2014-07-31:

A rather unproductive weekend, which I will summarize!

One job Friday morning, my old neighborhood to straighten some things out for a guy down the street from the old house. Setting up his Roku (he didn't have the wireless password to his router and tried to connect to the guest one) and answering a few questions.

Saw my parents, dropped off the picture.

Made pie.

Went to Sean's, did game, get messed up by the Disaster Strikes card quite a bit, but at least we got more XP for it. Did not win a game of Flashpoint, but we did get close.
Stan/Sean will be around only intermittently for some time, so next game = who knows.

Found an effort by fans (Team Four Star) to both shorten, hilarify (it's a word) and cut Dragon Ball Z. The voice acting is top notch, probably better then the original dubbing, and some of the lines…

"Inject this man with science!"
Krillen: "We need a plan!" *someone dies* "We need to RUN AWAY!"

Classic.

So I spent a bunch of time watching that.

Cut the lawn, quite nice outside.

Got no calls over the weekend, so that was fun. Didn't get back to any of the people I hadn't gotten back to last week, either. Huh.

Mon:
Tons of rain last night, and all through today.

Went shopping as normal. Got a bit wet, but I did not melt so I guess I'm not a wicked witch.

Got to work on the layout of the farm and finished a chapter. Started the next one, which will be the actual fight and our heroes figuring out all is not what it seems there.

Seems like I might finally have a buyer for my old gaming dell, so I got Vista installed on that. It didn't like booting from my flash drive so I had to burn a DVD because apparently I lost my old Vista disk. Finally got fed up with my optical drive clucking along and changed it for one I had laying around. It was still PATA for gosh sakes. Yipes. Anyway, burned it, didn't make a sound, happy.

It was 5:00 before I knew it. I got a few calls today. The lady I just put the new HD in for says her machine continues to BSOD and she's getting "strange popups" which means she's infected herself before even a month has gone by. Well done. Tracking the BS down will be a challenge, it only happens every few days. Sigh.

But two others besides that. The guy with the volume shadow copy problem got back to me about 5:30, and the latest round of voodoo chanting actually worked. I erased a registry entry, restarted some services, stopped some other services, registered a whole smegload of .dll files, and it started working. Huh. Imagine that, I might actually get paid for that job.

And for the one job I have for tomorrow! Is it Christmas?

Sold that motherboard from months ago, was printing the label as the mailman drove up. Had to stick it on there with tape and go running through the rain to give it to him, several houses down.

Otherwise, bit of writing, all that jazz.

My tire was quite deflated. Down to 10psi so I really hope I don't need a new one of those.

Tues:
Did my one job, not very long. She had changed her RR password, and of course outlook just decided to have a (hidden) error message about it, rather then saying "I tried your password. It didn't work. Perhaps you changed it? Here you can type it in again."

No, that would be too smart.

I updated her stuff, ran the scans, the machine was fine otherwise.

The tire was down about 3psi in the morning. Have to keep an eye on it, could be a slow leak, which is just what I need.

Then got back to writing. 38,924 words, and I got another extra chapter out of it. Sheesh, I have 26 chapters planned, but I'm 3 chapters ahead of myself. I guess actually that's still not too bad, only slightly more then 80,000, but that's if I don't now add more. I probably will, given how it's going so far. Well, we'll see what happens.

My trackball is on the way out. The main button doesn't work so well anymore. Wonder if I could replace the switch somehow?

Got a bunch of calls. Didn't reach one person, helped one person (for an hour) get her printer installed right. She took my address, I told her normally I don't change for phone time but business has been really bad so if she wanted to send me something I would be grateful. We'll see if she does. Made one appointment for tomorrow and one for Thursday. That's not exactly "picking up" but it's better than nothing.

Sunnier today, no rain.

Wed:
Rained today though. Quite heavily on my way home, but not for long.

Did two whole jobs today, but I cheated. I did my Thursday job today.

The first one was a wireless extender that needed a bit of a talking to. I spoke harshly to it and it fell into line.
She also wanted her blue ray player hooked up to the wireless. Well, that wasn't happening. It wouldn't even scan, just tell me there were no connections available. I gave her an ethernet cable instead.

Then over to a cleanout. She said she couldn't start it, I think because the plug wasn't plugged in. (It's a laptop) After booting it in safe mode and running the standard tools it came back at 27% power, so I'm pretty sure that was it. I hope it was, if it's something else making it turn off, well, not much I can do.

My Mac was kernel panicking all last night. Found that if I run my mkv files through handbrake they get 500MB smaller and there seems to be only a negligible loss of quality. Well, with all 8 cores going it might get through 2.5 episodes and then reboot itself. This morning I took it out, dusted it out (my tire was down 3psi) and reseated the RAM and everything. There's a tool to disable cores, not specific cores worse luck, but dropping it down to only 2 has made it go through 7 episodes with no problems. Of course it takes ~10 minutes instead of ~2. But that right there is a white people problem, so I won't complain about having a machine I can't run at full speed because it crashes.

Got the hardcover of Lonely Divide. Found an error! Transposed words two. Oh well, I fixed the file so if I ever make a new revision it will be fixed. Otherwise, ship them!

Apparently Korra isn't going to be shown on TV anymore due to "declining ratings" according to the wiki. I got the 8 episodes thus far shown.

Pretty slow on the calls front as well. Helped one person out, she said she would send me some money.

Messed about with trying to figure out this iMac I've got sitting here. Do I just sell it as is, for a little money, buy the suction cups I need to disassemble it and try a new display and probably make about the same amount (because of how expensive the replacement would be) or something else? I was trying to make it go dark with screen sharing active to see if it was a logic board problem or not, it's so hard to tell otherwise, and it's been sitting there with the full screen brightness for maybe almost two hours and still going strong. Sigh. Maybe I'll just put it up as is…

Watched all of Kora.

And I have no work for tomorrow.

But at least all the videos got redone, finally. That took way too long, but I saved a ton of space. No panics and reboot. Guess the one processor doesn't like operating under load for some reason. But you would think it wouldn't matter.

Sigh.

Thurs:
I may not have had work, but I had a busy day. I got a bunch of machines that were laying around here ready for sale, and put them up for sale. I had, with the iMac and my machine running, five computers on in this room at the same time. Sheesh. The iMac screen has been perfect all day, so I don't know what's going on with it. As far as the PCs go, they all got installed smoothly, and are ready to use. New batteries, each has two hard drives (old drives, in some cases, but hey, they're old machines) so I have 3 desktop machines up on craigslist and one laptop up on ebay. Also finally tested and took a picture of that yellow on black keyboard so that went up on ebay too.

Also ordered more of that expensive mixture stuff to make more guns. Should go much better now, that I have the mold already made.

Cats were playing "floor is lava" and I was like, "guys, you only played then when you had… oh no." They did. I pulled 20+ fleas off of Tinker and just a couple off of Squeaker. Time to start vacuuming every day again. And combing. How does this happen? I looked back at a year ago, just for fun. Turns out I was battling fleas this time last year as well. Let's hope this does NOT become a yearly occurence.

Did my paperwork. Seems I'm only two jobs short of last year's July, and August of last year recovered nicely. Let's hope this year does as well. As we are moving into August "with all the strength of a raging fire."

More rain, because why not?

Helped Ellen over the phone for about two hours, getting her email back. She hit the 2 GB limit and then her mail disappeared, luckily outlook express makes a backup of that huge file so restoring that did it. Honestly, how do you have so much mail?

No other calls, just the drop off for tomorrow, getting rid of that old gaming PC. So much hardware is now ready to get out of here, it's great. Wonder if I could buy broken things on ebay and fix them, making a profit. Or maybe craigslist. Now if all this stuff just would just finish the journey out of here, we'd be set, and have more space.

And just took another 20ish fleas off of Tinker. That cat is a flea magnet! Too bad I can't apply the vacuum cleaner directly.

Anyway, looking to the future there's no game this week, and a pretty empty Saturday/Sunday combo if this keeps up. Guess I'll have to go back to the old standby, writing.

I am going to try and not forget the three bones I have left of machines to give dad for the metal. I forgot last week, of course.

Enjoy your August, people, because fall is a coming.