2014-05-29:

Fri:
Several appointments, the first was taking a look at two laptops, answered some questions, nothing too major.

The next one was in the afternoon, another two machines. The desktop wasn't so bad, but her grandson's laptop had a dead hard drive. So I ordered a replacement and went on to the third one.

That one was very short, just checking the machine over, it really had nothing wrong with it. She was just worried about all the recent hacking, which of course wasn't applicable to her machine at all, but whatever.

Then went to my my parents, and came back here.

Worked on Learning the World, reading it over to get started with the submission process.

Sat:
Mowed the grass in the morning, and got the berry bushes off the driveway using a piece of coax cable. Not sure that's a permanent solution.

Finished the first read through of Learning the World, made a PDF so I can go through it again. Used a different technique this time, read the chapter in libreoffice then copied the chapter into Indesign, then reformatted the text. It seemed to work quite well. That took until 6:00. Hopefully I got it right and won't have to much else to it. Looks to be about 296 pages, while the first book was only 204. And that included the glossary. Of course, the margins are a bit different, and this one was much longer, by about 20,000 words if I recall right, so that's only to be expected. I think it'll raise the cost about $3.00. But I guess we'll see.

Got the messed up hardcover, but at least I know they are exactly the same now, so as long as the softcovers come through okay, the hard will be too.

Forgot that Sean gave me a movie last week, so I watched that while I ate.

Then went back to skimming Learning The World to look for any more errors before I start book 3.

Sun:
Got the Learning The World proofread and up on the site to order. Whew, that took a long time, but I was reading it pretty carefully. 296 pages in all. It raised the price, but I only priced it at a dollar more then the first two. I make nothing on it, but that's not really a concern, is it?

Started Helping People Club, because I'm some kind of Masochist.

Mon:
Wasn't sure if Aldi would be open, they close on weird holidays. There wasn't a sign up a week ago though, but sadly, they were closed.

So I did more book stuff, then went to see the mortgage guy. His machine was pretty messed up, but nothing more difficult to get rid of then running some uninstallers.

Then I set up a guy's "new" desktop, here at the house. Some refurbished XP machine, which I hope he got a stellar deal on. Had Win7 at the moment, and 8GB of RAM, which I was shocked about. How could an XP era machine even address that much memory? But it did.

Called the account guy's office, but they must not have been there, as no one answered. Sigh.

So I'll try them tomorrow, and do the shopping, and two others besides. Should be fun.

Did more book work, gotta proof them all. Got up to page 142, chapter 13/24. Hey, that's more then half. I am either missing a bunch of stuff, or I became a better writer or I've really already read this one a bunch. (Which I have, actually.) It's going much better then the previous books, hardly any changes. It was written after a considerable delay from the first two.

Tues:
Not the greatest, but at least the day resolved okay.

Really, it was the last thing that really dragged it down. Allow me to complain… I mean explain.

First job was just answering some questions, so that went fine. As it was earlier then I expected, I stopped in to see what the account guy was talking about. The person who was complaining wasn't there, but I looked at her machine. Mostly I think the color of the monitor was out of whack, as I didn't see any speed issues.

I then went shopping, and came home to eat. At that point I had my 1:00, just a minor cleanout, like she was running both Norton and MSE.

Having some extra time now, I called the person from tomorrow to see if he wanted me over there a day early. He said that was fine.

As he was near RIT I went over there to see about a call from, well, almost two weeks ago now. Sold him more RAM, and cleaned his machine out because somehow he had all kinds of spyware stuff in there already. Aarg.

Didn't expect that, so I was slightly late to the 5:00. And here is where our story takes a turn for the worse.

She needed her machine cleaned out, which was fine. But in certain text boxes, regedit, the login screen- the machine acted like the up arrow key was being pressed. I couldn't do anything at those time.

So I took her keyboard off, breaking a key in the process because the service manual was totally unclear. I mean terrible. But I got it off, but the thing still was doing it!

So I tried putting the key back together, and finally gave up about 8:00 because I needed to make some calls that day. Ugh. Well, brought it home, managed to use one of my dead laptops to get the little plastic hinge thing so the keyboard isn't broken now, and the machine is acting fine. So it's something bizarre with her mouse, I guess? I don't know, but at least I think it's okay.

The guy from 9:30 called, the machine was working perfectly when I left, but now he's screwed it up or something happened, so I have to go back tomorrow.

So it's dentist in the morning to finish my crown off, then two in the afternoon, and I'll call laptop guy and see about getting this back to him.

Worked a little on the book today, but not much.

Nice and sunny!

Wed:
Cold and nasty!

I got a call in the morning that the guy I had seen yesterday had solved his little problem, so he canceled. I did some more book work, then went to my dentist appointment. No Novocain, thank goodness, just taking the temporary crown out and sticking the new one in. For a little while it felt like something fat was inside that tooth, but it feels normal now. Weird.

Did a "general issues" job, have to go back, that 512MB ram I ordered by accident worked against me, I needed a 1GB chip. Sigh.

Then returned the laptop. It was the freaking mouse that was causing the problem. When we plugged it back in it went nuts again. Why?

Then back to do more book work. I remembered the old text to speech stuff and started it reading me the book, wondering if I would find more errors that way. Whoo boy did I ever. I'm up to page 97/280, and I'm going to have to have it read me the others, too. How did I miss so much of this stuff? At least I haven't had any more of them printed. It's just a read them over so carefully, or so I thought, several times. But I'm still finding stupid errors, like words missing or reversed. So frustrating.

Got the SSD in for the laptop, so I finished that off. Too late to call, but I only have one job so far tomorrow, I'll call her after that. One for Friday as well.

Thurs:
Morning one was pretty quick, just basically delivering a monitor to a guy. His laptop display stayed running though, which was odd. Oh well. I called the lady with the laptop, but she wanted later in the afternoon, at 2:00, so I came back here. Found a grammar checker, as I still felt certain things weren't right with the book I was going through. It made some suggestions, and I decided to go back to what I was doing before, that is, just doing a chapter and then pasting it into the Indesign file. Trying to use the PDF and then correct both the .doc file and the .indd file was doubling my work.

Sadly I can only hear one line at a time, in LibreOffice, rather then whole pages. Not that big a deal.

Anyway, made it to chapter 19 so far, and I'll work a little more after I finish this. That's page 207, so more then a hundred pages today. That's not bad, for how slowly the voice thing goes.

Then I get to go back and run chapters 1, 2, 2.5 though, and listen to them as well, as obviously just reading it is not catching everything. Sigh.

Rather yucky today, but no rain.

Took the laptop back, got paid.

What else, ah, game Saturday this week, so that should be good. Apparently last week Sean had houseguests.

No jobs Saturday, but a few for tomorrow. Wow, Sunday it will be june, and we'll be halfway through this year already. Yikes.

Guess that's it.

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