2014-02-06:

Fri:
Busy morning. Went to see the lawyer guy at 9:30, no one was at the office. How surprising.
So I went to see the guy who used to be down the street from me. Only found one thing on his machine that might have been causing his remote control issue, hope that solves it.
Then back to the lawyer guy, the router needed to be reset is all.

Across the street from my sister, I tried to log onto AOL and they said they had "detected suspicious activity" and just let me reset the password, no questions asked. Rather dangerous, isn't it?

Then over to see Jim, he just needed to update the password in his iPhone mail client.

Came back here, did some writing, then over to see my parents.

No game, so a little more writing and I watched a Bond movie.

Sat:
Writing all day, mostly. Got into a good place and did a bunch.

Sun:
Guess! But seriously, I watched the last Bond movie I hadn't seen in some time, cleaned up a little, and finished 41,527 words. Not bad for 15 days.

Not many calls. I've got a new "hound" some place in OH that keeps calling me. My caller ID was hilarious.

OH
Buddy
OH
Buddy
OH
Buddy

I mean, really? I can't wait for Tuesday for my last trip to the nursing home to get his stuff, and not hear from him for a while.

Tomorrow, shopping, and then a busy day, thank goodness. I have two checks to deposit from last week. Two. Not even going to bother. I have to go back to the remote control guy, he was still being controlled. Sigh.

I also must pick up a check, as someone wrote 2013 on one they gave me last week. Did I mention that one already?

Anyway, I think two real jobs. One that claims his email is only being partially sent, and a cleanout. We'll see.

Mon:
Aldi had milk again, hurray. Went to get dry cat food and gift making material, then did the shopping.

Ate lunch, then went out at 1:00 to tackle the Case of the Phantom Controller. Didn't find any programs I could identify that were listening on any ports. Of course lots of system stuff (svchost.exe for example) open ports and it's super easy to take a process over in windows so maybe one of them could be it? I took off the VNC I had put on there, though as far as I knew it was only "connectable" when someone opened it. Maybe I'm wrong. Tried to run an antivirus scan from my Ubuntu disk, but his internet was so slow, and it seems Avast has given up its linux client, so I'll have to look into that further. It updated but crashed immediately. And the database was from 2009 so the version I downloaded was very old.

No call that there's been another incident.

Got a check with the right date on it from some other people, then went to look at the email issue.
It seemed not to be user error, to my great surprise. He was saying sometimes messages he sent were truncated. I looked it up, and discovered a theory. That the auto save feature kicked in, saved a draft, and then no matter what you did after that the only thing that was sent was the initial save. This was outlook, by the way. You know, the email client you have to pay money for? The one that corporations use? Well done, microsoft, once again you have astonished me with your ineptitude.

Lastly, out in victor, a router issue. One iMac wasn't staying on line, though another was. Huh. Of course it was a stupid airport router. I updated its software, reset the software, added RAM to the iMac and updated them to 10.9. If that doesn't do it, nothing will. (It would be hardware at that point.) It was connected, just not getting anywhere. Weird.

And home with 15 minutes to spare to eat dinner.

Made some phone calls. Of course there's Buddy tomorrow at 9:00, ugh, then two more, plus a laptop being dropped off.

Worked on a valentine's gift, got it 2/5 done? 1/3? But it isn't equal work… anyway, I got it started.

I have an hour, I'm going to do some writing. I want to revisit a chapter I did already, make it a little different. Hopefully I'll still get to do a little new, but if not it's in my head.

Tues:
And I did! Up to 42,481 words.

Got up early, traffic wasn't bad at all, surprisingly. Saw My Buddy. Who apparently isn't being kicked out, in fact they were quite concerned he was leaving at all. Apparently he even had to sign a waver that he was leaving against medical advice. He still didn't know where he was going, which is odd because lift line was there to take him someplace. But I took his 6 boxes of crap, and how do you accumulate that much junk in a nursing home, while complaining that you don't have any money? Anyway, his 6 boxes of crap, TV, Blueray player, and plant, and put all the stuff in three boxes instead after I got home.

And once again my porch smells funny. Super.

Went out to the cleanout, mbam didn't find anything but combofix found a few things. He said he had one of those fake FBI things but I didn't see it.

Home for lunch, then back out to a lady having PDF problems, I guess. When I got there she had all kinds of crappy fake programs on her machine, like RegClean Pro and that stupid PC backup thing I see everywhere now. Took those off, gave her foxit reader, done.

Came back here, started looking at the laptop that had been dropped off. He didn't leave the password. A whole written page about what happened, but no password. Thanks. Of course I can't break it because his internal CD drive is busted and it's not recognizing my external. Love 'ya pc hardware!

He called a half our later with the password, so I got the machine going. It's weird, it won't boot unless you hit ESC on the HP logo when you first turn it on. It shows a bunch of error messages, then boots. It's trying to update now. I've got SP1 and 2 in there, and it's crawling across the bar "checking for updates." It's been that way for like ten minutes now. Even more astonishing performance from a PC. How can you not love them?

Oh right it's easy.

Worked a little more on the gift and finished the chapter. Figured out what the next chapter is going to be. A second student with a problem that needs more cowbell.

They're calling for some heavy snow tomorrow, we'll have to see if my 3 afternoon appointments get done or not.

Wed:
Which cheese has the least friends?

Prov-alone!

HAHAAHAHAHHAH. Ah.

Ahem. Sorry. Random, I know, but I just thought of it while getting some cheese out. I had to write it down.

Lots of snow today. Like, way too much snow. Of course any snow is too much snow. But you get the idea.

Finished up that laptop in the morning. Stupid thing.

Out to set up the new router for the lawyer guy, which I did a bit early and I'm glad I did. Should have done appointments in the morning, but the weather said it was going to be nasty all day, so I figured it would be more cleaned up later in the day. It was hardly snowing in the morning. Oh well.

The router thing took way too long because apparently the account is controlled by an email address he doesn't actually use. Great! We had to call them (and wait on hold a very, very long time) to get that information.

Got that worked out, went not too far away to see about an "IE printing issue" which turned out to be something else. I asked him in the phone "can you print from other things?"
"Oh yes, I just can't print from IE."
LIAR!!!!!!!

He couldn't print anything, the "port" for the printer had been moved. Hey, new MS chairmain guy, here's something you could take out of windows. That list of legacy ports, like LPT1 and serial ports for printers. Whatever the port is the printer is set up on, that's the port it gets. No more ports tab. Okay?

So that took a few minutes. Came back home, did the driveway (not that it looked it later). Went back to the lawyer guy because of the printer on the stupid wireless thing.

Then out to the guy who was scammed, his machine was pretty clean but I made him change any password with money behind it, just in case. Because the scammer could have just opened Firefox and looked at them all.

Then back here! Ate dinner, had a half hour until making calls time.

Which I did. Made one appointment for tomorrow at 10:00 (So I have enough time to snow blow the driveway again) and another for Friday, in the afternoon.

Buddy called from the hospital, saying they let him go "as a trap" uh, no, you left despite their recommendations. Apparently they called the police, as he medically is unable to take care of himself, so back he goes! Baka.

Thurs
No real action today.

First one was a laptop that was't turning on. I hoped it was just the backlight, but no, it was dead, dead, dead. It had been dropped, but he said it worked for some time after that. Well, so did my cell phone after I washed it.

So no money there.

The other hotel, the closer one, called me, so I went over there right away. Just checked it over, I didn't see the problem she was talking about.

Came back, ate lunch. Did the paperwork for last year. For a wonder I actually did more jobs this year in January then last year, and made $500 more. Wow! Of course this month is going to suck if the current trend continues.

Sunny, hurray!

At least in the morning. It clouded over rather quickly.

And then did some writing. I'm up to chapter 13, at 51,725 words. That's almost exactly 10,000 words in 4 days. Huh.

Got two calls today, the dial up guy and a guy I saw yesterday who didn't know what to answer when frontier asked him what antivirus he was going to replace the terrible f-secure with. It was right on his bill- $6.00 a month! For something he could get free. I mean, is even Norton that expensive?

So I'm picking the dial up guys machine and bringing it back here. He was complaining he couldn't get the updates and then removed it and couldn't redownload it. Yeah, maybe because you're using DIAL UP. Just a thought. We'll prove it when I plug it into my network here. I'll probably also run windows update, as that's probably never been done.

Otherwise the two jobs I scheduled earlier in the week.

May go to RIT Saturday for Rudicon, help with the demoing of stuff.

Other then that, this week is over.

Don't forget your sweethearts next week, fellows. See you all then.