It feels early to be writing this

[howeird]

But it's only about an hour before usual.

Gung Hay Fat Tuesday!

Slept well, but took a while to get to sleep with Spook curled up on the end of the bed, trapping some of my covers.

Last night I had plugged back in the router in the bedroom, set as a 2G relay, which is as fast as the tablets can go. The improvement in video play was as good as I'd hoped, which made me slightly late getting going.

In my haste I still remembered longans, thin mints, ice pack, frozen lunch, Kind and Harvest bars, scissors, audio hook-up wire, wire strippers and HB egg, but forgot the Kleenex. Traffic wasn't too bad, I was only a few minutes late. The break room was still all-Coke, but there were bananas and Tillamook cheese, and HB eggs (but I had my own).

First project was to fix a broken wire on one of the receiver's mini speakers, and wire up the two surround sound speakers. 

Next door guys were done using my test TV, so I hooked up the new laptop, but it took more than an hour to get it to talk to the TV, and then the "cloud" system which actually runs the tests was down. So Boss had me come up to the big building after her lunch and grab a new STB to test, as well as the stuff she had bought for me: Toslink optical cable, optical to analog adapter, and a DVD player which was supposed to have component video outputs.

Back to the hole, grabbed my lunchbox and was glad it was late (1:15) because the customers had taken their time and were finally clearing the break room. Many instances of eye candy came through for coffee and cereal and more coffee. Employees and contractors, not customers. But only one of them took a seat, and there was a guy in the corner reading out loud what was on his screen, in a very hushed voice.

Tuna casserole, I have learned to reduce the cook time by 30 seconds, it's a powerful microwave. Thin mints for dessert. Reading the Buzz Aldrin - John Barnes book, Encounter With Tiber, and this section has taken a 180° turn, and is from the POV of a boy from planet Tiber who is on a 40-year round trip to Earth, during dinosaur times. It describes some technologies with attempts at the math of how much faster a spaceship can be boosted using anti-matter and a light sail driven by planet-based lasers. Tiber has two races, and they are a blatant analogue to black and white in 1950's USA. There are 4 adults and 4 children, and as the children get older, of course the black boy and the white girl hook up, as well as the white boy and the black girl, with all the expected prejudices among the adults. And politics back home is similar to the politics which has kept humans off the Moon and Mars.

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Back to the hole, first priority was the DVD test, but on opening the box discovered Amazon's search engine lied, and the unit did not have component output, just HDMI and composite.  Messaged Boss, she will return it, and I found a replacement to order. Best Buy has images of the backs of the units (amazon does not) so I found a couple on BB and then looked them up on Amazon. The first one was out of stock, the second one was available.

Hooked up the new STB, was pleased it was set for English and not, as the box hinted, Latvian. But the firmware was too old, and Boss said she would have to ask the manufacturer to create a build for us. Probably not going to happen this week.

But by now, the cause of the "cloud" failure was known, massive outage at Amazon. But it was starting to come back, I was able to run some tests. They failed because the connection was intermittent, but I'm still learning the system, so no problemo.

5:30, drove to the garage and plugged in the car, opened my personal laptop in the big seating area, and Facebooked. Not as big a mob at the cafeteria when it opened, I was able to snag one of each dessert, and this time they were all winners. Also took a few pieces of alleged pizza. All in to-go boxes.

Home, lighter traffic until the IFH, where some idiot on a unicycle was pretending he had a right of way in the middle of the street. Cretin.

Only the usual newsprint ads in the mail, delivered to the front door (should have gone to the carport) was a 3-pack of kitty litter.

Inside, took a look at the pizzas, and recycled them. Made a can of Campbell's split pea soup, which was mostly not-split peas, very dried out, which had to be puled out of the can with a spoon. That was dinner, while channel surfing. There were some talking heads on PBS not really analyzing the State of the Union speech, and it was a pretty prime example of the stuff Trump has been complaining about. Everyone has an agenda, nobody on the panel was coming at it objectively. And I mean that from both directions. It was clear to me that the idea was to pay for the improved infrastructure by spending our money building the US instead of destroying the Middle East. The pundits were all "where is the money coming from?". OTOH, they all cheered his promise of family leave, but didn't ask how that would be paid for.

One of my Thailand Peace Corps friends, was surprised that Trump budgeted $400 million for the program, but when I looked it up, that's the amount the Peace Corps had asked Congress for last year. Go figure.

Dessert was the collection from work. Yum!

With a heavy heart, disposalled what agar agar coconut mix was in the pan from last night. It appeared to be at least partially edible, but agar is a base for growing bacteria, and I'd left it out all day. Have not checked the experiment in the fridge yet.

Plans for tomorrow:
Work, Boss has scheduled 9:30-10 with me in the hole
Two things to focus on - the new testing and my contract, which expires on Sunday unless the agency and Google get it together.