2014-07-10:

Fri:

Happy 4th, of course it's gone now. Called one person in the morning, helped her through some email stuff, or at least tried to. Did one job, at least it's on the calendar, but I don't recall exactly what it was. Don't have an invoice, so probably not much or long.

Then did more proofreading. I did go over to Heather's house for a nice meal and then some fireworks afterwords. So that was nice. Weather was cool, I wore a jacket, but then, I usually do.

Sat:
Proofed all of Book 4. Only one more to go!

Only two more to go! I mean, I still have to do the one from the other series.

Whew.

Also took a bit of a walk as it was just soooo nice out and cut the lawn.

Watched the "new" sailor moon, which episode one suggests is going to be exactly the same as the "old" sailor moon, just shinier.

One thing I don't understand, where did sailor moon come from? I mean, let's talk history for a second.

In the sailor moon universe, long ago in the past, there was a Moon Kingdom, right? And in that Moon Kingdom there was a queen (Usagi's mother) and presumably her father, which nothing is ever said about. Then the Princess and her guardians, the inner scouts.

Fast forward to today. The people of the past are being reborn due to the wishes of the queen, who gave her life and channeled energy through her special crystal. Fine and good.

We meet Luna who is looking for the Moon Princess.

She finds the Moon Princess right off.

But suddenly, out of nowhere, the Moon Princess instead becomes this Sailor Moon person. Where did that power come from? The power of the other scouts was inborn. They were guardians, they had certain attacks, they walked around in "costume" i.e. uniform but they didn't have to. They could have changed clothes and still shot fireballs or whatever. They didn't switch back and forth being two people because they were who they were. How does Luna recognize Usagi as "Sailor Moon" and not "Moon Princess" when "Sailor" didn't exist?

The transformative nature employed today is… I have no idea. They all look exactly the same, so it isn't to maintain some secret identity. Unless they have a power that is never discussed that makes people not associate one persona with another. (See the Darkbolt rules. Oh wait you can't they were never finished. Sorry) Perhaps their powers are not fully awakened until they "grow up" and until then, can only be used a short time? I have no idea.

Anyway, back to Moon here. There was no Sailor Moon back in ancient times. Shouldn't Usagi's "transformation" been back into the Moon Princess, because that's who she is? Where do her "weapons" and such come from? They didn't exist before, they were not needed. Is Luna actually creating them… out of nothing? That makes her far more powerful then we give her credit for. Can she make transformation items for anyone and turn them into scouts? Evidence points to yes, given Sailor Moon shouldn't even exist.

And why does this "tuxedo mask" person exist? He's a prince, isn't that good enough for him? He can't just be himself, as a prince? I mean the prince could wear a tuxedo or armor or a toga, he would have the same powers. Yes, that tiny mask over his eyes obscures his identity (sarcasm) I just don't get why all of this has to go on.

So yeah, thinking critically about things = disappointment. Plus if I can just watch the old episodes again and get exactly the same story, why bother watching the new ones?

Sun:
And done.

Sat outside in the beautiful sunshine and read through book 5. Got it up on lulu, and ordered $340 worth of BOOKS.

7 copies of book 1, 4 copies of book 2, and thee copies of the others.
Then 1 complete set of hardcover ones.

And one softcover of the other series, so I can read that one over sometime.

Oh, and I picked some berries, a whole tupperware full.

Finally it's over.

Mon:

Boring. Did one "job" in the morning, I think an ethernet cable I gave the bath people wasn't working very well. I traded him for another and it seemed to have no problems. We'll see if he stops complaining I guess.

Went shopping, no surprises there.

And then blah. Really. I put a bunch of stuff from a customer on ebay, that's how desperate I was.

Also I got no calls today. None. Well, I can't say that, I got a hang up from an 800 number.

Why don't you love me anymore?

Did you ever?

Cleaned up a little, tried to reach the person I didn't reach yesterday (failed). Sighed a bit. Hoped my books got here soon so I could put them in the shops where they will stay.

Worked on book 6 a little.

Tues:
Took just about all day, but I finally got a painting project I've been staring at since December of last year out of the way. Doesn't look great, I mean it's me, but it's passible.

Otherwise, one job. A machine with two antivirus products, one of them the awful, $16.50 a month frontier "secure." And man was their DSL slow. Also he was trying to log into his verizon account, but they said that email, or phone number didn't exist. Huh. He's moved here, so he didn't have a bill. He called someone, hopefully that person can get his account number and we can figure out what's going on.

Otherwise, figured out chapter 3 of book 6 and last night, trying to get to sleep, what her weapon would entail. It's pretty neat, if I say so myself.

You'll just have to read the book to find out what it is!

More calls, which didn't really translate into much more work. My only "job" for tomorrow is replacing the HD for that guy last week. The burning hot one. The HD, not the guy. Not that there would be anything wrong with that.

Wed:
Actually pulled off a paying job!

The install went fine. Normally I would have just take the dang thing, but with them being 25-30 minutes away (if your directions are right, towards the lower end of the scale. Guess whose directions led them astray?) that would have meant a 2 hour total driving time rather then an hour. I just sat and watched windows tediously install. I worked up another chapter or two for book 6 so it wasn't totally wasted.

Before I left home I saw the lawyer's office had called, so I stopped there on the way back. Her laptop, used by her daughter, was all screwed up (again) so I cleaned it out. That took about an hour so I charged her.

I actually made a little money today!

Picked a ton of berries, dodged raindrops, (it cleared off right away) and touched up the paint from last night. Boxed that up.

It came to me that I didn't recall reading a line in book 5 that I thought I had put in. About how cars that could drive themselves decreased police revenue and forced them back into doing actual police work. I was so proud of the line because days later I read a slashdot story about that same topic. But looking through the book now I can't find the line anywhere. Did I just think I put it in there? I don't have any notes about it, so I didn't note down that I wanted to do it, then forgot.

Le Sigh.

Have all of one job for tomorrow, and stopping into the accounting place because opening word makes her screen go dark? Huh?

What a crummy week.

Thurs:
But there was a burst of jobs today!

First I went to see the lady who couldn't find Firefox on her desktop. True, it wasn't there. But Chrome was there, and I accept blame for not asking if she had that.
I do not accept blame for "do you have remote assistance on your desktop?"
"No, I don't see that."
WHEN SHE DID.

Anyway, I answered her few questions and went on my way to to the accountant place. Odd thing there, her screen wasn't going dark as was specified in the message, but rather if she double clicked a word document word would open… but not open the document. It just left the word interface sitting there.

You can still surprise me, Microsoft. Bravo.

Dragging a word doc to the icon or using file->open worked normally. I checked the web, apparently certain printer driver issues can cause this sort of behavior (because why not?) so I changed the default printer.
Also took off the 2010 version of office that, when opened, complained a whole bunch about registering fonts. Wait, doing what? "Registering" fonts? Uh, okay.

Leaving her with office 2000 (ugh) which at least worked again.

Home for lunch, then out to see the guy with the Mac problem who called at 9:45 last night, admitting he had been calling the wrong number all day. It's atop every invoice, you know?
Anyway, I brought his machine up with target disk mode and it said "cannot repair this disk" so I figured there might have been some filesystem corruption. No problem, I booted (after waiting, and waiting, and waiting) my old DiskWarrior disk (are they still around?) and doing a repair that way.

Hazza! It half worked. It would get farther, but not all the way. So I figured I would need to reload OS X.

Whoops, G5 iMacs (yes, that's what he's using) can't boot from USB and it didn't like my burned disks. Well, I tried to boot 10.6 first, thinking it was the last that could go on PPC machines. No, I guess that's 10.5. Sigh. Anyway, put the disk in the other machine I had sitting there and, again with target mode, got it to recognize and boot from that. (Try that on a PC)

It loaded fine (hate optical hate hate hate USB is so much faster) and it booted.

Started him downloading 10.5.8 updates (768 MB) and after two hours of banging my head, I was on my way to the next job.

Which was the conclusion of the work I did for the lawyer's… assistant? Paralegal? What do you call her? Anyway, the company couldn't get it installed because no one does FIT testing. Figured out it was sending a URL to IE as the first part of the install (for some bizarre reason) which was screwing up, and not allowing the install to proceed. *shakes head*

Had to look up the error message, which I guess was some .ASP or .NET or C# crap but it did lead me in the right direction. Go interwebs.

And that was that. I also got two checks in the mail so I might break even this week after all!

Having visited all the people that called me today I'm not sure about tomorrow. One person I hadn't seen just had a question about turning his antivirus back on. Uh, yeah, turn it back on. You stupid?

In other news, my printer is clogged again. I got it all nice and working again, and now red has a big old emptiness, and green a smaller one. Sigh. Is it so much to ask for reliable equipment, Epson? Or a product that can be cleaned easily?

Additionally, I did generate what I think are some great ideas for chapters for book 6, so the time sitting waiting for the ancient Mac to do something wasn't totally wasted. (apart from the whole earning money thing, which I accept as necessary)

So I guess I have no jobs for tomorrow, and if you could see the look of shock and surprise on my face right now, I would be shocked and surprised because I'm supposed to be alone in this room.

No game, Sean will be galavanting around Canada at TFCon, so the only real event of note is Heather's birthday on Sunday. Making pie, but that's not really an event, is it?

Can I be disciplined about chapters, that's the real question, maybe get most of them planned out by monday? Or even start writing by then? Might be a stretch, I still don't know about finishing some of those games I've started.

July is almost half over everyone, I hope you've enjoyed, and it's been more summer like wherever you are. Because it's been almost fall like around here.

See you all next week.