2009-11-01:

So I close October with a pretty busy couple of days and have some fun to boot. Now Friday I start with a clean out for a customer I've had for awhile. Trying to run Vista in 1GB of RAM. And of course her video card steals 128MB of that, which I can't turn off thank you very much. But I get it running a little better and I'll order her some more. Then over to a BSOD guy. It was giving me some weird messages I had never seen a BSOD give before, like video driver failed to initialize or something, so I tried a different video card, but that didn't help. So I wound up just reloading XP and moving his stuff over to the new user folder it makes. Know what would be nice? If XP figured, hey, I see a user folder, would you like me to use it? But noooooooo. That took me till about 1:30, so I came back for lunch. I didn't leave for grandma's until around 3:45, what did I do.... Oh yeah, there was a vista system that had gotten dropped off, that wouldn't boot. Just stayed at the loading screen forever. I was looking at that. That's right. Then went over to Grandma's, then left for York. Replaced their HD and started the RAID rebuilding itself. Then to Sean's and over to RIT for the first day of the game convention. Only one person showed up to do HDL, so we had to run a new game just for him. He came back the second day, too. He was as overweight as I am skinny, which is fine, but the characters he made were messed up. I think his personality is probably one or two higher then mine, he was a great person to play with, but he was a total min/maxer. I mean, come on, a 1 strength, 1 con, 1 looks? Then 10s in reflexes, resolve, etc? I don't think so. I think if he just played normal characters like the rest of us, rather then freaks, we might have liked him better. Personally I would rather have played our ongoing games, but oh well. I got some nice dice with the con logo out of the deal. Very few girls there. Hey, at least I'm looking for them now, right? :-) The two games were fun, and Neil even came into town and told us stories about his crazy life, so that was fun too. Anyway, got home about 2:30 in the morning and checked my messages. My saturday morning had canceled, so I didn't have to get up quite as early as I had feared. Too rainy to do leaves. I finished off that Vista system instead, wound up just reloading it, too. Sigh. Moved everything over, as usual. Did one job on the way to Sean's, replacing a DVD-RW and cleaning some viruses out of a machine. Sneaky little guys they were, but I think I got them. Seemed to be running better in the end. Had some very tasty lasagna from this noodle place tucked back behind everything. How does Sean find all these places? I wonder if they go out all the time? Hummm... Next Friday Mizzy takes her ethics exam. She never said if she passed the bar or not, I'll have to ask her. I figure she would say if she did though. Anyway, we had gotten all set up and then had to move, apparently because the guy with the merchandise was being a jerkface. But the second game went well, and that was the RIT Gamer's Convention 2009. And again I got home at 3:00, or 2:00 depending on when you turn clocks back, which I hope you remembered, otherwise you're reading this a hour late. Got up to a fairly decent day and said, oh, look at all these leaves I have on the ground. That I hate. Of course, it's not the leaves themselves I hate, no sir/madam. Leaves are an important, nay I say essential, part of my life because I, like many, like breathing. Not breathing is fine, but only in very short stretches, and only then during specialized activities. The problem is they belong on trees, not on my grass, but apparently there's this winter thing (which, like my enemy the hideous shark, I am dreading) that would make short work of them. So I gathered them up, as I am oft to do, (unlike my neighbors, who again this year are nowhere to be seen with a rake in hand at all) and put them out to the front. The plastic barrier seems to be working pretty glad about that, let me tell you. Cleaned up the house after that, did a little comic work, checked slashdot, you know, the usual. I had 13 calls total from fri-sat-sun most of whom I reached tonight. As tomorrow seems to be the only forecasted day of relative nice weather, coupled with the fact my 5:30 canceled on me, I figured I would get more of Grandma's leaves gathered up tomorrow afternoon. So it'll be shopping, one job at 1:00, home to get changed, and out there. Such fun! Oddly, I have only tuesday fully booked at this point, with two for wednesday. Only 24 days until Thanksgiving, and this 19th will be the 7th anniversary of my being laid off Xerox. Crazy. Seven years. Doesn't seem possible. We're almost through 2009 and into twentyten. What adventures await me, I wonder, in the coming year. Current Mood: Neutral