2013-11-07:

Fri:
Windy!
Very windy. Did I mention it was windy? Lost power about 9:30 so I was just sitting around doing nothing. Didn’t think I would be doing much that day, but I actually did two. I went to york, as they called in the morning about their machine not turning on anymore. Figured I might as well go over there, so I did. Replaced the power supply, and that brought the machine back to life.

Had power back when I got home, though various areas didn’t. There were still traffic lights out in the area.

Then I got the replacement for the replacement keyboard in, so in the afternoon I went over there. That one worked out, and I went to see mom and dad. Helped bring a jukebox downstairs and showed mom the work on Sean’s gift. She approved, so I can finish that piece up.

Came back, worked on dad’s gift. Not going well in that department I fear.

Sat:
Worked on the current dad’s gift plan. Also cleaned a bit around here. Nothing too exciting.

Went over at 4:00 to Sean’s to play board games.

Stayed way too late. Sean wanted to watch the last Resident Evil movie which we did, after playing boomo and some weird card game about killing a family off I forget the name of. This was after Sean/Stan had left. I killed all my family members off, but somehow Mizzy still won. So there.

Sun:
Got up around 11:00, which was still only about 8 hours of sleep, I'll let you do the math yourselves. Finally got Dad's gift going perfectly, exactly what I wanted. Stuck it upstairs out of the way.

Then cleaned up around here, threw away a bunch of CDs I had been stacking up after making sure they were useless. Also made sure I had copied everything from my external drive to the new internal drives, wiped it, changed the RAID setting so it's now 4TB again, and started it backing up. I'll feel a bit better when it's done. Sadly even Firewire 800 takes awhile to back up 2.38 TB of information. 14 hours at the current estimate, after having done 206GB. Yawsers.

The day actually started out kind of nasty, but it improved and we even saw some sun. Shouldn't be too bad this week, I think?

Mon:
You know how this one begins- doing the shopping. Rushed through a bit to get to my 11:00, but needn't have bothered. I got it done with plenty of time.

Several jobs today. The first was for the lawyer guy, setting up scanning to the xerox machine. He was all worried I would need to call this Xerox guy… who does he take me for?

Then, back for lunch and over to my 1:30. Who apparently is a very slow learner. Not that long ago I reloaded this guy's laptop because he took it to staples or best buy or someplace and they reloaded it. Well, he did it AGAIN, only this time he took it to Jeff's. Jeff, being the nice guy he is, reloaded it AGAIN and sold him an antivirus he didn't need. Not only did he reload it again, and sell him an antivirus he didn't need, he didn't provide any proof of ownership for said product in the form of serial numbers/box/etc. In fact, he even told the guy "when you need to renew it you'll have to call me." Wow, now that's what I like to call a sleezeball move. I mean, seriously, how does this guy even prove the copy is legit?

Then my 3:00 was a cleanout. Didn't find much, but both chrome and IE were showing some stupid adchoices ad. Firefox, properly, was not. I ran every scan I could think of on that machine, checked their addons, the whole works. Couldn't figure out where it was coming from. By that time it was 4:45 and I had to get to my 5:00 so I just gave up. (I suggested to just use firefox, you should be anyway)

When I got to my 5:00 he wasn't there. I recalled he wanted me to call him before I got there, so I called him. "Oh, I fooled around with it and got rid of it," he said. Uh huh. Really? So that was a waste of my time.

So I came back home. At least he wasn't too far away from the previous one.

Did a bit of work on Sean's gift, still have a tiny bit left to do on this first part. Took delivery of Mizzy's gift, and one for mom. Mizzy's came out all right! *whew*

You know, working with PCs after a weekend of Mavericks and a Mac Pro make me realize anew just how terrible PCs are. I mean they are so slow to do the simplest of things, it's maddening. I mean Macs have always been more responsive. That's a given. But seeing the difference now, with this hardware (from 2008 mind you) it just blows my mind.

Tons of calls today for some reason. I have several scheduled for tomorrow and one for Wednesday already. Not too shabby.

A customer wanted to replace their leased modem, so I went and looked at the one I have. Great, the list has changed, so now I have to try and get some fraction of the price I paid for this one back, and order him a different one. Thanks Time Warner. Why did you suddenly change what models you support?

Still have this motherboard hanging around too, from like two months ago. Have to get that listed at some point too.

Looked for, and found, what I needed for the second piece of Sean's gift. This, and mom's advice, shall perhaps serve me well. Even found a component of Neil's gift I didn't know I had. Score!

November is looking good already.

Tues:
Pretty busy today, despite the fact that, yet again, I had a cancelation at the last minute. At least I was home to get the message before I left for there.

First one was at 10:00, and I'm still not sure what her original problem was. I was only there about 10 minutes, as everything was working fine. She had thrown some email away she wanted to keep, so I restored that. Go me?

Then at 12:30 just a machine that needed cleaning, no big deal.

My 2:00 had three machine so I was there for an hour and a half, two that were pretty badly infected by crap, and one windows 8 machine he had somehow rotated the display of into portrait mode, and put on some bizarre, high contrast, blank and white color scheme. Yeah.

So I got to come back home at 4:30 rather then go to my 5:00 that they said they "fixed."

So I worked a little on Sean's gift, and moved everything from the gaming PC over to the Mac Pro. There wasn't much, really. But there's a nice big PC shaped hole in my living room now. Getting the Vista drivers was a pain, because this model only "supported" Windows 7 but I only had a spare windows Vista key. It worked perfectly, expect it couldn't see my Mac disks. Of course the Vista drivers were inside of "Boot Camp Installer 3.0" which Apple had no downloads for. Yeah, seriously. They had the updates to it, the 3.1 and 3.2 versions. But no 3.0. Thanks fellows. Supposedly they were on the Snow Leopard disk, but I scoured that thing and didn't find them. Finally found them on pirate bay, and torrented the smeg out of them in a few minutes. Thanks, internet! So that's running… as well as Vista can, even given my massive number of processors, RAM, etc. Weird how the same machine can be so frustrating and so amazing just by changing the OS it runs. Vista is crap! Let me rephrase- windows is crap!

The few PC games I have run great, and I was going to install Starcraft II again when I realized, hey, I can put it on the Mac side now. The reason I couldn't run it before was because it needed 10.6.8, which I couldn't put on (easily). It's installing now! Sadly it won't accept my battle.net password and the website for getting it reset wasn't working. Classy, blizzard. I have the password written down, I know it's right.

Got a bunch of calls today as well, but only one job for tomorrow. Three already for thursday!

Let's see, plan for tomorrow:

Tinker in for checkup at 10:15
Paperwork
Selling 3 pieces of equipment on ebay/craigslist
more work on Sean's gift
1 job

Think I'll get it all done?

Not if my laziness has anything to say about it! :-)

Wed:

So how did I do?

X Tinker in for checkup at 10:15
X Paperwork
X Selling 3 pieces of equipment on ebay/craigslist
X more work on Sean's gift
X 1 job

Done! Well, to be fair I didn't get the PC cleaned up and listed. I need to oil the fans and such. I was looking for an item I had listed quite some time ago on ebay and had forgotten about. Couldn't find it, so I took the auction off. Weird. I put a few other things on though.

Got the first half of Sean's gift all done. Now to talk to mom about the second half.

The one job was just cleaning it out, which went fine. After I got home though he called me to complain about crashing and such, which he didn't tell me about when I had arrived there. Probably some kind of hardware issue, I doubt after what I did it would be software. When I talked to him he said it was just when watching movies. Probably overheating, as that would work the processor more then anything else.

Nice day today, almost nearly warm.

Tinker came though fine, as well.

Cleaned up the upstairs room, tested some video cards I had laying around, and discovered my USB audio adapter no longer seems to work. It did Sunday, what the heck!

Figured out my battle.net password. I was missing a character.

Figured out why my USB adapter stopped working. It was my own darn fault too, I think it happened when I accidentally ran the software to redo the hackintosh for 10.6.8. I hoped it would ask me where to do the work, like the newer version of the tool did. Nope. So it just overwrote some files, and put back a 2009 version of a kext responsible for some USB operations. Whoops.

Tried reloading OS X, but it didn't work. I tried it again, and rather then going through the whole "what would you like to do" procedure by the installer it just sort of started on its own. That time it took and my audio (and who knows what else) is back to normal.

Also sold one of the items I put up already! I was sure I wouldn't sell it at all, given the number that were on and their insanely low price. But I did, and lost only $32 on the deal. Sigh.

Tons of work for tomorrow, hope it all goes well!

Thurs:
Actually did all the work I was scheduled for, how about that?

Went and shipped the modem first thing, then to my 10:00. After some efforts I ran the disk manufacturer test and it took about 10 seconds to determine the hard drive was dying. Of course it was an ancient seagate so my adapter wasn't too happy with it. I did manage to get it booted and copied all her stuff off to a flash drive, which I could then copy to her other machine. Did a few more things for her and was only 15 minutes late to my 12:30. That was just a setup. Goodbye ancient PC and CRT monitor, hello crappy brand new PC and LCD monitor.

Came back for lunch, then out to buy a router it turned out I didn't need. She was saying her internet wasn't working, so I told her to unplug the router, etc. The normal song and dance. Turns out she didn't even have one! AARG! What she did have, however, was a machine full of crap. She had to leave, so I solved all but one problem. For some reason the Windows would not show up when they were opened. At the bottom taskbar showed them as being open, but they would not appear on the screen. I'll have to look into that one some more, and get back to her.

Came home for about an hour, then went back out to my 6:30. Another case of running two anti-viruses at the same time. At least that's all I hope it was. I didn't find anything else wrong with this machine, so that only took me half an hour.

I have a full day scheduled for tomorrow, probably go and see my parents in the morning, rather then the afternoon. My next to last one is in Chili, so it just works out better that way.

Wow, the first week of November is gone. It was nasty enough today. Not raining much, just dark, cloudy, cold and Rochester.

No game this week, I think? Stan/Sean said they were free last week but I have heard nothing. And no IV tomorrow though everyone said they could do it? I don't know.

Hoping it's going to be passable Sunday, I'd like to do some leaves stuff, though there are still plenty on the tree despite all the wind and rain we've had lately. DRY OUT please. Thank you.

Dentist next week, then the week after that is my 11th year anniversary for being laid off Xerox.
This year is slipping away fast, better grab of it what you can, it'll soon be gone.

See you all next week.