2010-01-10:

It wasn't that it was that bad, just... On friday morning my first one came down to putting one system in place of another and getting it ready to go, and then just checking over a second. That went fine. Then to one in webster. Thought he had said something about a BSOD but I didn't see any evidence. Cleaned it out. Had a couple of calls by this point, but some time before I needed to go to grandma's so I called one of my last win98 holdouts. Said her machine was just rebooting itself. Sure enough it was, did it for me right as the startup tones played. Leading me to think it might be the sound card. So I turned it off, along with some other unneeded hardware, and the six monitors it was apparently keeping track of and it booted fine. Backed her stuff up to her other hard drive and we'll hope it's okay. Over to grandma's, then to laptop guy. It of course worked fine from the second I stepped inside. Back home, stopped at subway and picked up food, had Dad over to watch the last two Dr Who of this season and eat yummy food. So that was good. Driving was terrible, sorry to make you come out in that, Dad. Hope it was worth it. Saturday my first was to transfer stuff from an old one two a new one. I asked the daughter if that needed to be done when I was there the first time and she said no. Shows what she knew. But at least I got to take her old machine. I don't think it's too bad, and I already have a home in mind for it, so that's all good. Will need to reload XP of course, more work for me, but nothing's perfect. The ugly one of the day was the next one. I knew going in it was going to be two, that was fine. Some crap Vista machine (without SP1) and a tiny netbook. The trouble, and by trouble I mean extra hour I was there (for a total of three) was trying to get the two machines on the same network so they could share the CD drive (which the netbook didn't have) and the printer. But would they? Noooooo. They could ping each other, and they each could see themselves in the stupid "domain" crap MS came up with, but not the other machine. Great. So I said, let the antivirus scan finish and run this (being the SP1) and we'll see if that solves the issue. Stupid windows. Why hadn't she been offered SP1 by now? It's only been, what, a year? Then came home quick, had some supper, and went to Sean's. That at least was a bright spot. Got the people killed who needed to be, and at least some of the danger of the world ending has been lessened. Today my main goal was to finish "The Way of Shadows" from Mizzy, which I did. I was about half way through, and so the other half fell neatly into place one page after another. Very good book, I thank Mizzy for lending it to me. Where before I wasn't too excited about Assassin's Creed, now I think it might be interesting to give it a play. And finish up my dark brotherhood tasks in Oblivion. Once I get my box that is. Should be tomorrow! Then I cleaned the kitchen. Had lunch. Took the snow off the roof and took pictures of the huge icicles hanging off my neighbor's house. Tided up other rooms. Made a little calendar on my desktop, using the january picture from my Sean calendar and the numbers I already had. I think it looks pretty good, if I type so myself. I'll rotate the pictures as the months change and have a little digital calendar to match my physical one. [[image:calendar.jpg:Calendar:center:0]] Hardly sold anything out of my ebay auctions. Oh well. Just about suppertime. I see 11 calls on my voicemail. One is a duplicate and I know there's at least one question. One from today is laptop guy, again. Complaining his screen doesn't fill up laptop display, a fact I POINTED OUT to him when I changed his resolution from 1024x768 to 800x600 when he complained "the text is too small". Tough. Oh, and his printer won't work. SO GOOD. Bet it's gonna be a great week, I can just feel it.