2014-05-15:

Fri:
Couple of jobs in the afternoon.

The 12:00 one was a cleanout. Or so I thought. He was getting a message from Avast about a website serving him something, probably from an ad.

The more major problem was his flash player crashing. I had investigated this previously, but not found an answer. I figured it would be taken care of with updates to Flash or Firefox, so we left it.

Nope.

Finally narrowed it down after an hour. It was the built in windows speech recognition. When the little window was open, crashed. When window was closed- no crash. AARG.

Then my 2:00 was some router related stuff, which I hope I took care of.

Then over to my parents house. Gave mom her mother's day gift, a Dell with OS X on it. Then got my hair cut.

Over to the artist's place, took care of some minor things there.

Came back and wrote. Got up to 50,762 words, which is a lot more then I expected at this point. It might be 80,000 in the end after all, what was I worried about?

Sat:
Got up to 57,744 words, and gave the story a slightly darker tone. Go me! I'm 4000 words up from where I thought I would be, which is great, and it's flowing pretty well too. (I think)

Did one job, setting up a new laptop and figuring out how they had two Facebook accounts.

That's about it. Once I finished chapter 17 I played a bit of that RPG I had been neglecting.

Wow, I wrote seven thousand words today. Huh.

Sun:
Another banner day in Robertville.

Did some writing, got to 60,784 words and it was 3:00. Decided I would play some more Ni no Kuni which I did for about a half hour.

Was watching a cut scene and the PS3 just sort of went dark. Figured maybe the game had crashed? Rebooted the thing, cursing the 20 minutes of my life I had just wasted, but at least I could fight the one thing I had actually fought and not bother looking around for the other two creatures I had in my list of "to fight."

And it wouldn't read the disk at all.

Tried a regular CD, a different game, nothing. Just sits there.

So the replacement drive didn't even get me through two games. Wonderful.

I suppose I can take the thing apart again, put the original drive back in, and deal with it not working after a length a time. I just… I wanted to play two games. The two games I got for Christmas. And I didn't even get to do that.

This is why I tell people not to replace anything with a part that's just as old as their part is. But of course Sony won't sell anyone a new unit, will they? Nooooo.

The funny part is, last time I used my original playstation? It worked perfectly. But now this is two optical units for this console, and they both have problems.

Well done, Sony. It's doing wonders, in my mind, for your brand image.

So instead of enjoying myself, I got to fume and write this up. Then I did other fun things, like straightening up the house, and some dishes.

I also checked my finances over, to see how much in the hole I was this month. A fair amount! Guess I can forget buying the electric lawn mower I wanted. Back to the ancient, leaky, gas powered one.

Had very few calls over the weekend, and in fact only one job for tomorrow. Swell.

I did write a total of 6004 words today, ending at 63,748. Three more chapters planned, so maybe a total of 72,000 words for this one. A little shorter then the others, but longer then I anticipated when I started work on it again.

Will I have it done by tomorrow?

Mon:
Trees are so pretty now!

All kinds of white blossoms, and tiny green leaves finally showing up. So nice.

It is a somewhat decent temperature as well, which is nice.

Went so many places this morning. First stop was the bank, of course. Then wegmans. Turned in my cans from eight million years ago. Also my lottery tickets and finally remembered that gift card from December of last year. So I got an onion (for the soup) and two things of fake sugar because I do tend to have a lot of lemonade this time of year.

Then bought oil and a filter.

Then went to the pet shop, they were out of the large bags of special food, so I got a small one instead. Have to check back next week.

Then to staples, got forms.

Then finally Aldi. Got lots of stuff for yummy soup, though I suppose it's a little warm for soup now? Bah, still good stuff, and that pot is crying out to be used.

Ate and went to my 1 + .2 jobs. The first was a standard cleanout with a twist. The UAC prompt window was requested. but didn't show up! I cleaned the junk off and that seemed to remedy the situation. Her machine was totally hung up though, waiting for this one window about 12 times.

Then stopped at the lawyers office, she was having scanner trouble but it seemed fine when I got there.

Back home I let my engine cool down and changed my oil.

Did some… do I have to say it?

My dentist appointment got moved up to tomorrow. One less day to worry about it, I guess. The other nice thing is that it's at 2:00 in the afternoon, rather then 7:50 in the morning. This is nice for several reasons- not getting up so early, having the evening to recover rather then trying to do jobs with a mouth full of Novocain. That sort of thing.

I actually have two jobs tomorrow too. What's happening?

Then in the afternoon, 5:00 or later, someone is coming to take a look at this iMac as a possible machine to buy. I just don't know how long the screen will hold up, lowered brightness or not. Hopefully I'll be somewhat recovered by then.

Anyway, finished No One To Blame, at 72,066 words. Now to begin proofing it, and start getting all 7 of my books into physical form.

Wow, I did 34000 words in six days, if my counts are right. I started working on it again last Wednesday, and look, it's already done. If I knew it was going to be that easy, I wouldn't have waited a year. HA!

Tues:
Got through the first appointment easily enough, just answering some questions, no big deal. Changed her credit cards on sites using it to her new card.

The second one was a kit more annoying. Okay, a lot more. He has two machines and the first one just needed Firefox reloaded. Mbam found only two minor things, no problems.

It was the second computer that was giving me fits. It wouldn't get online. I knew it was working, I could ping via IP and get to the router page.

Well I did some searching and someone mentioned a SP problem, and to unload SP3 and reload it.
Well, this machine had… SP2. Huh?

So I tried to update to SP3, both normally and in safe mode. Nope, same stupid error message both times, something about a sys file being locked or something.

So I figured I would just boot from my SP3 CD and do a "repair" which would put SP3 files on there as though installing them.

It BSOD when it rebooted.

So I had to bring it home, because by that time it was 12:30, and I wanted to get home by 1:00 so I could eat and leave for the appointment.

So I did.

The procedure, or at least this half of it, went smoothly. Only an hour of work, wish I could change $1000 for an hour of work I do. Of course some of that was the molds and stuff for that have to be made.

It's now about 6:00 and the novocain is finally wearing off. A guy was supposed to call me at 5:00 but he didn't, maybe he'll call later. I would like to sell this basically irreparable iMac.

I did work on reloading the XP machine, and started another read through of No One To Blame. Interestingly, looking for the video driver on the compaq website I came across a 2008 upgrade to "prevent continuous system restarts or Stop: 0x0000007e errors after upgrading to SP3." Nice to know about that now, dim wads.

Where is the video driver for this machine?

And resisted the urge to start watching season 4 of ponies, having Neil Specialed that. I'll save it for Sunday.

And the guy called, he's not coming after all. He's still looking at cheep PCs on ebay. Seriously dude? I'm willing to sell you a $600 iMac for $250 because you have to keep the screen brightness down. You could put windows on it, if you're so in love with crap. I HATE YOU.

Sat and proofread the book, made some phone calls. I have three places to go tomorrow, two new places and returning the PC I worked on.

All in the afternoon, leaving my morning free!

First thunderstorm of the year tonight.

It was nice and sunny today too.

Wed:
Finished the first read through of the book. Also added some more text, bringing the total words to 74,514. This was done in the morning and after I got back from working.

Working was eh. Setting up the new printer for the lady who makes her living using a CAD program she refuses to upgrade. I've got it running for her in the Win7 XP Virtual Environment. It somehow messed up her drawings or something, we had to play with the scale it used to get it to print correctly. And of course the way you interact with the printer is dumb-dumb-dumb.

So that made me late for the drop off, so I went to the battery guy instead. (He was basically on the way, at it was 4:00 at that point, the time I had told him I would be there.) Popped the battery in, and done.

The dropped off the system and come home.

Finished the read through, and then started looking into the process for bookifying all these things.

Apparently, bookifiying things is expensive. The company Blurb I first started looking at 2 years ago has many ways of getting a book made. The least convenient is a program called Bookwright. This program will give one a free ISBN number, which you kind of sort of need, I guess? But the program is terrible. Just using it a few minutes was painful. I even read the "manual" but no, I had mastered all program functions in just moments, it wasn't me being stupid. (The "manual" was a couple of pages.)

The better program they offer is called BookSmart, which while somewhat dysfunctional would be usable. But no ISBN number is offered through that program.

I looked at buying them separately, from the issuer of such things, and there's a "starter" package with 10 numbers. I need 7, so hey, I could write three more books! But they only give you 2 barcodes, so I would need to purchase 5 more at $25 a piece.

Oh, and by the way, the package is $500.

Yes. $500 to enter 10 numbers into a database. I doubt a human ever looks at it. I am paying for a computer to add a couple of fields to another computer's database.

Wow.

Then let's buy some copies. Obviously I want to get Sean and myself and my parents a hardcover copy of my books! That's another $500.

OR NOT.

So, do I use the awful tool and get the number, or pay mad dollars, the better tool and go without (just selling from my website and blurb itself) or use Indesign like a sane person?

Or do I use lulu?

Made one call, as I got one call today. Sigh.

So it's church garage sale tomorrow, one call, and book stuff.

Heavy rain today, for a few minutes. Sunny otherwise though.

Thurs:

I used lulu!

They offer more markets, I could use the indesign file I already had and just make a PDF, and they gave me the ISBN number for free, for all three versions of the book. So take that, Blurb. Thanks for offering some crappy tools that don't serve my needs, and "free" things using those tools, but I'll pass.

So I'm currently waiting for the proof copies of Due Process, and the ebook should already be available for sale. Once the poofs come I can make sure my indesign is right and then get the others ones up there.

Of course, I chose the wrong size at first, so I couldn't sell anywhere but in the lulu store. Oops. But on the plus side, the paperback and the hardcover are both the same size, so I didn't have to resize them. Yay?

Also they aren't as expensive, because they didn't have as many pages as I thought they were going to. So it's 4.99 for the ebook, $14.99 for the paperback (which I think is pretty high, actually, but I don't even make anything on it, that's almost cost) and 29.99 for the hardcover, which again is pretty high. Man, wait, is that more then before? I think it might be. Sigh.

Oh, wait, that's retail price, my price is 16.89, so that's only $360 for the three copies. $115 if I wanted three sets of paperback. Much better.

Just finished the ebook before I had to leave for my only job of the day. That was an odd process, by the way. They didn't like the rtf version but bringing it into word and saving it as a doc file they were just pleased with. Huh?

Anyway, the job went fine, it was a BSOD XP machine, the RAM was bad. I gave him a temporary one as I didn't have any in that capacity, and I'll have to go back. Solved some of his other problems, and came back here.

Now just need to start selling dem books!

Oh, went to the church garage sale up the street too. Got a whole bagful of paints, so that was worth it. I haven't really looked to see how full each is, but even if they are all only half full, it was a good bargain.

Game Saturday, looks like Demongate, so anything could happen.

Two calls today!

So I have one appointment for tomorrow. After getting my water meter changed, in the afternoon.

Watched a bunch of Familiar of Zero so I can start writing Susan's Chronicles.

Pretty terrible, work wise, I guess. SELL DEM BOOKS.

Have a good weekend, everyone. See you next time.

Gibberish for this week:

ISBN number is dumb-dumb-dumb.

So I had mastered by that program.

I didn't have as I got form.

Wow.

Then it rebooted. but it, is terrible. Just using the dropped at buying my mind, for then I got more major program she replace, took care of white blossoms, and go with 10 number, which while somewhat don't know about?

Got through instead of copies. $500 to enter is offer is coming a bookifiying them. Yay?

Also my price, my price is 16.89, so I tried to have a lot of "to fight."

It was his o