Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

Not much happening on Tuesday. Worked on the Day Jobbe during the day, then did some stuff for the Montreal Worldcon bid in the evening. Yawn. So little happened that I went to bed while forgetting to make a journal entry and instead put in this back-dated entry to try and keep up my string of posts.

This morning, having not totally gotten back on Pacific Time, I woke up around 3:30 AM or so and decided to take another crack at getting the new cable modem online. Using my smartphone, I determined that the Spectrum website issue was resolved, and I managed to find a telephone number that (eventually) led to a human being, who actually knew what needed to happen. I gave her the MAC address of the new modem (that being the one key piece of information), she entered it into their system, and several modem restarts (and one case of me disconnecting and reconnecting it to the network, and one restart of my computer later, the internet reappeared on the home network. Don't let this summary fool you: it took around and hour of futzing around trying things before everything connected.

I'm relieved that we got this going before I needed to go back to working on the Day Jobbe, because moving the amount of data I move over the smartphone's bridge connection would have been painful.

As we've not yet been able to find a place for Lisa to settle down for the rest of the European stay, I booked four more nights at the hotel where she's staying (IHG points being useful here; stay three nights on points and the fourth night is free). They will try and sort that out and maybe get her an inexpensive mobile phone (no smartphones or anything with a touchscreen) so at least she has a way to call me and others.

It took several tries, but I discovered that there is a way to call Lisa directly at her hotel by dropping the last digit of the hotel's phone number and adding her room number. I've never seen that before, but once I got it working, it was very convenient.

I continue to log hours at the Day Jobbe, trying to be productive and visible to my co-workers. I do have some flexibility with my hours as long as I get work done and attend our regular daily staff meeting so that they can see me. (Although normally we keep our cameras off. I did turn it on briefly on the first day here to show them where I was working.) This is useful because we need to do some shopping on Friday that would eat into the time at the start of my temporarily normal work day. That's okay, though, because there is always stuff coming in overnight on which I can work this morning, hours before most people would expect me to see it.

If you tried to contact me yesterday afternoon and expected a quick answer, you did not get it, because Spectrum Internet locally went down around 4 PM local time. Aside from a brief up-time a couple of hours later, it stayed down until at least 10 PM, when I stopped waiting and went to bed because my 4:30 AM alarm was looming over me, despite a two-hour nap that afternoon.

Lisa and I spent quite a while trying to make sure that it wasn't a fault with our home network, because this not only took my computers off-line, but also the Callcentric internet telephone. Eventually I noticed the text message from Spectrum telling me about the outage, and we then relaxed. Indeed, I went outside and sat on the porch for a while instead of staring at my computer screen working on Westercon stuff.

While I did have a backup plan for Day Jobbe (use my company phone as an internet hotspot), the company does not like me doing that and usually send me nastygrams for overrunning my data allowance. In those cases, I have to explain to them that it was for company business, but I don't like having to do it. Fortunately, by the time I got back to the computer this morning, our internet was working again and I could get back to work.

I had cause to go into the website for managing my 401(k) plan and found something that didn't look right. I read through all of the material on the website and it didn't make sense. I would have preferred sending email, but the site says that "email is not available." My only choices were dealing with their automated system (which I'd already tried) or calling them. This was important enough that I steeled myself for talking to customer service and called them. After a not-too-long delay, I got through to someone who was genuinely helpful. He mentioned as we were working through the issue is that they're currently being drowned in support calls having to do with Tax Day (April 15). I hadn't considered that because I did my taxes last month.

I laid out the issue to him, and he agreed that it didn't sound right. He dug into the details, including the rules specific to my company, and he said that everything I told him matched what he could find. That made me feel better. He put me on hold and went to talk to the tech team there. After a wait (he checked in on me to make sure I knew he hadn't forgotten me), he said that the support people also agree with me. In a sense, he and they were grateful to have something other than "send me the tax forms I need." They're pretty sure that I'm right, and they are digging deeper. It's important, because if I'm having this issue, it seems pretty likely that other people are having it as well. The support analyst said that it may take them several days to figure out what's going on, because they did a system migration a few days ago that they suspect is at the root of the problem.

I'm glad that I called this in. I'm not going to give specifics of the issue, but I'm pretty sure that if anyone else is having the same issue I am, they would be very unhappy. Fortunately, I don't need it fixed immediately; I just need it fixed eventually.

The team on which I work in my Day Jobbe is located in places around the world. There's a certain task that one member of our team in Mumbai normally does, but he's going on vacation and getting married. His backup is in the Netherlands, but she's also on vacation. I'm the second backup and the person who wrote the process and the instructions for it. So tomorrow morning, and possibly some days next week, I have to be up at 1:30 AM my time because this task (upon which all of our team relies) has of late been being done around 10 AM Central European Time. Consequently, I need to get to bed as soon as I can so I can get enough sleep to not be a zombie come tomorrow morning.

Today was quiet. I worked an ordinary Day Jobbe day with no emergencies, then used a single tag-in on the VTA light rail to get gallon of milk and then a take-out dinner. The closest thing to excitement was going to the hotel front desk and checking out and then back in again to the same room. I had to do this because for reasons having to do with how I had to keep changing my travel plans, I ended up with two end-to-end reservations instead of one long one.

I'm studying the light rail schedule and am considering trying to go out via Mountain View on Thursday rather than San Jose. I think it would save a little bit of money because Mountain View - San Francisco is only three Caltrain fare zones rather than the four from San Jose.

Lisa and I went to down as soon as I could get away from work to do what we intend as our last grocery run before Christmas. We also went by Best Buy to get a couple more USB hubs needed for things we've been connecting to our computers. Things were busier than usual for a Monday afternoon, but not completely mad as I expect it will be as we approach the weekend. Thanks to leaving for Reno about 12:30 PM, we got back home before dark, which is good because temperatures have been below freezing and I was concerned about the roads getting icy.

My leaving for Reno early was part of a deal that required me to get some more Day Jobbe stuff done this evening once I got the groceries unloaded. I usually produce some reports every Monday, but they're not required to be done until people start looking for them on Tuesday morning, so a few hours delay is okay, and I got them done.

I did not post anything yesterday, which is rare for me because ever since I started my journal, I tried to post something each day, as it's a substitute for a diary. Sometimes you won't see everything I post due to filtering. Some things are locked only to me, and most friends-locked posts are only on DreamWidth because I don't bother with the manual cross-posts to LiveJournal for them. (I still post to LJ because I paid for a life membership long ago, but DW to LJ automatic cross-posting is suspended because LJ started rejecting DW posts, so I have to manually cross-post things.)

This isn't a particularly interesting week, so it just may be a series of "worked/ate/slept" posts unless I manage to get the next episode of RLMS done.

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.