2014-11-06:

Fri:
Worse than yesterday, I can tell you that.

The first one took me hours, trying to track down some new kind of virus that doesn't actually have any files on the disk. No really. It runs by injecting code from the registry into some dllhost.exe process and sidestepping some protections that are supposed to keep that exact thing from happening. Took me five different antivirus scanners to finally find it. FIVE. It apparently puts a non-ascii character in so even if you know where it is, regedit won't let you delete it. How does it do all this? I would shut down the six or so dllhost.exe processes (one which used 1gb+ of RAM) and moments later they would be back.

Seriously, MS, fix your freaking software.

It was just downloading random stuff I guess? He had a thousand or more temp folders just like the lady with the crypto virus did, similar structure. Just random web files for no reason I could discern, 15GB of them. AARG.

That made me late to my 2:30 (my first one was at 9:30 I hasten to remind you) which also went poorly. His first problem was the machine I had sold him years ago. It seemed to be the power supply as I changed that and it started behaving.

The second, and problem I still haven't managed to fix, is the internet speed. I've tried a different card, direct/wireless, a USB wireless adapter. Nothing. When in safe mode with networking I get the full 16mb/s I should be. No problem. But in regular mode I'm getting maybe 3-4. It spikes all over the place too.

I did get to hear "The Art of the Dress" from MLP, the one little girl was listening to it on her iPad. Wish I had an iPad- OH WAIT I DID.
As everything in the universe must balance I also heard the Christmas Song That Shall Not Be Named, from a certain Dora the Explorer TV show. I think you know which one I'm talking about.

The third one went fine. It was just a RAM install, and even I can't screw that up, right? Right? I was only 2 hours late to that.

One Elsa tonight, but it was nasty and raining. It's 8:00 now I suppose there could be another hour possible?

No gaming until 9:30. Until then it's trying to track down what's making this system so slow. It's not like something is using the bandwidth, the networking graph shows 0 usage while it's just sitting there.

Saw my parents, had "lunch" over there as I hadn't had time to eat anything until then. That was about… 6:00?

So that was my wonderfully horrible day. How was yours?

And it seems to have been Panda? The antivirus? Huh? AARG.

Might as well end on a positive. My fund is up $64 today, a 1.31% gain. That means I've only got $15 to go… before I get back to my original amount. So excited!

Sat:
Saw a sign for "Giant Moving Sale" and had to think:

Is this a sale to move giants?
Is this a really big sale that happens to be moving? Like you can't find it easily?

These are important questions, people.

So I did a fair share of running about today.

The jobs were pretty easy, first one actually responded to "last known good configuration" which surprised me. This allowed his mouse and keyboard to work after booting. (GO MS!) Also had to reset the networking stuff to get back online. More praise for MS!

The second one was a Mac, so I just did what it needed, and that was all fine.

Then I dropped the PC back off, talked with her a bit, and came home. By this time it was 3:30.

No game today apparently, so I didn't have to leave again.

Played a bit of Borderlands, got up to the group game.
Watched episode 2 of Constantine.
Episodes 3-4 series two of Log Horizon.
The Dr Who episode
And episode 4 of Korra.

Was watching some How it Should have Ended and Cinema Sins when Sean/Mizzy were ready, and played more Borderlands until it was time for beds.

Sun:
Sunny and not terrible outside! A crisp fail day. Fall day. Fail day… that was a total accident I swear.

Anyway, did the leaves, back and front. Hopefully 1-2 more weeks of leaves should do it.
Also because it was so nice I put up my christmas lights! I figured I might as well, I didn't at all last year because of the trip. (Has it been a year already?)
So I figured putting them up early provides balance. I won't actually light them until another three weeks or so go by, of course. But it was nice, so I figured I would do it.
The little plastic holders I put up… uh, ten years or so ago… are totally brittle now. You can just push on them with a finger and watch them crumble apart. I still had some good one is the box though, so that was fine.

Moved my clocks back after that, so I got to relive the last hour. Started thinking about the next chapter of Susan's Chronicles.
Finished chapter 51 and have a little bit more to go before I'm back to the direction of the plot again.

Tons of calls over the weekend, like 9 of them. Three tomorrow, including no file virus guy! His machine is now BSODing. YAY! SHOOT ME.

Mon:
Pretty much as expected. But the details:

Shopping as normal. Got one more string of christmas lights to fill out the front yard, found a string of 200 on a spool so that worked out nicely. I'll try figuring out my camera settings sometime and get a good picture of them. (Once it gets a little closer to the month)

Dropped off this month's ink and everything else was pretty normal.

Job #1, some distance away, was a standard cleanout. Nice to have one of them now and again, isn't it? Answer: yes.

#2 was… nothing. Really, he said he couldn't connect to the internet, oh look, he can. So I took off a couple of things I didn't recognize and that was fine.

Came back here, did my paperwork. Then out to the last one.

Had to bring it here. It's my old buddy IRQL LESS THEN OR EQUAL. I changed the video card, turned off stuff, (ethernet, sound, ports, etc) No luck. It runs in safe mode. At the every end I disabled every service and now I'm turning them on 10 at a time, rebooting, letting it run for a while, repeat.

Got some calls today, have two in the morning tomorrow, very quick ones I'm guessing. Then at 1:00 Tinker goes in, just a checkup. Then one after that.

I think I figured out what I'm making for Mizzy, we'll have to see if it's possible.

Off to reboot some more.

Tues:
First two went fine. The first guy's Safari somehow got stuck, and he didn't tell me the menus were grayed out when we spoke on the phone. So I had to force quit it and that was fine.

Second one was just dropping a power adapter off, and it worked, so fine.

Back to working on the BSOD machine. Finally narrowed it down to the networking system… or something. With the Ethernet port turned off the machine is more stable. Clicking… yes simply CLICKING on the little network icon (which should just report "no network card" or something) will cause the machine to BSOD. I'm currently downloading a SP2 version of 32bit vista (yes, he has 4GB of RAM and a 32bit OS, go figure) so I can do the "upgrade" trick and see if that helps. I know it's not hardware, it works great in Linux.

Took Tinker in for his checkup, and off to a cleanout that was a half an hour away. Sigh.

Tinker needs dental work. How can he, they both eat a lot of dry food, which should help, right?
Anyway, got the needed file downloaded, copied over to my flash drive, and with some more gyrations, got the "upgrade" process working.

Have I mentioned recently that I hate windows? No? I still do.

Went at 4:00 to Hilton, odd trouble there with a printer. Her Win7 machine which was USB connected to the printer could still see the wireless part. The Win8 laptop… could not. That was the third thing, I cleaned the desktop up and figured out her older laptop's hard drive was busted. Why did toshiba, that makes hard drives, put a seagate hard drive into that machine? Who knows. Anyway, shared the printer and that worked, so whatever.

Came back, made phone calls. Then tasty soup.

The upgrade seems to have worked. It took… four hours? But finally at 8:30 it booted and has been running now for 45 minutes. (Downloading 168 updates) Thank goodness.

Time for some borderlands!

No actual work for tomorrow?

Dentist.

Wed:
Having no work this morning I decided to pull the mould out and see what it was doing.
It didn't work out. Sigh. The top was pretty cured, but the bits right next to the plastic was not, it stuck and pulled and was generally disagreeable. aargh.

Dropped off the system in the afternoon, wonder if it'll be okay.

Played some Borderlands, puttered around. Not much to report today.

Thurs:
Some things to report today though. Guess what? He called me about issues. Who would have thought.

Went to set up skype and answer some general questions in the morning. That went fine.

Got the replacement *Sean's gift* in, so I'll start painting it, hopefully tonight.

Then at 1:00 out to a cleanout. That went pretty well, it had 5,800+ entries that mbam found, which actually didn't take all that long. What took the longest was freaking .NET installing when I needed to leave. I wanted to make sure the antivirus got in properly. ugh.

Then way back to the opposite end of the Earth, setting up a printer. Also re-setup his remote. I was a bit late for that, but it went okay. Cheap, cheap printer. It insisted the starter cartridge be replaced until we reseated it a couple of times. No wireless. (Less space than a Nomad. Lame.) Oh well.

Then right nearby to Ethan Allen, another cleanout. Win8 machine, quite quick to run mbam, so that only took me a half hour.

Back here, ate, watched some airbrush videos and made calls. Not many to make… sigh.

It's actually a good thing Shapeways did send me a third one. While airbrushing them I noticed the piece that I had glued on had blown away. Just *wheft* gone. I looked around, maybe it's under the paper I have in the box. I didn't want to move them while they were still wet, so I'll look there tomorrow. Sigh, I wanted to make that one to sell, but maybe that's not going to happen. At least it gave me two practice dummies to try out the painting before I did the real one. I'm quite pleased at how it's coming out. Yeah, it's not as good as that youtube tutorial but I really like the color. The "burnt" areas could probably have been a little… something else. Maybe some green mixed with the black? Would that have worked? Or less strong, or just not done by someone who has no clue what he's doing? Anyway, it's drying now, tomorrow I'll do the lines. And then hopefully it'll be done!

No work for tomorrow. Talked PC from hell guy through some things and "don't use IE" and it stayed working while we were on the phone 20-25 minutes. No parents either, they'll be at the Shops.

I do have a job for Saturday though.

No news on game this week.

Rained hard all day today. And more rain to come. Hope there's a break over the weekend, most of my leaves are down so I'd like to get that done.

Bundle up. Looks like the 40s forever now.

Until it's the 30s.

And below.

See you next week, people.