So last Friday saw the gmail backup, which went about like I expected. Five seconds of work, 40 minutes of her blathering on about my personality, the English language, and crap in general. Then in the afternoon a BSOD (the first of many this week, it was a "bumper crop") that I spent more hours (yes hours) then I should on. I did get it cleaned out, but I should have just reloaded the thing. Finally got to the last step, installing Panda, and of course it hangs just at the very, very, very end. I waited. I waited some more. Little did I know the panda installer seems to hang up now, as it happened with several other machines I did later. It gets through, but only if you are very, very, very patient. So I gave them Avast instead. 

 

Saturday, four machines of one stripe or another were dropped off, so I got them all done. Just basic stuff on them. Then Sean's for game and yummy food. We did Shadowrun, and got two of the three possible runners, as one didn't show up. Inconsiderate of him, really, to not show up so he could get killed by us. Darnright rude, in fact.

 

Sunday I finished up the new pony magnets (looking good!) did some more writing in the new story. Read some. Cleaned up a bit. Normal Sunday stuff.

 

Monday I did the shopping. Went to set up my new IRA, which took a half hour. Yes, a half hour to punch a couple of things into a web form. Seriously? Just made my 11:30 appointment. That one just needed chkdsk run, it cleared the BSOD up right. Stopped to see Mom & baby kitten because I hadn't last week. At 2:30 I returned the laptop. 4:00 she just had her wireless password wrong. Love windows so much. Don't say "You have the wrong password" like any normal piece of software, just silently fail with no message at all, because that's the most helpful.*

 

Start of the "Super Storm", and was pretty rainy and windy here. Only lost power for a few seconds, but it cost me a cool gunzerker item Mizzy had just given me in Boarderlands. GURRRR

 

Tuesday: Weathered the storm. Lots of leaves down, but not the whole tree yet. Hopefully sunday/monday it'll be dry enough I can chop them up with the mower. Otherwise that's a lot of moving wet leaves around I would rather not do. Only one job that day, the lady I got Tinker from, who was sprouting toolbars again like it was going out of style, then wondering why her firefox performance was abysmal. Yeah, that's it.

 

Cut out the new magnets. Have to figure out how I got the others so nice, I messed up all of them but one. (creases in the tape) Maybe something like a ruler to smooth it down right from the start? Looked into a bug in the copyright inserter code of all things, that I can't believe had been missed all this time. Also looked over the new Demongate book layout. When are we going to start that game??? *pouts*

 

The next day a cleanout first thing, then back to Expensive Motherboard lady. Her games were "not responding" because I guess windows programmers suck. Who knew? And there was a weird IE error. I thought it might be AOL (she was using 9.0VR, current version 9.7) so rather then download 40+ MB over dial up, I went over to Mom's house, downloaded the installer, burned it onto CD, and came back. Far quicker. Yes, think about that for a second. Dial up. *shakes head* It updated, then gave me a fun "Side by Side Configuration is Incorrect" which is even more helpful then silently failing without telling me anything!** Of course I can't look it up because you have dial up! So I just took the machine. SP2 failed with "unknown error". Windows update hung. I spent the rest of the afternoon banging on it, and finally just reloaded the sucker.The $100 motherboard I got apparently has two flaws! One, the one DIMM slot doesn't work. Two, the ethernet port doesn't work either! Yippy! So I ordered her a 2GB chip, and will just replace her 2x1GB chips. I put in an ancient ethernet card, so that's fine. Glad I got such a great product for my $100. But it would be a total hassle to send it back, so… Guess I'm not charging her for the hours of work I put into it, because if I did, she could have just bought a new machine right off! I hate my job.

 

Think I fixed the inserter bug, it resizes now.

 

Three whole trickers the evening. Two girls together (who didn't need any more candy) and an almost too old boy (with mom?) dressed as a ghostbuster. Kid, when that movie came out you weren't even alive! Why are you dressing up as… a… Did I just say that?

 

Then today. Ah, the best for last. Went to the hotel straight off, which is looking good, actually. It's not open yet, they wanted to open the restaurant tonight, wonder how that went? Anyway, my part went fine. A crappy, crappy, ancient machine so packed with dust I wonder how it worked at all. With 256MB of RAM. Wow. Got it cleaned out. Inside and out.

 

Had a laptop dropped off so started work on that. Sometimes when booting it just hangs. No reason. Did ram checks, disk checks (oh thanks Toshiba, for that great HD diagnostic tool you make. What's that, you don't make one? Oh that's right) virus checks, windows update. Runs great… if you can get it to boot. I've reloaded that one (at 8:00 PM, after starting about 1:00 today) so we'll see how it goes.

 

The other thing I was the replacement SSD, finally, from Corsair. I had to email them and say "It's been two weeks since you "made the label" for my shipment. WHERE IS MY SHIPMENT?" before it finally went out and now, finally, arrived. Opened it up, it's a "refurbished" unit. Really, Corsair? Really? You can't "refurbish" an SSD. If it's broken, it's broken. Why is this important? Got her machine reloaded. It's BSODed three times trying to get all the XP updates. So is this one defective too? Or is it just XP being XP? You can't tell, that's the trouble. There's no diagnostic tool for SSDs, after all. 

 

Two for tomorrow. Both similar, they won't boot. The second, as I was hanging up the phone, remarked to someone in the room that she "couldn't tell me what was wrong" like I was the one that made her an idiot. You might not be able to tell me "what's wrong" but you can tell me what you SEE HAPPENING. I might not know anything about cars, but I can tell the mechanic "My breaks are squealing" or "I can't go into reverse anymore." Just saying "it won't come on" can mean

 

1) it doesn't get power

2) it gets power, but does nothing

3) it gets power, starts to boot, but hangs

4) it gets power, starts to boot, and blue screens

5) it gets power, starts to boot, finishes booting, then hangs at a black screen with a mouse cursor

 

Is it so hard to describe these situations? Apparently it is, because she couldn't wait to hang the phone up to make it look like I'm some kind of freak for asking "What seems to the be trouble" to someone else in the room with her.

 

Well, the laptop seems to be rebooting okay, maybe it'll live after all. The desktop hasn't blue screened since the updates were finished, so I have no idea what that means.

 

One for Saturday thus far, and game… I think. Kind of up in the air.  

 

It's a new month, so paperwork must be done. 

No word on the roof yet, but I'm not too worried, yet.  

 

I believe I will leave you with a picture. Perhaps my two cats will come to tolerate each other after all? Just like I may, one day, learn to tolerate windows?***

 

[[image:catandcat.jpg:In the same room and not hissing or chasing or anything?:center:0]]

 

Have a good weekend everyone. Hope it's dry for you. 

 

*This is sarcasm, if you missed it. 

 

 

**More sarcasm