2014-03-27:

Fri:
Couple of quick jobs. One very old system owned by a slightly crazy old lady I just checked over. I was surprised at how well it ran, given the age.

Then over to look at a machine with no internet access. Turned out she turned off everything somehow in MSCONFIG. Weird.

Came back, ate lunch, went over to my parents, got signed up for Health Care (sigh) and then went to set up the one lawyer's new system. That went well, and it was good timing too, it was near 5:00 so I took off with the other two systems to rebuild over the weekend. I'll bring that back ready to go, so I'll just have to set up the things I load from the server.

Then directly to Sean's, did another Terra Mystica. Mizzy played, and she lost very badly. Sean won by a huge margin while the other three of us were somewhat in the middle. Very strange how it worked out. Mizzy ran into the same trap I did, resource starvation. She picked a race that didn't give her any workers by default, where usually the others get one at least at the start of every turn.

So I'm sure she'll do better next time.

Sat:
Did my one job for the morning, which went well. Another case of "let's put 4GB of RAM into a machine and then load a 32-bit operating system!" that seems so popular with people who don't know what they heck they're doing. Couldn't fix that of course, but I did get him straightened out and the data from his old machine put on.

Then came home and installed XP into the two systems for the law office. The one brand new one, and the slightly better one with combined parts from both, with the new SSD. They both went smoothy, and I finally used that pentium processor I bought back in '08. That things has been riding around in my car since then, so I'm really, really glad it still worked. Seems to be running like a champ, so I think they'll be pleased.

Then over to Sean's to go to dinner and do some Wanders game.

Because of the wait for the restaurant and such, we didn't start until 8:30. So we didn't get very far. Not that we do normally, but…

One amusing anecdote, Sean was talking about something that happened to him in 1996 and our junior member exclaimed "I was three then!" Needless to say, Sean reacted badly. I gently rebuffed his cries of how old we all were by saying if that was his reaction today, imagine what he's going to be feeling in another twenty years. He gracefully conceded the point.

Sun:
Got through more V.C. Forgot that the sister was killed. It's a total FF7 moment too. Normally my guys can take a dozen bullets and be fine, they just have the magic glowing thing waved over them and they can continue fighting. But no, in a cut scene someone takes one bullet, and everybody acts like the magical healing glowing thing doesn't exist. There were like six other people there. Where was the medic? Usually she's summoned instantly. Where where the glowy things? They should have been waving those things like it was going out of style. But no.

Of course they had to pick the most emotionally opportune moment to do it. Like, where were the scouts? Why did no one see these troopers approaching?

Oh well.

Then watched the Veronica Mars movie. Pretty good, she's a candidate for the Element of Loyalty, that's for sure.

Busy day tomorrow, and I have a few jobs for Tuesday as well.

Had two systems dropped off. I said I wasn't going to work on them, but I did, because I'm a loser who works on PCs on a Sunday night instead of, I don't know, having a girlfiend or something I guess?

Mon:
Mixed it up a bit today, because that's just the kind of guy I am. Went and delivered the two systems to the lawyer guy, got them set up and his programs back on. That went okay.

Came back here, ate lunch, then went out at 1:00 for a cleanout, or so I thought. They had somehow activated the trail of Malwarebytes Pro which totally sapped the performance of their machine. Also chkdsk is running every time they boot for some bizarre reason. Looked into it, left the longer of the suggestions going when I left, hoping it would do the trick.

Then I did the shopping, no surprises there.

Came back, finished up the system from Sunday night, which started doing 143 updates when I turned it off while he was on his way here to pick it up. Thanks, MS. Would a dialog box saying "is this a convent time to pointlessly apply "updates" to keep you "safe" or do you need the machine to really do what you asked, that is, to power off?" be too much to ask?

So he had to come later to actually get it. Sigh. Sorry, dude.

Left to check up a machine, vacuumed it out, no big deal, it was fine.

Then back here. Just a few calls today, one cancelation, so I put someone else in place of him. So three places to go tomorrow.

Tues:
Sunny, but still cold. Went in the morning was a cleanout, and I thought I had it all done, but apparently not. We'll return there in a moment.

Came back for lunch, then out to take care of some password issues. Her machine was infected by the "lets play random music" stuff virus I battled last week, and as she had nothing on her machine I just took it to reload. I did get her passwords set though.

Started the reload at home, then went back out to see the book guy, and finish up the website thing for him. That done, I went back to the morning one, and decided installing VNC as a service was where I went wrong. It's the default option, but I believed (erroneously) that you couldn't connect without running the program. Nope. So I reload it, because apparently once installed that particular setting can't be changed, and I'll have to remember to uncheck that box every time I install it from now on.

Sigh.

Finished up the laptop, so that can go back tomorrow.

Got a few calls today, and I have two "jobs" for tomorrow. The speaker lady that left me standing on her porch last week who still can't get the speakers to work, and the lawyer's office with some quirks. So jobs but no money. Super.

No, I tell a lie. I will collect the money from the laptop job.

Wed:
Pretty much what I expected. I went in the morning and changed the settings on the scanner application so it saved in PDF rather then jpg. Then went over and looked at the speaker situation. She had it not only plugged in wrong on the back, she had plugged the right port into one of the headphone jacks. Oddly though it worked, which was weird. At least, in a certain position.

The only other thing of note was returning the laptop and taking her husband's old desktop away. It was a system I had made for him, apparently, but being deceased he wasn't using it much any more. I'll probably recycle the inside and just stick the case back downstairs. It's a nice case.

Played more Valkyria Chronicles, got to the last "page" in the book, with the final two missions. It's a long game!

Thurs:
Went to see the dentist guy in the morning. As usual, he had much more for me to do then he had said over the phone. This made me late to bring stuff to My Buddy which made me late eating lunch which made me just minutes late to my job down the street.

Which was basically nothing, he had an email address spelled wrong.

Then I went to York to see what they were having trouble with. When one user tried to open Peachtree it gave a weird error message about another user on the machine already having it open. Well, I deleted the user and remade her, which didn't help. Then I wiped her out again, remade the user a different way, and that worked. Took me way too long to work that out.

Way too long.

Got back about 5:00, ate dinner, did some reading, made phone calls.

Should be plenty of running around tomorrow. The keyboard I did for the dentist guy doesn't work, and I need to drop off a system. Plus a cleanout in the morning, something about a kindle fire… then my parents at the end.

Some talk of getting together with the gang Saturday, but it's just a single email at this point. Well, we will or we won't.

Hopefully by this time next week it'll be a little warmer, too. I'll see you all then. I'm off to go win Valkyria Chronicles.