2009-10-05:

Sorry, little Pokemon humor there. Protip: it's pronounced Poe-Kay-Mon not Pokey-Mon which I used to hear people say all the time. I was only about half effective today, as you'll learn as you read the coming words, straight off the tubes! Started the day well enough. Went shopping as always. Library. Crunchy food for my kitties, engine cleaner for chibi kuruma, the usual. Went home, made lunch, called the mortgage place to see what was up and it was that one guy's laptop couldn't connect to the wireless. "That should be easy." I thought. Then I heard Brain shouting "YOU FOOL! YOU JUST DOOMED YOURSELF." He was right. Ate lunch on the way over there. Picked up ODST from my parent's house. Got there. After about an hour I finally realized that his wireless card seemingly lost the ability to do WAP encryption. WEP was there in the list of available encryption types, but no WAP. Reloaded drivers. Rebooted router. No WAP. So he just thought it might be something he was doing wrong, it wasn't, he said "okay, I'll just plug it in when I need it to go online, (he had two other machines in the office) which isn't often." So there was an hour I couldn't charge for because I fixed nothing. Then over to Chili, to see people which throughly messed up their mail settings so stuff was all over the place. So I got that straightened out. In fifteen minutes. Went over to the copy place I was at late last week, it was asking for his login info for some reason. It worked when I left, but not now? Huh? I just kept putting it in, thinking I must be spelling it wrong (the email address is HUGE) and finally it took it again. K. Next a so called cleanout, though that wasn't really their problem. Sure, there was some stuff that didn't need to be there, like McAfee they had been paying for but which still insisted it expired in 2007, but when I tried to get on AOL dial up (yes, they still exist out there) I was only getting a 14.4 connection. Now dial up is pretty bad in the best of times, so getting a speed from 1993 just wasn't cutting it. I tried a new modem and got 50-52kbps but it was still moving really turtle-like. And not that turtle hermit guy who knows martial arts, either. Then it was reveled to me that despite having both cable AND digital phone, they lacked RR. Wait, what? You're trying to use an analog modem over a digital phone? I'm not sure that's going to work. In fact, the few customers I have seen try this bizarre amalgamation have not had what I would term success. So I told them about RR lite, getting rid of AOL dial up, and that's the current plan. So, again, the only solution to their problem was getting rid of dial up. So I guess in some way I've improved the world a little. But it would have been nice to have this information at hour ONE not hour TWO of troubleshooting a crappy dial up connection. Seesh. So I only charged them for an hour since my "solution" was really no solution at all. Back near my house to see the guy on bay. Oddly, the file that told mail what had been downloaded was corrupt or something, so every time he got his mail, he got... all his mail. So he had like eight copies of everything. I learned the cause through a google search, thank you google, and was on my way again swiftly. To my 5:30 which, again, I was only half effective at. He was using incredimail, ugh, and when he tried to get mail, it never went "connecting". It just sat there. It would send fine. Just not receive. So I tried a whole bunch of stuff, finally at 6:45 I left. I did solve his problem, in something I did, it finally started connecting again. But he had the most pathetic frontier speed I have ever witnessed. He was going to call them about it. Made my calls until 7:35ish, finally ate dinner. Booked all of tomorrow and all of Wednesday afternoon with three appointments. Made more labels for my invoice forms, got ready for tomorrow. Humm... comic or ODST? Yeah, that's what I thought too. Current Mood: Steady as she goes, Mr Sulu