I got off the Portuguese class at 4:47 pm. Google Map says there will be a Bus Route 24 at 4:58. I rushed to the 500 meters away bus stop by 4:49. It was chilly and it was drizzling. An old couple was already there. Both of them would be older than 70 years old. The bus did not show up at 4:58. It did not show up at 5:10. I said something to the old couple about the never coming bus, and he said something back. We don’t know what each other said, but we were able to communicate our frustration on the bus schedule. It was freezing. I was worried about the old couple, even though they were in heavy coats.

The bus did not show up at 5:15.

The old couple decided to go back home at 5:17.

The bus showed up at 5:19. The driver already knew me. When he saw me walking in the street as he drove by in the city he would honk and wave to me. He is a very nice guy. However, the rush hour traffic in Braga is impossible. They need a better tracking system for bus riders, such as the Next Bus App used in Berkeley.

Walking up would have taken me 15 minutes. However, if I missed the bus going up, then William and I would miss it going down.

I couldn’t log in my NIH account this morning.

NIH started this policy that if you did not connect to the NIH network in 30 days, then your laptop would be bricked. The decrypt key would be destroyed and nobody would be able to recover it. The only thing you could do in that situation was to ask the IT to wipe out the hard drive and start over. They also have the policy that if you had not connected continuously for two hours, then you would not receive security updates. I don’t see the rationale behind that.

I have been carefully counting the days but my PIV card reader broke. It has been a struggle to connect every time. I was not one hundred percent sure that I did not go over the 30 days limit. It creeps me that I will lose all my files when the screen saver kicks in.

I called the IT support. It took her five seconds to figure out the problem: I had not done the sexual harassment training. She said she could give me two hours to complete the training, which should last 90 minutes. I was about to go to my Portuguese class so I told her that I would call later.

We also have this training at the Hood College. Students who did not complete the sexual harassment training would be stopped for class registration.

I barely have enough time to complete the training at home in the evening before my conference with Berkeley started. Actually I had to join the meeting late for 15 minutes. Our WiFi has been restored but the signal was so bad that I was kicked out of our Zoom meeting five times in two minutes. I did a speed test. The download speed was 0.57 Mbps, the upload test could not even be started. My cell phone couldn’t connect to the WiFi at all. I sent a note to our agent.

Talking about training, my account was disabled by Oak Ridge two weeks ago because of missing an annual renewal training. To conduct human subject research, I have to take four different sets of training required by different agencies: Berkeley, VA, NIH, and MIT. And I took annual mandatory security training for LBL, ORNL, and NIH. Every training is important, but there are too many of them.

I checked and re-checked the CISCO VPN record and made sure I had been connected for over two hours. Now I can have the peace of mind to reboot my laptop.

The plastic holder of my PIV card reader broke. Now I have to squeeze it with my hand when reading the card. And the Apple mouse stopped working. Without a mouse, the MacBook Pro is hard to work with.