2014-10-23:

Fri:
Everything went pretty well today. First one was the BSOD, but I didn't see it. I started in safe mode, to be fair. Didn't find really anything wrong, but I did do what I could for the system. It ran okay for me so hopefully it'll stay that way. Also the other laptop's norton was over a THOUSAND days out of date. Really? That thing wasn't, I don't know, maybe popping up a message or some kind of achievement for being vulnerable for so long?

Took off the terrible mbam resident process and gave him an antivirus. Oh look, the machine is faster again.

After lunch I went out to clean three (I thought it was one) machines out, and introduced him to Dropbox.

Then over to book guy, and he couldn't manage nine pages without getting them all over the place. But I corralled them, and made the PDF.

Then over to see my parents, pet a kitty or two, and came back here.

Read about 10.10, ate dinner, played some solo Borderlands with Athena.

Sat:
Wanted to drop off the hard drive but the guy wasn't there. It had been delivered between my screen door and the door so who knows how long it had sat there?

So I cleaned up around here, and went out at 12:45 to see the lady with the internet trouble, who could not unplug her cable modem (she was all, oh, I'm too stupid, blah blah) the night before. Wouldn't have helped, in this case. It was her even more ancient than any I've seen router. It wasn't even wireless! So there went the second of my nice linksys routers with custom firmware.

Then over to Sean's. Stan/Sean were late, we were going to start at 2:00. We actually "started" at 4:30, but were going to wait for Mizzy to be done doing work stuff. So we played that gem mining game I have again forgotten the name of. We watched two episodes of Dr. Who. And by then it was 9:00 and Stan wasn't feeling too well so he left. Sigh. So I left, came back here, and we played borderlands until way too late. (Not complaining about that one)

Sun:
Started the upgrade to 10.10. Made a USB drive for it, sacrificing my 10.7 which I doubt I will ever use again.

The upgrade was a bit wonky. Took me some time to realize, oh, look, the install is actually taking place on the OTHER monitor. You know, the one that's off?

Once I got that figured out it went quite quickly. Love the new dark menubar, even if I did lose my dark lighting background. Have to find a copy of it. Maybe the laptop?

Started watching a movie Sean gave me while that was going. PS3 is busted again, as I was watching it with that and it got 1/2 through it before just freezing and not reading disks anymore. Something in the drive must be burning out the laser, or something. That's two that have failed now. So I have no idea what I'm going to do about that.

Ripped the DVD copy and watched it. Pretty good movie, stupid ending.

Downloaded my background picture from the web. Maybe it never was an Apple thing? The dark menubar looks good with my dark background. Now if I could just pin the dock to the right side again, where it belongs. Apple giveth, Apple taketh away.

Played some borderlands. Got one mission away from where the group game is. I didn't do a couple of the optional, timed, missions. Because I hate them. Finally got a good moonshine weapon. My two others have a 30% chance to ignore shields, this one actually gives me bonus XP. Too bad it's a crummy ti-laser beam.

Oiled the fans on my 360 external cooler. Much better.

Many calls over the weekend, but none today specifically. I have a full day tomorrow and a almost all slots filled for Tuesday. How about that?

Mon:
Got a ton of calls today as well, but more on that later.

It's Fall. Cloudy, yucky, and leaves are starting to fall in the back.

Shopping went normally, no surprises there.

Went out to my first job, she was infected with some general stuff, so I got that cleaned up.
The next one, the prison outreach, had two new machines. "New." Yeah, they were core 2 duos, that puts them at, what, 7 year old? Yeah. And look, they were running AVG and Win7 with crappy 80GB hard drives and 2GB of RAM. And then they wondered why they were so slow. I did what I could.

Sadly, even I cannot make a 7 year old machine… wait a second, my Mac Pro is nearing 7 years old. Let me amend my statement- I can't make a crappy machine run like a non-crappy machine.

And finally york, who as usual didn't have the problems he called me and said he had. But I talked to him about stuff, and he still says he's getting new machines for everyone. (He's been talking that way for months, maybe more than a year now?)

I have five jobs tomorrow. The printer setup, the HD setup, bringing a monitor to a guy with a busted iMac LCD, (and hoping I have the right adapter) the psychologists' possible dead hard drive and a guy with a flipped screen (love windows, you can flip your screen with a keystroke!) and printer issues.

Should be busy, busy. No news on gaming tonight, so I'm off to catch up to the group with Athena.

Tues:
Almost got through the mission, it's a long mission. But I did get through today. But it's tomorrow that will be worse.

Dropped off the hard drive and started the copy for guy one. Estimate said about the entire day so I bade him good luck.
Next up was lady one. Her machine mysteriously started working again, go figure. Backed her stuff up and the wireless glitched out. She had left and I didn't know the password, so I couldn't look up what I wanted to look up. Left her a note.

Over to the guy with the rotated screen and printer issues. He decided on not buying ink for one and a $50-100 print head for the other, but rather buying one good laser. So I went to staples and did that for him. Set it up. Do they do home set up? How much would Best Buy have charged him for that, I wonder. I charged less.

Then set up a second laser printer, which went fine.

Lastly over to Chili to see about the iMac. First couple of times it somewhat booted up but went nuts crazy. Then suddenly it worked. I left him the monitor, we'll see how it goes.

Got a ton of calls again, so there must be some big expense soon in my future. (This always happens, I'm not crazy I swear. Well, I mean I am, just not in that way.) Anyway, five places to go tomorrow, and probably four of them will be people I can't even help anyway. One "Hanging?" at 12:00, one "laptop hardware issue" and one guy I suspect is trying to edit a PDF or something. I guess we'll see. Number 5 is that iMac I sold the guy not that long ago acting up. Maybe the Hard Drive? It won't boot, so that's great.

Going to do some borderlands tonight with the others, I think.

I can't tell if this is a good week or not. (looks at tiny amount of money made thus far.) Nope! It's just all the jobs I did today where half hour affairs. (The kind without all the kissing and the guilt later) I mean it doesn't take much time to pull a printer from a box. Of course I didn't get paid yet from lady #1 so that would put the total up some more.

Wed:
Okay, so today wasn't too bad, I guess.

Morning guy really had one thing that I just took out manually. His biggest problem (according to him) was internet speed, but he is on lite so… yeah, what did you expect, sir?

Then at 12:00 a person with a laptop I had cleaned out about two weeks ago. Yeah, he was infected again. So I took care of that.

At 2:00 were the two laptops. Both had lost screws in the same place, the corner. And I think both inner gripper was busted making the hinge loose. I glued the one down, and moved the screws around so hopefully the corner stays in place now. The one laptop was completely taken over, mbam found about 800 things, I think it was? Sheesh.

The next one was just him using wordpad instead of Writer basically. And he went on and on about me not planning to vote. My grandmother was always bizarrely infatuated with that as well. Like it would make any difference at all if X person instead of Y person was in office. HA. He's working on this "letter" to try and get this president of his local union (which I guess he feels some grievance towards) which, as a writer and lover of language, offended me on numerous levels. His use of "u" for you, and not spacing things right or using correct capitals or grammar. He said he was doing it to "prove a point" but I tried to make him see it would just make him look like an illiterate moron who should not be taken seriously. He said he knew what he was doing.

Boy, the times I've told myself that line when it wasn't true! HAHA! ha ha. ha. *quiet sobbing*

Okay. He was also going on about not being able to remember things… while he had an alcoholic beverage in his hand! Read the sentence again. Yeah, you're old, that's fine, but you don't get to complain about mental breakdown while simultaneously putting a KNOWN POISON in your body. It wasn't that he was swiging down a beer either, this was serious stuff.

Just saying.

Then the last one, and the iMac hard drive failed S.M.A.R.T. so I'm giving him my old firewire external. I figure it should be fast enough to boot the machine at least somewhat reasonably. It's installing now.

Ate dinner, lots of phone calls today as well, but I only have stuff for the afternoon tomorrow. Return the iMac, and a couple of other probably minor things.

Thurs:
Started a new borderlands game, with the third character. Got to the point where she could take the pistols out of the locker that my other character left for her. I have to wonder, even at purple rarity, how useful they will be when she walks an entire skill tree to get the skill to get a mirror copy of any pistol so she can use two instead of one. Oh well.

Then work! Dropped the iMac off, no problem there.

Cleaned out and moved some files around for the next one. His little girls are growing up, they were hiding the last time I was there. This time they both came and said hello to me. He wants my HP that I put in craigslist for the girls to bang around on, so I'm going back there tomorrow to sell that to him. He didn't want the monitor or printer, anyone want an old Epson printer?

Then printed some pictures… so many pictures. That took way too long. She got a call wanting my number, but I was actually there! What are the odds? So I just went over there right afterwords to see about an email problem not far away. Took care of that, finally got home at 7:00. Made some calls, two more after the drop off tomorrow. One with a BSOD and cleanout, and one cleanout. Then over to see my parents, as usual.

No game this week that I've heard of.

Pretty busy this week, I guess. My fund is even going up. I'm only down $200 now, and somehow that's good news.

Next week is candy day, and the start of November.

The silicon is only tacky now, and holding shape. I don't know how much more solid it will get, but I'm always hopeful.
Sean's gift is done at the printers, but still hasn't shipped? What are they waiting for?

And that's it for this week, I believe. Have a good weekend everyone.