2014-07-04:

Fri:
Did some reading in the morning, want to get these books finally out of my hair. (And start selling them?)

Afternoon jobs were eh. The first one was a real job, with real money exchanged at the end. The second one was for the bath place, and he insists he has to restart the machine several times in the morning to get on the Internet. He also turned it off by pressing the power button right in front of me, which I was horrified at.

So I suggested a few things, and he's going to see what happens.

The last one was for the Hotel. Someone called that they couldn't print to the printers in the front area there, but one of them worked just fine. The other was plugged into the wall, rather than the hub, which is where it went wrong. The other person with the "slow printer" said someone else had come in and she was doing "backup stuff" and that made it slow? I have no idea.

Back here again I finished book 1, hopefully for the last time, and uploaded the files for it. Ugh, I've had 6 revisions of the ebook. Yipes. Well, unless there's something serious that is found, that's it.

Played some Last Dream, I'll start book 2 tomorrow, along with getting dinner around for everyone.

Sat:
Bought food, made food.

Didn't get to serve food.

Seems Stan or Sean, I forget who, got roped into working so we didn't do game.

I guess now I have a weeks worth of food, and I know what I'm eating the rest of the week.

So instead I worked on proofing book 2. I did also drop off the 10 port USB hub and USB 3 cable, which worked better for the guy.

Sun:
Finished proofing book 2 and uploaded the final changes. On to book 2.5. Got the first 62 pages done. It seems a little better than the last 2. Either I got better at writing, just spent more concentration improving it before now or am missing a bunch of stuff, it doesn't seem like I need to change as much.

Not many calls over the weekend, only made one new appointment for tomorrow.

My parents returned home, in the middle of a thunderstorm. It rained quite heavily for a few minutes.

One more day of June!

Mon:
Shopping, as normal for Monday morning. No trouble there.

Two jobs. The first was a basic setup, she just needed some things explained to her about a laptop she had been using for a little while. I gave her the standard stuff and answered her questions, so that was fine.

The second one, across from Seabreeze, was a cleanout. I haven't actually seen that place operate in years. I go by it in the winter sometimes, when the bridge is closed. Nice to see it moving. The cleanout went fine, and I came back.

A very quick copying of some files to a flash drive for a guy, and it was back to proofing. So close, page 276 of 301 pages. It'll be done tomorrow, and I'll be half done (again) with the Demongate series. This one went much faster, hardly anything changed!

Hot. Very nice out. Perfect not wearing any clothes weather.

Do it. DO IT.

Tues:
Talk about a wasted day.

Drove a half hour to see a guy about his keyboard not working. (or maybe motherboard or maybe the machine is so old it doesn't understand USB keyboards and needs PS/2?)

Anyway, he wasn't there.

So I called him. "Oh, I texted you because they called me into school."
Honestly, this "texting" business has to stop. You can't text my home phone! Really! It's not going to work.

So I left him the keyboard, and that didn't help. So I have to drive all the way back there on Thursday. Woohoo.

Then the next one. It was on but not responding, just a dark screen. On the phone I wonder to myself.

"Self, should I insult this woman's intelligence by asking if she powered it off and back on? No, you are going to, for once, assume someone has a basic level of competence."

MISTAKE.

I powered it off, hit the switch again to power it in, it was fine.

She wasn't in the office, so I just left her a note.

Keyboard guy called, it didn't work. It probably needs a PS/2 keyboard, I seem to have a vague recollection of that at some point in the past.

Finished proofing book 2.5 and got the updated files posted to lulu. Only 3 more to go (+1 the Paragon one.)

Did paperwork! Again, better than last year at this time, which is so weird. Because I still have no money. Didn't make any money today, meaning I only lost some.

Worked on book 3.

Speaking of losing things, we lost power for about an hour at 4:30. Was concerned I would be forced into eating all that chocolate ice cream I made, but no, that didn't have to happen.

My internet didn't come back, naturally. Guess it messed them up too, as there was an outage with those guys when I called.

Though I would only have a 6:00PM appointment tomorrow, but then one person I hadn't reached and one new person called, both after 9:00. As usual, within a minute of each other. I answered, after all I didn't accomplish anything today, so maybe tomorrow might be better?

Good way into book 3 at the moment. 80/271 pages. Internet still isn't back.

Wed:
Another great day, allow me to tell you all about it.

The morning one at 10:00 was a puzzler. Her machine was actually fairly decent, I think about the vintage of my Mac Pro, as it seemed to be a i7 8 core machine. Intel does funny things with their "hyper threading" and vista won't actually tell you how many cores, but anyway it should have been pretty fast.

No. To begin it wouldn't boot. It just went to the black screen with cursor so familiar to vista users everywhere. I got it booting, ran some scans, but still wasn't satisfied with the performance. By this time it was past 12:00 but I did notice the hard drive was awfully hot. I mentioned it, and said maybe it was just a crappy drive (it was a gateway PC after all) and that I had done all I could. She should try it out and see if the performance was what she expected.

Well, she called later that it blue screened. Super. So that was wasted effort. I think we'll have to replace it and reload everything.

Next (that I was an hour late for) was my friend office "preparing to install." Love office so much. Also she had a bunch of toolbars in IE (Ugh, why are you not using firefox? It's right there! You're on XP for Pete's sake.) that I also took out and Mbam found 600+ things it wanted to remove. So that went fine.

Finally ate lunch at 2:00.

The 6:00 one went okay, just installing a piece of software and answering some questions.

Then the phone calls. I got a bunch of calls today, but only made one appointment. Something about printing. It's sure to be a 5 minute job. I spent way too much time walking people through stuff, like 20 minutes getting someone to unplug their router. Someone who should know better, because they admitted they had done it in the past. Then another 10 minutes trying to get someone to right click the V icon and click "attach listening viewer" WHEN THEY HAD DONE THAT VERY THING NOT FIVE MINUTES BEFORE. I had disconnected, and then she asked one other question, and I was like, oh, connect me again and I'll do that for you, it's easy.

ARRG.

I got a call from a woman that would also probably be a five minute job, at about 8:40, and I was willing to (as always) help her from here, for free. Of course she insists she doesn't have the remote assistance program even though I pretty much give it to everyone. For this precise reason. (She also said she didn't have CCleaner, which is impossible, that is one thing I run on every system I ever look at.) So I direct her to download it. I have no idea what she got into. Even doing a google search (as people cannot distinguish between search boxes and address bars) for it brings up the right site as the number one result. But without telling me what she was doing, she just starts installing some random executable from the internet and of course it messes her machine up. So I direct her to the correct site, and she says it's blocked. I think she means the malware she downloaded was blocking it, (which I have seen before) so I direct her to remove all that crap. About 50 minutes later she finally has and I again direct her to download the software. She now says "chrome" and I realize what's happening. Chrome doesn't like the 32 bit version of this software, it says it's "malicious" and blocks the download. But the 64 bit version is fine. (Oh, and this so called "feature" let her download the actual malware so… go figure.) Her machine is 32 bit (because MS really needed to develop 32 bit OS versions after XP, to confuse everyone) So I tell her she can use IE for this, or turn that "feature" off for a minute, long enough to get the software so that I can finally look at the issue she called me about. She asks if I can just come out. I say sure, I'm happy to, but it's silly to come out for this five minute job I could solve by looking at her screen and saying "oh yeah, do this."

I mean I'm trying to save her money. I'm trying to be the good guy here and not take advantage of her… let's call it ignorance. (you know what word I want to use in place of that.) We're almost there, it's a simple matter to turn that setting off, or just open IE for this one task. She gets all defensive and says she'll find someone else.

What?

Lady, I just spent an hour on the phone with you (a half hour past my normal cut off time, I might add) because YOU infected yourself, because YOU cannot follow simple directions and just click random stuff. And I'M the bad guy? I'm the one you no longer want to deal with?

Fine. Call someone else. They'll be happy to come out to your place, do the five minute job I would have done for free, and charge you an arm and a leg. Because I guarantee you nobody else that comes to the house has my rate.

So I finally got to eat supper at 9:30.

I will never, ever understand people. Not ever. That's probably why I'll never be more than a mediocre writer. I just can't fathom why people react the way they do to things.

Of course, the lady with the BSOD didn't get to talk to me because of all that, so I'll have to call her back and apologize that she couldn't get through because of the other lady.

Why do I even try to be nice? I should just do nothing over the phone, minimum $50 charge, no matter what, I come out.

Because trying to be fair and honest just doesn't work out.

Thurs:
Did a lot more work today than I thought I was going to.

Morning one was a "printer" issue which turned out to be an AOL issue. Surprise and shock. Suggested firefox.

A bit more reading of book 3, getting through it.

Called a few people and helped them out.

At about 2:30 I ordered the hard drive for the machine from yesterday and left again. She was worried something was going on with her machine and the internet. It was fine when I got there, but I did recommend more RAM as she only had 512MB. Then I sat and read for a bit before my 5:30, as I was half way there. Got in there early and it turned out his machine was not liking the USB card he had the keyboard plugged into for his weird windows error message he was being shown. He couldn't hit enter to get past it.

Marvelous.

Had a ton of calls today, but as usual it resulted in only one job. Well, one for next week as well, so I guess two. Mail isn't getting sent from a Mac, oddly. And she says there's no error message? Huh.

Doesn't seem like there will be any game this week.
I am going to Heather's for the 4th tomorrow. Perhaps I'll have book 3 done by then?

I'm up to page 214 currently, so it doesn't need much more.

Enjoy any fireworks in your area, and be safe out there.

See you all next week.