2014-11-13:

Not that it was the iMac's fault, mind you.

Fri:
And so what did I do instead of making money?

Worked on gift stuff.

Finished painting Sean's gift and wrapped it up. It came out… okay. Not great, but it's me so I'm sure he doesn't have too high of an expectation.

Also worked on Mizzy's gift a little.

Snowed today. Yup, snow. Sort of a hail, actually.

[[image file="2014-11/icechunksontop.jpg" alt="Ice Chunks" ]]

Didn't last long, but it rained/snowed off and on all day.

And so the first week of November closes. One job tomorrow, not sure what else I'll be doing.

Sat:
Couple of major events to talk about today.

Raked the back. Broke my good rake, but I think it can be fixed. The plastic head is secured to the handle via a plastic tube. My idea is to replace it with a metal one… which is what it should have been in the first place, as it's a stressed part.

Did my 1:00 job, just a new Mac owner who found more floppies. Ugh. Anyway, put his old system back together to copy them off. Answered his next batch of questions.

Watched stuff, Constantine and such.

And that's the highlights.

Sun:
Worked on the next chapter of Susan's Chronicles.

And then wrote it, and the next chapter, because I was on a roll.

Got five calls over the weekend. And though the power of friendship I got zero jobs out of it. Oh yeah, can you feel the power? One person was injured and wanted a few days to recover. One was Ellen. One was helped over the phone. One backed out. One wanted soldering done, and I said I was willing but couldn't promise anything. 

So I have zero jobs for tomorrow! Yay! What the heck happened? I was so busy for awhile there. Aarg.

Mon:
Went shopping, didn't need much. Normal stuff there.

Came back, finished up writing the "bonus" chapter from yesterday, so I got two done for the price of one.

Got a bunch of calls today, going out at 3:30 for one in Victor, didn't reach one, one was the lawyer's office and I gave her a suggestion and she said she would see what happened. One guy just had a question about using IE. DON'T USE IE EVER.

Others called after that, but at that point it was too late for them.

Cleaned up the front yard. Wasn't going to, but it was sunny and quite nice out, so I figured I would. Near 60. Didn't take long.

As as I got close to the 4:00 I realized it was the lady with the farm, so I got to see some animals! They came right over to me, and it was just light enough on my way out to see them. Three goats (two young ones) two sheep, two donkeys and two horses. They all lined up by the fence when I came over. "Oh, you have something for us?" Even the horses were the same way. "What's that? Your hand? You want to pat my head? No, you have nothing in your hand, I am not interested."

They were all cute!

Oh right, the job. DSL trouble, and she said 1-2mb/s was normal, being out in the boonies as she was. But dropping all the time, not so much. I moved it so she can at least see the lights to know when it's dropped, and tried a new phone cable. It was a Mac, so it didn't need any cleanup or anything.

Came back, got some appointments for tomorrow and wednesday.

Tues:
Nothing too major today, in fact two of the three were quite quick.

First one was just her trying to put in gift cards. She said she had trouble, obviously they went in just fine.

Then in the afternoon a cleanout, she had a lot of junk in there, not helped by the fact her norton, apparently supplied by comcast when she lived elsewhere, hadn't worked in who knows how long.

Then the other quick one, just figuring out his Facebook password and getting their printer hooked to the new router.

Sunny again today, but it looks like that was the best day this week.

Wed:
Didn't know how right I was yesterday. And I'm not talking about the weather.

First one was fine. Macs not seeing a printer. Look at that, it saw it just fine. I'll get him some RAM for his Mac Pro that to this day only has 1GB so it can be a bit faster.

Then I went to see about finding an iPhoto library. Turns out it was on an external disk which wasn't mounted anymore. Easy fix!
But then she asked about 10.10. I said, okay, let's do it if you want. (She was still running 10.6.) Wonder if I'll ever learn to leave well enough alone?

The upgrade itself went fine. It's what happened afterwords that's killed the rest of the day. 
First of all she has over seventy THOUSAND pictures. This is not a photographer. She does not have thousands of dollars of camera equipment. Also her previous version of iPhoto was so old, I had to download a separate tool to update it. Then iPhoto (which I had to torrent, given how I had no idea if it was downloading from the store or not because there's no progress indicators) just kinda crashed when it started to do whatever it was that it needed to do.

So I yanked the folders out of the iPhoto Library folder and started importing them… manually.

But that's not the end, no hardly even the beginning. To add to this, she has over fifty THOUSAND emails. Yes, you have envisioned that number correctly. Who keeps this many emails? I doubt the president gets that many emails in a whole term! I mean seriously.

Of course, I go into a loop trying to open Mail and import all these emails, it tries, then dies. I had to remove all emails from the folders, then start it importing manually as well. So I leave, hoping a few hours would be enough.

My next one was super quick, just hooking a printer up to wireless, it was already out of the box and everything, and I thank you for the consideration. Most don't even get that far.

Picked up my monitor I loaned a guy, as I was right down the street from there.

Came back here (it's now 2:30) ate lunch. My 3:00 showed up on time, just a checkup of two machine. That went fine.

Back to iMac from hell, oh, and she has hundreds, if not thousands of documents on her desktop. I have… six? Little known fact, the more icons you have on the desktop, the slower your machine runs. At least it used to be that way. It treated each icon as a window, and it uses memory. (If I understood it correctly) So that's not helping either. She has so many, they are all blurring together and you can't even really see any to even open them.

How does this woman even function?

So the transfers are not done. Time Machine was trying to backup from the drive the iPhoto stuff was going on with, so that didn't help. I turned that off.

Opened her calendar figuring the day couldn't get worse. I was wrong. It was empty. Turns out it won't sync with iCloud, I add the account, boom, it never shows up. I used a new user and tried it, and it worked there, so it's something in the preferences. Tried copying the folder Calendar from the one account to the other. That just made it crash.

Maybe it needs a restart or something? I hope so, I left it, as it had 40,000+ emails and 30,000+ pictures to go. Hopefully 9 hours or so will allow both to finish up.

I mean I don't even have 4,000 digital images, and I've been doing digital photography, by the looks, from 2002. Maybe even earlier. Wait, no I bought my first digital camera from CompUSA, an Apple camera, so that must have been 1996-1997 timeframe? No, I worked there through collage as I recall, so it could have been later. Around that time, anyway.

THROW SOME STUFF OUT. LET IT GO. CLICK YOUR MOUSE ON EMPTY TRASH.

Oh, and at 8:30 I got to do a mini-cleanout for the guy from 3:00 because he was messing about and put a bunch of crap back on his machine. Good job!

Thurs:
Somewhat better today, thankfully.

Though I did see snow, which does things to me, as you might have picked up on. And someone was just telling me they didn't like it hot, and moved up here from Florida. Crazy. You like less energy? Buha?

Anyway, first one went super well, somewhat to my surprise. The problem child was a laptop that was shutting off. Well, took the bottom panel off and what do you know, the heatsink was right there! Wow! Unscrewed that sucker and man was it plugged up with dust. Cleaned it off and I think she'll be set.

Ironically that was three houses down from iMac lady, who knew? Stopped in there, rage increased.

Then to a cleanout, no trouble there, but I was just there not long ago. Huh.

Ate lunch, went back to iMac lady. Turned out the reason Mail was so slow to import was that it was trying to import each individual message as a FOLDER. Bwha? Basically that meant that each .exml or whatever file became several folders, a .plist and the original folder. No wonder it was locking up! Looked into other means of doing the same job, and finally found a way. It wasn't pretty, but I organized her mail a little better to boot, and iPhoto had actually finished. Her calendar worked too, after a reboot, so that was nice. So that only took the entire afternoon, and I came back here.

Good number of calls today, I have three for tomorrow and one for Saturday. Not bad.

And my fund is up $2.00. Could things be looking up for old Robert?

Thought about xmas gifts, think I've come up with a nice one for mom's birthday. Born three days before christmas, she had it rough. So yeah, dad already has all the things I found, what's the point of collecting something if you've already 'caught them all?' Oh, wait you say that's the actual point of collecting things? I must meditate deeply on these mysteries.

So I'll have to come up with other, different things, to get him. Guess we'll see.

Well, two weeks to turkey day, this month is going fast. Hope it's being good to ya'll out there, we're all in this together.