July 10, 2017

 I took notes today, so that's helpful.

This morning I slept in a little longer than I would have liked but I still got to work on time, and that's what matters. The first thing I did when I got to work was print out more prize drawing tickets and cut them apart using the giant paper cutter in the basement. I then pulled books for my two main displays this month as well as a few chess books to put on the table next to the chessboard. And then I ran around trying to find props for the photo shoot this afternoon.

The PR lady called down this morning and started talking about the photo shoot for the magazine writing an article about our adulting series. I had completely forgotten that was happening. Whoops. Before I got on desk I ran around and looked for props that we could use. I found a bunch of stuff in one of the small kitchens or whatever we call the tiny rooms with sinks and microwaves. The PR lady also scrounged around for stuff and went to the store to buy vegetables.

And then I was on desk for a couple hours. My friend stopped by with her boyfriend and his daughter so I talked to them for awhile. The boyfriend and his daughter spent most of the time working on the jigsaw puzzle but came over near the end. It's been awhile since I've seen my friend. Two or three months at least I'm guessing. And now they have moved even farther north, up to Michigan, so I will probably see her even more infrequently. I need to make more local friends.

The photo shoot was at one o'clock, which was during my lunch break, but I bumped that back for the sake of publicity. The photographer called an audible on the shooting location and we ended up doing it in one of our meeting rooms because it had really good natural light. The meeting room was currently being occupied, with a meeting of all things, but they were going to lunch, so we asked if we could use the room while they were gone. They ended up bringing their lunch back to the room but we were done about five minutes or so after they got back and they were using the other half of the room.

I ended up being the “instructor”, which I didn't really want to be but the teen librarian wasn't there so I was the one representing the series. Yay. We pulled staff members from around the library that looked the right age, had them sit around the table, and then I cut vegetables and pretended to tell them things. It was super awkward. And kind of fun but mostly awkward. Then we moved down to the computer classroom and I pretended to teach them about budgeting. That was a little less awkward. We'll see how the pictures turn out.

After that I helped put everything back where we got it and then I went to lunch at 2:15PM. I was so worked up about the photo shoot that I didn't even think about being hungry, so that was nice. While I was at my Mom's house my new CPU was delivered, which was strange because I was pretty sure I had changed my address but apparently not. But it worked out because I was able to take it with me instead of having to swing by after work. It also didn't have to sit out on my porch all day in the 100+ degree weather. I brought it into the library with me so it didn't have to sit in my 100+ degree car.

The rest of the day was very uneventful. At least what I can remember of it because I stopped taking notes before lunch. I remember looking at ideas for the maker faire, which I have to go to in September. I really want to do the large Jenga thing but my boss wants me to do something technology related. We're thinking about doing something big-ish for International Games Day and maybe I can convince my boss that the Jenga thing could be used to promote that. We'll see.

When I got home I installed my new CPU. It was actually a pretty quick process. The hardest part was remembering how my liquid cooler is attached. It's confusing. But after I got that figured out, it was smooth sailing. I applied a thermal paste cleaner to the liquid cooler, cleaned off all the thermal paste, and then applied something else that is supposed to get the surface ready for new thermal paste. I then installed the new CPU, applied a rice-sized bit of thermal paste, and reattached the liquid cooler. After that I cleaned the thermal paste off the old CPU and put it in the new CPU box, along with the stock cooler.

I dinner when I was done with that, and then spent the rest of the nice cursing, because I am once again trying to set up my Vive, this time on my desktop. It's a pain in the ass and if I had a swear jar I would have easily paid for an international plane ticket. It was just one thing after another. First the base stations wouldn't turn on, then the controllers wouldn't connect, then I got a cornucopia of different errors every time I tried to launch SteamVR, then Steam itself stopped working. And now I'm back to it kind of working but the controllers won't show up again. I never did get it working properly and it is now way too late because I spent way too much time trying to figure it out.

I think one of the big issues is that it can't run in Direct Mode, which it says in the best mode. I think this means that the headset is seen as its own entity or something. When that mode is disabled the headset shows up as another monitor. This is the only way I can get it to work on my laptop because regardless of the mode there is a compositor error, whatever that is, and it can't be manually launched (or if it can there is no indication anything changes). The only way to get around this is to disable Direct Mode so you can move your mouse off the side of your monitor, onto the “desktop” that is the headset, and click on it. It's like bringing focus to the headset and making it the active window. In Direct Mode you can't do this. So I'm not sure about that. It's all very confusing and it is discouraging when solving one issue just presents a different one. I'm having flashbacks to trying to set it up on my laptop. I seem to be getting way more errors this time around. I think it will be easier with my new computer because I'll be starting from scratch and won't have to worry about some random program causing a conflict or losing something important if I have to uninstall something.

VR is definitely a love hate relationship.

While I messed with all that stuff I finished watching Shooter. It was an alright show but I still really don't like Ryan Phillipe as someone named Bob Lee with an intermittent Southern accent.

And now I'm going to record my audio journal because midnight is creeping up and I have to open tomorrow. Six o'clock is going to come way too early tomorrow morning.