2012-11-29:

So last friday, this would be the 16th, the first one went pretty quickly. She was trying to install some stupid F-Secure software, so I put panda on instead and told her to call frontier and stop charging her for free stuff. She already HAD avast! on there, which was free, so why… anyway. The second one was kinda crappy. It wouldn't boot, so I ran chkdsk on it. Wow, the errors on that sucker just kept coming! Never seen so many errors on one disk before. Ran it again and it was clean. Still wouldn't boot though, it was probably too far gone. I did the copy-reload-recopy dance but at least he had a lot less data to worry about then the last one I had to do that with. The third one was quickest of all.  "Oh my password is X." *doesn't take password* "Are you sure?" "Yup." *Looks at password list in firefox*. "Your password is Y". "Oh I wonder when it changed?" AARRRGGG.

Got bracket in, I think this laptop has more problems then I thought. Sigh. I got it loaded, but it's still acting really weird. Finished one gift!

Saturday I was modeling this cute dolphin ring I saw in a catalog I thought I might print out in silver through shapeways. It was made of stone and $99. I thought I could make it myself, in silver, for much less. But the more I stared at it, the more it looked like a duck to me. 

[[image:duck.jpg:It's not supposed to be a duck:center:0]]

[[image:myduck.png:But mine really looks like a duck:center:0]] 

As you can see, it was coming along, despite my Ineptitude:Art and general lack of knowing what the heck I'm doing in Blender. But it just kept screaming "duck" to me. I mean dolphins have… they look like this:

[[image:dolphin.png:small beak:center:0]] 

So I might try a different style later on. 

Then at 3:00 over to Seans. Good game, Pyre, had a fight with some demons, helped make a cross that can exorcise demons by touch. That sort of thing.

Sunday I watched more Thundercats and did the Skyrim Thieve's Guild mission. Some calls, but not many jobs.

Only did one job Monday, and the shopping of course. The one job took me about three hours. At least I sold the SSD I ordered for the other laptop. Little did I know that he corrected the date on the check, which meant they wouldn't accept it. I had to call him and get another. Did the next 5 Halo missions.

Tuesday another single job day. Just a RAM install. I did change my oil and made room in my living room for the xmas tree. I usually put it where the awesome unicorn cross stitch is but I didn't want to cover that up, so it's now in a different place. Wrapped Dad's gifts, all of which I have now. Died many times in Borderlands playing alone and then a little more Halo. Modeled Lucia's pendent from the Lunar series. See, when you bought Lunar 2 for the playstation it came with a bunch of stuff. Look it up. I bought mine used so I didn't get the pendent, which has made Hulk angry many a year. But it's a simple shape, less complex then the ring, anyway, so I thought it might be easier to start with something like that before moving on to rings. So I did.

[[image:pendent_rendered.jpg:The original is on the left:center:0]] 

Finally figured out how things are textured in that program. It's pretty complex, actually. Math Math Math. 

Wednesday I did two jobs. One tuneup that was unremarkable and one answering questions job. Their little Time Warner card is different then mine. My bill is going up AND down by 3.95. Their bill is just going up. Weird. I guess I'm just special. 

Got a 25% off coupon at staples, and combined with my $20 ink rewards meant I got a 5 port gigabit ethernet hub that normally is $55 for $22. Oh savings how I love you. I had to use it that day, and nothing else caught my eye. I didn't strictly need it but at least file copies between machines will go a lot faster around now now.

Thursday: I refer you to Jim Gaffigan:

"It's like we didn't even try to come up with a tradition. The tradition is we overeat.  

'Hey how about at Thanksgiving we just eat a lot?'

'We do that every day!' 

'Oh, uh, well, what if eat a lot with people that annoy the hell out of us?' 

Oh, he's anti-family!"

Had some… surprises… sprung on me. I'll just move right along.

Friday, an odd one in the morning. IE was just hanging up on regular old websites. Firefox was of course fine. Updated him to IE8. Turned off add-ons (or so I thought) didn't help. It turned out to be the flash player of all things. Figured it would be the one thing I wouldn't have expected.

Set up a Mac Mini. Very stupid of me, didn't have DVI cable, had to go to *shudder* best buy on Black Friday to buy an overpriced cable. I have 5 VGA cables, where did they all come from? Did I order them by mistake instead of a DVI cable? I know I had one at one time. Thank goodness her monitor had DVI too, that would have sucked otherwise. Charged her as though I had ordered it online, because I'm not making her pay for my mistakes. Lost $19. I guess Apple is too cheap to include a DVI and a VGA adapter for their product, how many millions do they make every year? Good to know.

Saturday I set up the new laptop for the people I spoke of in the first entry and theirs sold for $80. What a bargain. More Borderlands 2. Decided to go to Sean's because our scheduled game fell through, and he decided to do the new Demongate High game instead! Yes! No Mizzy, sadface. It went great, we went until like 1:30 in the morning, so there.

Sunday I put up the tree. I need a Tinker ornament now, I have everyone else. Worked on the novelization of the campaign from the… earlier morning. Got 14,361 words and I was still only 2/3 what we had gone through that night.

And we start this week. Shopping on monday and finding out about the bad check. At 3:00 there was a guy who put Win8 on a laptop running XP and somehow deleted his old user folder. Other folders were there in the windows.old folder. But not that one. At least he had his stuff mostly backed up. Some general stuff, an ancient machine needing some work. One had 2 antivirus programs on it, and AVG wouldn't uninstall right, had to keep trying it. Ugh. Got up to 15,801 words. Ate at 9:00 and did Halo at 9:30.

The next day was putting a system back together after she moved… downstairs. Another ancient machine, with only 256MB of RAM. Yeah, think I found out why it runs slowly. Used that weird PC800 RAM that has to have those spacer things or it fries the motherboard. Luckily I had some. Oh, it didn't even have an ethernet port! Had to give her a card for it. 

Got notice of my big, big delivery being held at the Fedex location, because it had to be signed for and I wasn't sure I would be home. Thought I could finally start making those chirstmas gifts! Silly boy, the universe hates you, you think it's that easy? Carefully took out of box, plugged in, hit switch… was something supposed to happen? Turns out it's Dead. Great, just great. Called support: "Take the bottom off and take some pictures." Uh, okay. It is now thursday, the so called "support" from this company is "is it plugged in upside down?" and "does the fan run when you turn it on?" $2000 I spent on this thing, which shall remain nameless for the moment so as to not give anything away. Supposedly these units are hand built and tested before shipping. I thought maybe dealing with a smaller company would mean better support, not less support. 

I've ordered a new power supply ($90) on ebay to see if that's the problem, as obviously I'm not going to get any answers from company X. If that doesn't work I guess I'll put it on ebay and try to get some of my money back selling it for parts. I paid by check because it was over my daily limit for my debit cards, so I really have no recourse with the "company". This is the best one too, I really like the features of it. 

I'm a bit angry about it, if you couldn't tell.

My third job that day cleared up with just the regular clean up activities. Got the writing done, the story/book/whatever now stands at a total of 21,026 words. From one night of gaming. Wow.

Wednesday I hooked up a time machine. In the same room one person has Time Warner cable and their own router. On the other wall is Frontier with a router. What? *shakes head* Hokay guys. Little bit of trouble, I hate those airport routers with a passion, still, but it worked out. Went back to the place I had been on the 21st because she got her iPad and a router from someone else. It wouldn't hold a signal so she wanted the one I offered her several days ago. She could have saved $20 by having me do it right then. Oh well, I like $20. Only a hundred jobs like that and I can buy another product X! From another company that might even care to ship me a working one!

Did some Borderlands with the lower level characters, have to love bullet regeneration!

Which brings us to today. Two jobs, the first, just resetting a DSL modem that had gone bonkers. He didn't have any antivirus, again, he HAD Security Essentials (free) which I had given him. The icon was there. Sadly there was no program below it. He thought he had the frontier stuff that, again, he was paying money for. Okay, great job. I put MSE back on and instructed him to call frontier and stop paying for free things. (Gee, why does that sound familiar?)

The second was over at the hotel. An almost new laptop that was BSODing and Caterease. The laptop had non-removable memory so when the memcheck86 started throwing up thousands of errors, I said, "Take it back to the place you bought it." Caterease uses some INI file (wait, not a registry entry? Actual somewhat sane programming practice? This cannot be!) which had somehow gotten messed up. I poked around until I remembered that little fact and was able to correct it. Of course there wasn't a nice error message like "I can not find the database. Please check the ini file to make sure it points to the location on the server where the data resides" no it was just "database error, error 54288" which told me nothing. And it's so specialized a software there's no googleing it. But it was okay in the end.

One call today thus far at 4:30, and I get to see My Buddy with a printer tomorrow. Looking forward- no. Pyre again Saturday at 5:00 by the looks. Should take delivery of some parts and gifts today, there was some trouble at UPS yesterday apparently ("Due to local operation disruption, packages not unloaded from trailer, expect a one day business delay") so they didn't get taken off the truck. They aren't here yet though.

*checking*

They are out for delivery, so they should come. 

Cats are doing well. Getting cold, had some snow but it didn't stick around. Excited about the roof guys starting next week. I bough them coffee and sugar packets and creamer but forgot I don't actually have any sort of cups they can put hot liquid in. Huh. Have to pick some up Monday.