in the family who have done that. I did it for the last season of girls softball.

(Bum, bum, bum, bum, Staying alive, Staying alive...)

There is a whole lot of stuff that needs to be done around the house. Perhaps we will do some of it this weekend.

Or perhaps I will go to the basement and do some recording.

Or both!

I did a bunch of little things at work today and wiped out nearly 300 more warnings in our compile as we shift to a new version of Java. This is in addition to the 2000 or so that I killed off last week. A lot of this was due to the Number constructors having been deprecated a few years back, so all of those occurrences are now patched.

After school let out, I took K to the bank. She now has a bank account and a place to deposit her paycheck from her summer job.

And I made arrangements to return my new glasses and get a replacement pair, because I actually managed to find a pair of frames that were too big for my head. I did not think that anyone *made* anything that was too large for my head.

But I was wrong.

It was the sort of day where I took Gretchen out to Chili's for lunch and then ate the appetizer platter special *as* my lunch.

I have to say that I have missed fried mozzarella...

The sound problems were largely corrected in today's show and everything was much more audible than it had been before. There was one brief mic malfunction which (per K) mysteriously corrected itself without anything being done to it, but other than that, everything was fine and it was a lovely performance. (I'm suspecting that the headset mic got knocked a bit out of position and then got moved back to where it was supposed to be, but I could be wrong. It had that sort of hollow, off-axis sound to it, so...)

Meanwhile, I'm not sure *which* thing that we did fixed the problem, but the new work computer is now working, which means that I had better do some of that next week. :) (It may have been a fix to the proxy settings, as that was one of the things that we tried.)

Right now, K is out at the after-party and we are trying to decide how long we will stay up waiting for her to come home. :)

Today was mostly spent trying to get the new work laptop configured. This would have been easier if any of the instructions on line had been updated. As it was, I made a small mistake and ended up falling down a rabbit hole of mismatched documentation.

Ah, well. Tech support got back to me after 10 PM tonight (*sheesh*) and the problem is now sorted out, I think. At least things *seem* to be working.

It's being complex. That's a good word for it.

Progress is being made at work, which is good.

This damned cough continues. It is gradually getting better, but I am royally tired of it.

I got the rear brakes done on my car, which was an annoying amount of money. And my 12-string guitar is ready to be redeemed from the shop, which is good, because I would like to have it back. :)

Whether I *can* redeem it from the shop tomorrow depends on what the roads are like, because it's an hour or so away in Downers Grove. So we'll see how that goes...

It feels like I am pushing a lot of string uphill lately, not helped by the very slow recovery from this darned cold. Today, I sent an email out to a number of folks responsible for the string and the hill, so we'll see if that does any good.