Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

My company is in the process of rolling out Windows 11 updates to all of their computers. This a very large task, as there are thousands of computers all over the world that have to be updated. Fortunately, they didn't require me to go to the Fremont office to get the update. Nevertheless, what probably should have only taken an hour took much of the day. The engineer handling my computer remotely had a whole lot of trouble getting things to install. Even after he handed it back over to me with instructions, there were several more Win10 updates that had to be installed first (and the computer restarted) before we could even start the Win11 update. The Win11 update itself, even over my decently speedy internet connection, took more than an hour to download. (I don't know exactly how long it took because Kayla decided it was time for us to make the trip to Sparks about which she wrote on her journal after an hour of waiting.)

This morning, the computer had downloaded yet more updates, and they also had to be installed and the computer restarted again. That seems to be all of it for now.

So far, Win11 seems to be working okay, and it didn't reorganized my computer or change the user interface as much as I expected it would do.

I woke up around 0530 this morning, having slept around seven hours. I did not have to check out until 1100, so I could have gone back to sleep for a while, but I decided that it was in my best interest to get back on my normal work schedule. While I was in the UK, I was sleeping in each morning, starting mid-morning or sometimes as late as Noon, but tomorrow I'm back on "normal" hours.

Not being in any rush, I finally got the WiFi in the room working (I couldn't actually connect last night) and wrote yesterday's entry, backdating it to last night before I went to bed. I had a couple of cups of coffee, got showered, packed up my bags, and checked out of the hotel.

As I was packing, I realized that my initial plan to take a taxi to the Amtrak station to collect the minivan (which I'd made before booking into the SureStay) was a waste of money and energy. There is a Reno Transit District bus that runs past the airport and goes to the Central Bus Terminal, which is a block from the train station and from where the Astro was parked. So I stored my luggage with the hotel and walked to the bus stop.

( Slowing Working my Way Homeward )

Initially everything went fine on the home network. Unfortunately, after a short time the network went down. Investigating things, I found the lights were off on the cable modem. All of them, even the power light. I tried plugging the modem into another known good power outlet, and nothing happened. So I concluded that the modem was dead.

Having a dead modem was not really something I wanted to have to deal with after a seven-week vacation, especially given that I need to go back to work (online) tomorrow morning. I got the computers running somewhat by bridging my smartphone, but that's not ideal and it's slow. The cable modem was out of warranty, so I ordered a new one (the old model isn't made anymore) from Best Buy and went back to Reno. Again, this is not something I wanted to have to do.

Returning home, I set to work trying to get the new cable modem to work. Unfortunately, now it looks like tonight that Spectrum Internet has a website outage and all of the support options come down to something along the lines of "not tonight, I have a headache." Also the manufacturer's installation instructions seem to assume that of course everyone has a wi-fi-enabled home network, which we do not (and that Lisa does not want). So at least for tomorrow I'll be stuck with the slow bridge over the phone until I can (I hope) work with Spectrum to figure out how to make the Arris modem (which says on the label that it's compatible with Spectrum) to work.

Tonight, however, I am home. This is the final installment of my 2024 Worldcon travel story. Lisa is still in Europe, though (she went to see the Wuppertal suspended monorail today), so there will be different travel tales (and stories of my doing my travel agent act) to come.

In the hope that we can get caught back up to our self-imposed schedule of releasing a new episode at the start of each month, Lisa and I recorded the talk-to-camera or "studio" portion of the next episode of Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories this afternoon. I should have time to edit it to get a episode done by the end of the month, even though I'm going to San Jose next weekend and won't have time to do video editing. In general, I don't do RLMS editing anywhere but at home, because the source files off the P2 are huge, so they sit on the 15 TB RAID drive, which would be a bit unhandy to haul around with me. It sits in the wiring closet and is available to all of the computers on hour home network.

In order to make proper use of the "studio lights" we bought a few weeks ago for Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories, Lisa wanted to install a switched outlet in the ceiling. This will allow her to mount the lights up there and get them aimed the way she wants them, and then when we're going to record, she can just flip the switch without having to spend a bunch of time setting up lights. This afternoon after I finished with Day Jobbe for the weekend, we set out to to the wiring.

( Wires, Wires Everywhere )

Lisa turned the circuit breaker back on and tested both the rewired light fixture and the new outlet, and everything is in order. Once we have more electrical face plates and the mounting hardware for the studio lights, she'll finish the installation. She thanked me for my help handing her tools and parts, disposing of discarded pieces of wire insulation and conduit packaging, and otherwise serving as an electrician's assistant. The saved her a lot of time because she didn't have to keep climbing up and down the ladder.

Cleaning all of the computer wiring, the table, the area underneath and around the desk, and putting all of the computers, wiring, monitors, etc. back into place took around as long as the wiring project did. I'll have more to say about the computers and monitors tomorrow.

Half of my day was spent working on Day Jobbe, as there was work on the custom database that I wrote and manage for my team at work that was misbehaving and that I needed to have working by the time things start tomorrow morning or we'll all be in the soup. I haven't gotten all of the bugs out of it yet, but after four hours (which I did log, although I'll probably not be able to recover them this coming week) I did get it so that it will work tomorrow morning.

So the second half of my day was also spent over a computer, albeit my personal machine, editing an episode of Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories. I don't know how those other YouTubers manage to put out all of these videos multiple times a week, although I guess for most of those who I follow, it's actually their full-time job rather than just a hobby like it is for me. I'm managing about one minute of finished video per one hour of editing time, including making photos fit into the narrative. It's interesting to learn, but it's tiring.

The first day of spring? Well, it's sunny, but cold, and I had the fireplace running this morning. I may go to bed early today because it's warmer in bed.

Our living room has always been difficult to light. This is odd because the walls and ceiling (except the fireplace area) are white, but we've always had trouble lighting the room. Throughout the time we've been here, Lisa has installed different light fixtures to work on the issue. As I wrote a few weeks ago, Lisa extended an outlet under the computer desk using surface conduit, but that was only the start of the project, and yesterday we tackled the bigger part of the project.

( Installing a New Light Fixture )

As we finished the site preparation, Lisa determined that she didn't have enough wire. We probably have an extra spool of wire somewhere, but we couldn't find it. So we had to go to Lowe's, where we bought another 250 feet of wire. (We obviously didn't need that much today, but it seems likely that we'll need it eventually, and the unit price is cheaper in the larger rolls.)

This, by the way, is why Lisa planned this project for a Friday. The outlet project earlier this month we started on a Sunday night, and rather than finish off the whole project with the light, we had to stop and put everything back together because I had to have my computers back online for Monday morning. In this case, had we got to a point where we needed to stop for the night, we could just continue on Saturday.

( Running Conduit, Pushing Wires, and Mounting Fixtures )

After completing the wiring, Lisa turned the circuit breaker on and put bulbs in the fixture.

( Switch On and Reinstall the Computers )

My job during this was to ocassionally hold tools and stand by to run errands as needed. When I wasn't needed for that, I could read from one of our railroad magazines to keep Lisa entertained while she wrestled with conduit, wiring, and fixtures.

Lisa still thinks we might need one more light fixture. Our living room is larger than the entire studio apartment in which I lived for a year in San Jose after moving out of Fremont and before starting to cut the ties to the Bay Area, and with its high ceiling, it seems to have lots of shadows. Fortunately, the way she installed the florescent light on the ceiling a few months ago left her some room for expansion, so when she feels up to it, we'll probably go purchase another identical fixture and install it next to the existing light to double the illumination.

First, the large one: XPO Logistics Announces Plan to Spin Off Logistics Segment to Its Shareholders. I have absolutely no inside information about this. I found out the same way the rest of the world did: when the press release dropped and the CEO sent an all-hands announcement. I speculate that "NewCo" and "RemainCo" are merely placeholder names, and the asset-heavy company (LTL, Intermodal, and the like) will get one name and the asset-light company (Supply-Chain Management, where I work for a corporate entity that 25 years ago was called Menlo Logistics) will get another. How that will affect me personally is impossible to say.

Now the small one: my new company laptop finally arrived. Unfortunately, to activate it, you have to have it plugged in through a wired connection inside the company firewall. My nominal office is in Fremont, and there are piles of reasons (starting with COVID-19 and continuing with not wanting to drive 600 miles for half an hour of work) not to go there. So I made arrangements to visit the XPO LTL (formerly Con-Way LTL) terminal in Sparks today. This is my third trip there, and all three of them have been for the purpose of activating a corporate machine. It will presumably be the last time I will be able to do this, because by the time I get a new machine again, it will be a completely separate company than the one for which I work, rather than being a separate subsidiary of a parent corporation.

This is the first time I've been in any XPO facility since the pandemic hit. Everyone was wearing masks, distancing was obvious, and I had to declare various things at the front desk like not running a fever, having traveled internationally or been exposed to someone who has had C-19. In my case, I was tested about a month ago and was clean then and I've been trying very hard to minimize any further exposure. This also was the first time I've had to wear my employee badge in over a year! The folks in Sparks were very nice and I used their conference room, plugged into their network, fired up the new laptop, signed in, made sure I could access my corporate applications and that the computer recognized me, and shut down. Total time in the room was about 30 minutes, but that was partially because it's the first time I'd connected all of the pieces of the laptop and I had to figure out where some things connected; also, the only Ethernet port in the conference room was behind a cabinet, which meant a bit of shuffling stuff.

Lisa had come with me to Sparks, even though she just sat in the Astro with Kuma Bear reading a book, just to get away from the house for a little while. We headed straight home after I got the computer working. This evening, she helped me as I pulled part my work area (for the second time in a month) and rearranged things again.

( New Office; Not the Same as the Old Office )

We even managed to find the necessary adapter cables to get DisplayPort (from the HP super-hub) to DVI (our monitors only have VGA and DVI connections) working. And there's still a little bit of space to the left where I can use yet another laptop issued to us by our customer, which for "security" reasons won't let us access their system except with their specially-configured Chromebooks.

Someday I really hope we can figure out a way to get the upstairs office habitable. We know what to do, but there's a huge amount of money necessary to do it. I have the desk space up there to spread out quite nicely there. Right now I have a six-foot-long desk and it feels very crowded.

I haven't bought a truly new computer for roughly twenty years. For most of that time, I've taken advantage of my employer surplusing my work machines when replacing them and letting me have them, usually wiped, although in a couple of cases they put a "clean" OS on them. This string of living on hand-me-downs has come to an end.

( Power Laptop )

I spent a large chunk of today starting to get this new computer running. I'm disappointed to see that docking stations are apparently not a thing anymore, as being able to use my laptop as a workstation but then undock it for when I go on the road was ideal. Instead, I have a USB 3 mini-dock that is supposed to be able to push everything (two monitors, ethernet, two USB 3 ports) through a single USB 3 port. I haven't finished putting that together yet and I'm writing this post on the old computer that's sitting on its dock. I'll need to pretty much completely disassemble the desk in order to take things apart and reassemble them with the new computer.

We're still not done, either, as the old computer could directly read the P2 cards that come out of the pro-grade Panasonic camera, but this new one certainly doesn't have a PC card slot as that's way too old-fashioned apparently. There are devices that will connect P2 cards to USB 3 ports (important due to the size of the files), but they're pricey. We'll see how things go the next time we're in a place where Lisa has actually filmed a WSFS Business Meeting and I have to quickly edit it into something practical to upload to YouTube.

In order to run a piece of legacy software (no internet connection required; in fact, it boots from the CD-ROM drive to run a specific task, so it's relatively immune from outside hacking), I needed to dig out one of the Dell D600 machines. Not surprisingly, the batteries were dead for having sat for a long time. I plugged it in and the green charging light came on. Then, while I was working on the legacy-software job, the green light turned into a flashing red light, meaning "charging error." I hastily shut down the computer and pulled the battery, which was very hot to the touch.

That model of Dell laptop battery has been known to go bad. I set it aside and put in another. (I have lots of them.) After a few minutes, it also turned red and I pulled it. Same for the third battery. Fortunately, the fifth battery worked, as did the sixth, and there are others available if I need them.

I also managed to (eventually) get the legacy job done. Although Dell might possibly still replace the old defective batteries, I'm not sure there's much point, given how rarely I use the old Dell machines. I may just take the defective batteries with me and put them in the battery-recycle box at work. But I'm sure glad I was paying attention, because I really don't want a battery fire, and that first overcharging battery felt almost hot enough to burn my hand when I pulled it out.

Lisa's computer would no longer work with the very old version of Skype installed on it, nor would it download the newest version. After a lot of fussing about, I was able to download the full version of Skype to my computer, transfer it to her computer via USB, and she was able to install the new version. Whereupon all sound on her computer died except a Skype conversation. That means she couldn't hear voicemail greetings or voicemail, or any other Windows sound at all, even the Windows startup sound. Much troubleshooting ensued. Eventually, she was able to get sound running again by running Control Panel/Sounds and Audio Devices/Voice/Test Hardware... and running the Sound Hardware Test Wizard.

I think the Skype installer was trying to implement a setting in Windows 7 and later (but in XP) that mutes/reduces all other sound when it thinks you are using communications software like Skype. Since the setting isn't in XP, it ended up killing all sounds all the time (whether Skype was running or not) other than Skype, and not all of Skype to boot! You could talk and listen on Skype, but you couldn't hear it ring nor hear voicemail greetings, nor voicemail recorded for you.

This entire updating and installation of Skype took us about 90 minutes, which is about 80 minutes more than I think it should have taken. But it seems to be working now, except that every time you launch the program on her computer, it prompts you to update it. But it won't actually update if you say yes on that screen.