2013-10-31:

Fri:
Things went mostly okay today. Two appointments, the first at 11:15 (an odd time, I know) so I went out and bought the rest of the ingredients for the dessert tomorrow. Also the backup hard drive and got gas. Then went to the first one.

She said it was acting weird and while I was trying to back it up, it started the reboot cycle she was talking about. As it happened almost immediately after the machine was turned on, I changed the video card. (She had also mentioned some odd color stuff) It booted right up. Of course, the driver on the CD wasn't "signed" so it wouldn't install. Only parts of it did. Downloading the driver from the web (168mb?) finally let it install and the backup was churning merrily away. My goodness PCs are slow. It's a fairly new machine, too.

Back home to eat lunch, then out again. He was saying something about a serial number, but his real problem was running out of disk space. He had a tiny 11GB partition as the main, then the rest was a second partition. Crazy. So I moved some stuff over there and that was fine.

Again, copying 2GB internally between partitions should not take that long, Windows.

Then out to see mom, got advice on how to proceed with Sean's gift.

Felt like a fool because I missed something in an ebay auction, mailed the guy to see if I could cancel the order.

If not I can make what I ordered suitable, and I did get a good price on it, so I can't really complain. I just would like to not have to do that extra work. Sigh.

And he was really great about it. I canceled the order, got the refund, and more carefully looked this time. Found what I actually wanted and ordered that.

Thank goodness.

Sat:
Turns out there was no game today, because Sean/Stan were not feeling well. So I had oat bars all to myself. Cut them too big, the next one I have will be half the size. Not that they aren't good, they're too good!

So I cleaned up my computer and freed up what space I could. Lots of stuff just hanging around that I need to look through or do something with. So I started doing that, at long last.

Used the technique my mother showed me yesterday to work on Sean's gift. Looking good, if I do say so myself.

And went over Mizzy's gift again and made some tweaks, then ordered the physical object. Getting there, now I just need to take care of the family.

And by take care of I don't mean bump off, I mean buy gifts for. Just wanted to be clear.

Started chapter 115.

Sun:

Finished chapter 115 which will lead nicely into the next chapter, that I didn't even think of before. How great is that. Answer: Pretty great.

Then went back into gift mode, found a gift for mom I forgot about, I'm such a loser. Got some things ordered.

Tore apart two PCs, still have three in my purple room to decide what to do with. Probably scrap them, to be honest. They're just too old to bother with. But at least it's two less once I can get the cases over to dad for metal reclaiming.

Mon:
Did the shopping, but you all knew that by now. Asked the bank why my last payment to Frontier was rejected because the address was wrong, but they (not them specially I mean) maintain the address. I can't even change it, because the website says "All your address are belong to us!" or something to that effect. They suggested deleting the ebill and setting it up again. I counted with "if it's not right automatically like your site says, how will deleting it and putting it back be any different then it is now?" I must have failed my Persuasion check because they said it would be fine. Okay. Went home and did that, and it sat for several minutes trying to talk to frontier to set up the e-bill again. So I just canceled it and used the Frontier site directly to set up the auto billing. I have had problems with that site. As I recall, I tried to set up e-bill for time warner, but it wouldn't go through. I finally just scheduled a reaccruing payment, as it's the same amount each month.

Then some jobs. Set up a new machine first at 11:00. Didn't think PC manufacturers could cut many more corners, but they managed it. I picked the thing up and it was super light. So, curious, I cracked the case open and found there was no power supply inside the thing. Huh? Apparently they basically shoved a laptop motherboard into a desktop PC case, but left the case the same size. They even blocked off the hole the power supply would have stuck out of. Wow. It was actually weird seeing a desktop machine without all the wires coming out of the power supply. What will they think of next?

Came back to eat lunch, then out at 2:00 in order to see about some wireless problems. Must be something in the wall for that room, I suggested an extender right outside the doorway.

Then over to a BSOD. It actually referenced the file that was the problem, some Windows Live Family Safety driver, which of course I couldn't remove in safe mode because the "windows installer" wasn't running. Uh, hello? It's just removing some files and registry entries on the disk. Why do I need a special "service" for that function, especially since not being able to do it makes the whole machine crash on boot?

I just took the file out of the drivers folder, rebooted, put it back, then ran the uninstaller.

Windows. I tell you, you find a new way to annoy me each and every single day.

Meanwhile my Hackintosh solders on.

Two for tomorrow.

Ugh, it's 39 degrees out. My leaves haven't even started falling yet.

Nearly finished chapter 116, meeting the werewolves.

Tues:

Very disappointing day, actually.

Finished up 116 before my 11:30 appointment to change the keyboard for the guy last week. He said his machine wasn't boot now, as well. Odd. It was, as I expected, a stuck key, given the problems he had with the keyboard.

The trouble now is, the K key is over sensitive on the replacement. You just rest your fingers on it and you get a line of kkkkkkkkkkkkkkk as fast as the machine can put them there.

Sigh. So now I get to ship this one back, get a replacement for the replacement, and spend another 40 minutes driving there and back.

My job wouldn't suck so much if new equipment wouldn't let me down so much.

Called the mortgage place, but she said her attachment issue went away. She's also accessing a site that's only compatible with IE 8/9. Seriously? IE 11 is out, right? Fix your stupid website! It's not the 90s anymore, we have different browsers then IE 6.

My 3:30 faired no better. It wouldn't boot, and in fact was stuck on the XP loading screen when I walked in. (And saw his very, very hot daughter. For about a second and she was out the door. I don't blame her. *smily*) Well I ran chkdsk on it which took about a half hour, making me curse the day all PCs were made. But it ran though. Ran for a bit in safe mode, then up and rebooted. I replaced his RAM as I thought that might be it (he wanted more anyway) but it still rebooted. Looking closely I saw his capacitors were leaking, at least four of them all in a group. Super!

So I charged him $20 for the trip, the only money I made that day, and came home.

Two pieces of hardware let me down today. At least one had the excuse of being 11 years old.

Wed:
Two jobs. The first said he was having trouble with his password. Not so! He was having profile corruption, a fun windows activity the whole family can enjoy.

So I made him a new profile and copied everything over.

Then in the afternoon I went over to the hotel, and the machine she uses for email had gotten itself into PIO mode again. So glad that went away in later versions of windows. So we’ll have to see what’s going on there if it happens again. I looked it up, and apparently a lot of things can cause it, but mostly related to CDs. Like, if the drive gets a CD with a scratch, it will slow down to PIO mode for some bizarre reason, and then never get out of it again. Yeah, that’s the proper behavior, microsoft.

Got the new computer! Went down at 3:30 to pick up it. I had gotten the extra RAM in the mail earlier that day, and while talking to a guy about new windows, I got the two hard drives. Yeah, someone knocked at the door, and he had a shiny vest on. “Oh, it’s RG&E!” I erroneously thought. NOPE. It was someone from Anderson wanting to talk windows.

Well, he wanted to talk about sending some other guy to talk about windows. Huh? So I need the front window replaced, we’ll see what their cost is.

The Mac was being colicky on install. I put in the RAM, taped the SSD in (I’m a MAN) and installed 10.7 as a base. I did this because I knew 10.6 would need to be updated, taking yet more time, so I figured 10.7 was a good start. That went fine. The migration assistant also went fine, bringing my old profile in as it should. I then downloaded and made a flash drive of 10.9. Good thing I did. When it installed it panicked about 3 seconds into the boot process with some kind of “mismatch between file and CPU” or something. I tried various things and looked into it, and it seemed others had the same issue. One solution was to install 10.9, then copy the profile minus the applications, and do them manually.

It worked!

So very late I finally went to bed satisfied things were going okay with it.

Thurs:

Met with the windows guy. He was impressed with my house, my 3d printed gun, my sword collection, my being a brony, etc etc. Cost to replace front window: $3000. No wonder they can hand out $500 off coupons (if you get 5 windows done) like candy. (It’s a Halloween reference) The cost to replace all the windows was astronomical, while just the first level was merely absurd. I don't care about the upper windows, I don't heat the upstairs anyway, so I'm not concerned with heat loss. Anyway, it’s the front window that’s rotting so I told him to go ahead. Dec 1, and it should only take a day he said. They do seem to have a really good product, with very low thermal conductivity. I just want the composite outer material that won’t rot like wood, so I’m not doing this again in twenty years. (Sounds familiar, oh yeah the roof)

And again, two jobs. The first just wanted to make sure he wasn’t infected with anything. Mbam found nothing, but combofix took out a few things. Actually I was surprised at how well his machine ran, being an XP machine. It was a dual processor, which helped.

Right before I left the hotel had called me about two different computers, so I figured I would go back there. So I stopped at Heather’s to give them a game system to test a game she wanted to sell, then went back to the hotel. A machine I didn’t think I was going to look at gave me the most trouble, with a totally clogged heatsink, and a lot of HD filesystem corruption. Sold them the flash drive I saw I had just recently (I had forgotten about it) and moved all his documents over there before it got worse. Some wouldn’t copy, but most did. So he’s protected as they figure out what to do. They’re using this program called Opera for their booking and such, which uses this ancient version of Java and no other. Some extra piece that was incorporated later, but it checks for this specific version? I don’t know. Anyway, I doubt it would run on anything but XP so they’re kind of stuck. Plus the XP falloff next year… Honestly, get some new computers. Got back at 6:30, and I had arrived there I think at 4:30. Sheesh, but at least in three months I'll get the money for it.

Finished coping all my files from the various hard drives I had, and the machine now is up to speed. Liking it. The few games I play I can finally put at higher settings and they still look fantastic, way better then they did before. I’m pretty pleased. Now to get the old one going again the way I want so it can move forward.

Rainy. Thus far at 7:54 I had two kids. One princess, old enough to know what was going on, and one Bee, who wasn’t. I think the parents (there was a whole pack) were having more fun then the kids. They were cute!

Anyone want any candy?

Possibly some sort of get together this Saturday at Sean’s, as Neil is coming over. Oh, got his gift in the mail too, got to start working on that.

As far as tomorrow… yeah. Meeting the window measuring man, and that’s about it. Going to visit my parents, of course. Probably do computer stuff around here, getting 10.6.8 on that PC hardware if I can manage it.

Have a good rest of… never mind, have a good first week of November.