2014-01-09:

Fri:
Did one super long job in the morning for the dentist guy. I really hope that isn't a new trend, but he always has weird requests. Otherwise my rate change will be a losing proposition.

As I had seriously gone over, time wise, I just went over to my 1:00 directly. The daughter was there, and said her mother had called (I found out at 11:00 that morning) that they didn't need me. Thanks.

Came home for lunch, did a bit of writing, maybe a level or two of Starcraft 2 and got subs for Dad and myself for when we watched the latest Dr Who episodes.

Which we did.

Sat:
Finished the first Susan story! 519,000 words in total. Gave it the "twist" ending that leads into the next series of stories, and done. Got it finished just before I had to leave for Sean's house.

Did a game we haven't done since last March, but we got through the adventure we started all that time ago, so that went okay. At least we didn't have to melt an entire freaking mountain of ice down. That would have been tricky. I'm not saying my character couldn't have done it, but I think the spell I did pick to solve the problem worked just as well.

Sun:
Pretty productive. Finished up the first chapter of the new story, just to get it down. I want to finish book 3 and 4 of the Demongate adventure before I go back to it. At 1 per week I figure I have two years before I need more Susan adventures.

Also watched two movies and played more Starcraft 2. It was a good day.

Mon:
Pretty busy today. First off I set up a new machine for the people I loaned my old gaming PC to last year. That took an hour and a half, so I lost $10 with the new rate.

Did the shopping, no surprises there.

Then at 2:00 I used my first Surface tablet ever. I thought the whole point of RT was to use regular windows programs, but the two things I tried to install didn't actually work. Also the Surface trackpad attached to their little keyboard thing is awful. And the screen kept dimming and brightening seemingly at random. Settings were all over the place (that's just windows 8, not the tablet) and it was just generally terrible. Super, well done microsoft. Please continue to pump out inferior products. That took me 2 hours, so I again lost money with the new rate. I probably wouldn't have charged them the full price though, as I had never used a Surface before.

Good thing the next one was just up the street, even as it was I was a little late. That was just setting up a printer, which went fine. That I made $10 more then I would have at the old rate, which is more in line with my expectations. What's with all the long jobs suddenly?

Ellen canceled, so I came home. Watched the episode of Sherlock that Sean had given me. Made some phone calls.

Very busy day tomorrow, when I moved Ellen's to 6:00 I didn't realize I had a 5:30 that wasn't written down. It's not far, and it's just a printer issue, so hopefully I'm not too late. Even so I've got a lot of work and some for Wednesday already as well. Weird.

Lost power for about an hour at 8:30. Estimated time was 11:00ish for restoration but it came back. I had just opened up Starcraft when it went out, and I was like "are you kidding me?" and shut everything down again. Thank you, UPS.

Once it came back I waited a bit to make sure it wasn't going off again, put aside the book, and played.

Tues:
MAKE THE COLD STOP.

Ah well. Work! My 9:30 had one bad program I had to go into safe mode to remove, but luckily she had an SSD so mbam powered through in 2 minutes like before and that was that. Checked their downstairs laptop and updated it so that was pretty easy. Brought My Buddy his power cords because he said the people that worked there broke it, and the charger. It was broken, but how does one break a power cord like that? More likely he broke it by trying to move it when it was plugged in. Anyway, another resident had one so while I was there we went and got it, and it plugged in and worked. Thanks dude!

Came home to eat lunch, then went out again for the half dozen or so I needed to do in the afternoon.

First was a lady I had just seen, she wanted to go over a few more things. And for some reason OpenOffice wasn't opening. She had like 40 soffice.exe processes so I just restarted her machine rather then killing them individually. I took it out, she had office. Usually I don't give people who have office the free alternative, but somehow I did in her case. Sorry. As I had the time I went and picked up the laptop from the mortgage guy who I didn't get to last week.

Then at 4:00 a lady whose husband is in a nursing home now, so she wanted a few things done. Like deleting his email account and cleaning out a bunch of stuff. Cords, odds and ends, even an old machine and flat screen. I separated the ancient stuff like the parallel cables from the useful stuff like USB hubs and I'll give her some money for what's usable. However, that took me longer then I thought, so I was a little late to my 5:30.

Which was a Mac, but the job was getting her printer back on the wireless. Answered a few questions for her, figured out why we couldn't delete pictures from her iPhone (it was being controlled by iPhoto, my nemesis.)

Which of course made me an hour late for Ellen. She just wanted some things checked over, so I finally got out of there at 8:15 and home at 8:30 to finally make calls. Finished that at 9:15 because I spent half an hour with the lady I set up a day or so ago to get her bird program back. Don't ask.

Finally ate dinner at 9:30.

Not quite as busy tomorrow, but I still have a bunch of places to go.

Man, if my entire year was as busy as this first week of January has been… I would be a wealthy man.

And insane.

Wed:
What do you mean, how would we tell the difference?

I mean, uh, Wednesday happened!

At least it wasn't as cold today. First one was the dentist guy again, only was there an hour this time, thank goodness. Came home to eat, reloaded the laptop for the mortgage guy. Started windows update around 1:30, it's been "checking for the latest" with svchost.exe at 99% cpu ever since, and it's 9:30 now. Super.

Out at 2:00 for an ethernet cable plugged into the wrong router. Another case of time warner giving someone a perfectly decent wireless router, and they insist on using theirs.

The next two kind of sucked. The next was not powering on, and a new power supply didn't help. So it was dead-dead-dead. The little LED light inside would just weakly glow but that was about it.

I came back here because I had until 5:30. Laptop was still just doing its thing. Put the laptop I got awhile ago on ebay for a guy.

Then out. This machine had a bunch of problems. Sometimes it would hang. Sometimes it would BSOD. Sometimes it would run a few minutes, sometimes it would reboot itself. Even booting from my linux flash/CD didn't help.

Probably the motherboard. Still, two machines in one day I couldn't save? Sigh.

Got home at 7:15, did phone calls until after 9:00. I have five jobs for tomorrow, including one out past Sean's house, exit 2. (he's exit 3) ugh. And seeing my friend Ellen again, (at 6:30) to give her a new mouse.

So it'll be another late day home tomorrow. Where is all this work coming from all of a sudden? (Not that I'm complaining, no, wouldn't do that. No sir.)

Well, off to find out if I can update XP somehow with the website not working.

Rest of this week should be interesting…

Thurs:
Like a house afire.

Morning one was Mac city. An ancient G5 iMac that wasn't booting. A newer intel iMac in need of 10.6. His main iMac running (ugh) 10.7 which needed 10.9 (badly). An older Mac Pro then mine with a 30 freaking inch monitor. That thing was a monster. (So want.) And I thought my monitor was big. Still, 30" might be a little too big, you know what I'm saying? Anyway, couldn't load 10.9 onto that one, only 10.7 but it only had 1GB of ram (chortle) so he wasn't sure what he wanted to do with it. (He's selling it for someone) He thought he might want it for himself, but being older then mine and unable to use 10.9, that might not be such a great deal.

Anyway, got him all set and came back for lunch. The laptop is still 99% cpu with SVCHOST but it had download several updates. I shut it down and let it do 44 updates, then booted it back up so it could continue downloading more.

Out to a very short question session at 1:30. Then went to the prison outreach place, and repaired her outlook. She was having problems after uninstalling the demo version of 2013. Silly.

Called the guy that was far out, his machine passed the RAM test I did, but failed the HD test almost instantly. He's chosen to replace it, so I brought it back to do that work.

Called Ellen as I was now very ahead of schedule, she wasn't available today after all. She thought it was Wednesday and missed her dentist appointment apparently. (She got worse, when I called her back this evening she still thought we were having our conversation from yesterday where I was looking for the mouse. Ouch.)

Have a full day of work tomorrow, then mom, then Sean. Neil is here so I'm going over there twice, Saturday as well. I do love driving.

The laptop is doing 27 more updates. Maybe in another two days it'll have them all done?

Warmer, but still below freezing.

The iMac I brought home rejected my other 10.5 disk for some reason, but it did like my 10.4 disk, so I loaded it up with that. Maybe it doesn't like burned dual layer disks? Called the guy but didn't reach him to find out what to do.

One job for 3:30 Saturday at the last minute, Only one person I didn't reach. Perhaps in the afternoon at 12:30 or so I'll try them again. Get everyone from this week done, like some kind of responsible adult or something. (HA, as if)

Got through Due Process and started on Unveiled World. Forgot about some of the plot of that book, but it gives me a good precedent for what I want to intro in the third book. Almost like I planned it that way. Even though I didn't.

And so the first weeks of January are gone, just like that. Hope they were good for you, see you next week, same complaining time, some complaining station.