2014-02-13:

Fri:
An actual amount of work today. Morning one went a little long, but I got both her laptop and desktop straightened out. She even gave me $10 extra so I didn't actually lose any money to the new rate, and a check dated 2012. Seriously?

She made the bottom line of the 2 really long, so I put a line down and it sort of looks like a four. I used a blue pen but it looks black. Sigh. We'll see what they do.

Home to eat, then out to exit 5 of 490 to to my second scammer fixup of the week. Astonishingly, they encrypted his registry with syskey and he got the password out of them somehow. It's encrypted forever, apparently, as there's no tool to undo it. But at least I didn't have to reload the whole machine, like the last time that happened.

And over to dial up guy. He was complaining about downloads essentially timing out, and wondered if he "had a virus." So I started the download but the estimated time was about two hours. I brought the machine home and it downloaded in less then ten seconds. So I managed to get his machine here, download the thing he couldn't, run windows update, and then ninite to get him up to date on everything else, then get his machine back to him before the original download would have finished.

I don't care how much money you're 'saving' dude, time to find the extra $40 a month and ditch dial up.

Then over to my parent's house. Set up a different set of speakers for my father, hoping that will cure his sound issue. Weird issue. Also showed my mother Picasa so she can print her photos easier. She liked Picasa, and as I type this on Thursday, no more sound issue. How weird is that. At least, not that they've told me about.

Then back here, worked on the Paragon Database a little to get it ready for next week when I go over to RIT to help demo DgH.

So I fixed a few bugs and made a new version. I just have to boot over into windows to create the windows installer. (hate you windows)

Sat:
Writing, of course. Got chapter 13 done, and up to 57,015 words. Gonna be a long one, probably longer then the others, as I have six moths more to write before the big finish that leads into the last book. Oh, it's gonna be good.

Then I won Call of Duty, because I hadn't actually played a video game… uh, this year? Annoying, but at least I got through it. I hate grenades! I was killed more times by grenades popping out of nowhere then I was killed by anything else!

Sun:
Can you guess?

Yes, I went horseback riding, and bob sledding and sally sledding and hang gliding and even got into a fight with a grizzly bear. But I managed to trap his king's castle on the 43rd move and it was only three moves to mate and he resigned like a gentleman.

NO I WROTE MORE YOU SILLIES.

Up to 61,099 words and still have a chapter left of notes to get through. We get to see someone from the RWAG game I played a few times over the summer, so he didn't go to waste. And another shadowy figure is seen. Is it the same as the first one? Is it someone working with that one? WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPEN?

Then I read some other people's stories, for the variety.

Got a ton of calls over the weekend, which would have been great, if I had reached more then half of them. Which I didn't. It was less. Where are all you people?

Just goes to reinforce Robert's Second Law- the more calls you get in a weekend, the less people you will reach on that weekend.

But I did manage to make two whole appointments for tomorrow.

(Incidentally, the First Law is that any animated work that goes on long enough eventually turns into Dragon Ball Z.)

Mon:
Keeping to my regularly scheduled programming I did the shopping, no surprises there.

My first one was downtown, *shudder* but it wasn't too far into it. In fact I sometimes pass the building on my way to 490 from the car guy's place. It took a little too long, and she was very whiny. I found out this was because she believed she was getting charged $40 every half hour, what?

Then over to the easier one. Didn't know Dell made Mac drivers for their printers available, but I guess they do. It wasn't connecting, nor could I figure out, initially, how to make it connect. The installed application let me see the printer but not actually do anything about it. I finally downloaded the installer from the site and that let me get it on the network.

Went over to pick up an xbox someone was supposed to drop off at her mother's house down the street, but they said they didn't know anything about it. She did say her daughter was 'an airhead' and weren't surprised at this revelation.

Came back. I had gotten 6 calls between 2:00 and 3:30. Some just moments apart. What the heck? Most were just people uselessly calling me back from yesterday. There were three new ones. Then one new one called back and said said everything was fine, but then another new one called so that it was back up to three.

But even with all that, I only managed 2 appointments for tomorrow. Both in the afternoon, leaving me lots of time to clear the driveway out again from all the snow we're going to get tonight.

Fun.

And not the pinky pie type of fun, either.

Did more writing, just for the variety.

Tues:
Hey, it snowed again. I guess the weather likes the variety too! HA!

Did writing in the morning. Then out at 1:00 to take care of music playing in the background. Haven't had one of those in a long time. Turned out to be a whole bunch of chrome processes in the background, launched by something.

Then over to see about a Mac Pro G5. I'm part archeologist, I swear. It would chime, but get nowhere after that. Checked various things, looked up that symptom, which according to forum posts could be anything from the battery to the video card. I reset the PRAM, which took me back to my high school days, let me tell you, and it booted! Huh. How about that?

Came back here, finished what I thought would be two chapters but was long enough to break into three. 68,226 words, and I know what I want to do for December. Little more character development, and have Dean go on (separate) dates with Yasui and Elizabeth.

Then read more of Worm, just didn't feel like getting into the next chapter quite yet.

Not much work for tomorrow, so I should have plenty of time!

Sigh.

Wed:
Single digits today, but sunny.

Two jobs, one in the morning, one very late at night. Oddly they were both near each other, up 390N and one exit away. Both went fine, the morning one was quick, didn't even write up an invoice. They were saying something about it not coming back from sleep, but I woke it up 6 times and didn't see any error messages they were talking about. I had just set that machine up maybe a month or two ago, hopefully it's not some hardware issue.

Thought about the next chapter, decided what I wanted to have happen and wrote some notes, then went back to reading Worm.

At 5:30 I went out to set up a new machine and take out an ancient Dell. That went fine as well, and I came home to make some phone calls. One appointment for tomorrow and one for Friday.

Rolling in.

Thurs:
Got the next chapter started. 74,410 words. That's almost as much as the previous book, (77,771) and I still have a long way to go. Maybe it'll be 5 books in the end?

Did my one job. Her problems basically boiled down to "Norton." She was having trouble with the printer, which was networked. I was having trouble just getting her machine to do anything properly. However when I turned off the 18 zillion functions of Norton (gee, wonder why it's so slow?) it got a little better.
I wanted to uninstall it and see if that totally cured everything, but the account was in someone else's name. Her son, maybe? So I couldn't log in and redownload it because she didn't know the password.
Well, I had been there almost two hours by then, and found no other solutions. So we went with uninstalling Norton, and what do you know, before it was even to 50% the printer started printing the job I had sent it previously.

Amazing. Well done, Symantec. Another "quality" product removed, and more revenue for you denied.
If she does what I told her to, and makes sure she's not auto billed.

Got some calls, have three to do tomorrow. One from here, or at least try to, he's recovering from back surgery he said, but when I called him he wasn't home. Uh, okay? Other then that a checkup and a cleanout.

And going to see my parents, of course.

Still snowy and cold. Ready for spring now. Any time.

Don't forget your lover(s) tomorrow everyone, and I'll see you on the flip side.