2009-11-11:

And I got to do something creative at night, so it's all good. Left this morning and was like, "what the heck happened around here?" Something was... different. There was NO TREE! My neighbors had cut down this really nice flowering bush thing next to their house. Had probably been there a good 60 years. But all of a sudden, no, it's gotta go? Wha? I didn't notice it gone because when I got home yesterday it was dark, so it was kind of a shock to expect to pass a tree and suddenly there is no tree. They seem to be questing to chop down a tree a year, they took out another really pretty one last year. *shakes head* It's not like they can do anything with that "extra space" they now have, it was between my driveway and their house. So now it just looks ugly and empty. [[image:treegonebyebye.jpg:Tree gone:center:0]] I suppose they could extend the fence, but they don't have a dog so what's would be the point of that? My only scheduled job was my 10:00 off Chili, so once again I passed Sean's house. Stupid Sean's house. She had a winXP system with (can you guess) 256 of RAM but which had a problem. I don't want to call her unintelligent, but somehow she reasoned that using the win98 restore disk would be the correct course of action. So now she's lost everything, turned the clock back almost 12 years, and she has no XP serial number so I can't really do much about it. (It was probably pirated to begin with) So I do what I can, load up ancient versions of firefox, luckily Avast! still supports 98. The firewall I used to give doesn't. Technically it doesn't support the year 2009. No lie, you'll recall a couple of months ago I ran into that, setting the clock back a year made it run fine? But she can get her email now, at least. Oh, and everyone calls Avast! Avasti. Can you see that ! is not an i ? Of course you can! So, like not calling firefox, foxfire, let's call Avast! Avast! and not Avasti. On the way home I hit the dentists, who was having trouble syncing his palm, so reloaded palm desktop. Also picked up a system that gave me some trouble later, but which will be mentioned in due course. Then to the hotel to load Silverlight, the awful Microsoft Flash competitor, because we needed another flash like plugin on our systems because I always said to myself "Self, flash is so great, I just wish it was made by my all time favorite company, Microsoft!". I did. They need new printers for the front desk. Sadly they need printers that do a couple hundred sheets A DAY (she said) and printers like that are in the $500 range. And they need two. And while I might be doing okay, I'm not dropping $1000 on printers because that would leave me very little money until that check cleared. So I'm going to go back there, with the print outs, pick which printer you want, pay in advance. Done. I went to see Boris who said he had a paper jam, but he didn't. So I got home! Another absurd amount of calls that hardly amounted to anything. I booked tomorrow, yes, and part of friday, so thank you, no more this week, all done. So I finally got my GPS loaded up with local maps. Took some fiddling, the software only showed "COM3" and "COM3" but the serial port on this machine I was using was "COM1". So I got the bright idea of just typing in COM1 and it actually took it. I so hate PCs. But it's really neat to walk outside, point the thing at the clouds and it shows you, hey, this is your street and YOU are HERE, facing THIS direction. It really did, too, there was the side street a little ways down, there's the main street, it was all there. Sure, new ones are loaded up with maps for the whole country, and give you turn by turn directions, and are color and 3d but I bought this one for $30 so I think I made out okay. As long as I see what direction I'm going in, I know that I go north long enough, I'll run into 104 and from there it's easy. So that's all I need. Then I looked at this other system that had been pulled. He said he wanted it as a spare, but I can't even get the thing turned on! Tried a bunch of stuff, but no dice. I'll have to ask him what's up. Revamped my profile a bit. Finished that coloring from yesterday. Fired up the first half of Mizzy's christmas gift. The cheap, easy, kinda cool one. Can't say anything here (though I don't think either one reads this) but when it's done it should be pretty sweet. I just need to find a good printer. And to visit a toy store. Maybe I'll use the CVS upload tool and just send them as photographs. They're close by. Well, plenty of time to figure that out. What else? Dinner. Phone calls. Now I can get ready for tomorrow so I can do it all again!