2014-12-18:

Fri:
First one was fairly quick, I turned off crappy Norton (the firewall portion) and look at that, her internet came back up! I set everything I could find back to defaults, turned it back on, internet down! I turned it off permanently. Internet up!

Yeehaa!

Number two was also a quick one. He had works documents and someone had given him OpenOffice. Mistake. You need LibreOffice to open them. So I got that machine the software it needed.

Back to eat lunch, third one was cleaning it up and getting an antivirus installed. Seems a windows update can prevent MSE (A microsoft product) from installing… on a microsoft product. Good job fellows. Luckily the first result, (an 8 page forum discussion) led me to the update so I could remove it.

Then over to my parent's house early, as it was some time until my 4:00. Saw them, got yummy cookies. Good luck on the show, mom! Then dropped off the laptop, getting there with 9 minutes to spare. Is my Timekeeper background great or what? You know it.

Funds lost again. Here's a question. Today's "gain/loss" was -$28. Yesterday the fund was about $50 down, or $7450. Subtract 7450-28=7422. So why is the fund now at $7329? That looks more like a loss of $121 to me. But you know, math is hard and everything so maybe that simple subtraction is beyond me?

Finished chapter 63, the spear is made, and it's time for the final? combat.

ehehe.

As a note, it's now 220,620 words long. I'm about exactly two years ahead of where I'm posting, so even if I stopped writing now (I won't) I could continue posting an update a week until January, 2017. Huh.

Sat:
Wrote the battle chapters. Two of them. Whew, she even used a creative solution rather than just bashing The Darkness over the head. How about that?

The next chapter should finish up that world and get to the next one. I need to do some more research on it though, I think. I wonder…

Sun:
Wrapped christmas presents, as planned. That went well, so I'm totally ready for the day.

Wrote 1/2 of chapter 66, getting Susan to the next world.

Made my "questions" for the game, as usual I bucked the trend and went my own way.
(For those of you just joining us, we do a christmas eve trivia game every year, but I always do something weird instead of just asking questions. I won't spoil it for anypony, but it should be pretty good!)

Mon:
Busy today, but only with holiday prep stuff, really. I got one call over the weekend, which didn't even result in a job. sigh.

So I had but the one that was moved from last week, setting up a new laptop. That went fine, and I came home to eat lunch.

Out then, to do the shopping. Stopped at two places and got game gifts, so that took the bulk of the afternoon.

Why do cats try to break into a fresh bag of food when they have exactly the same food just sitting there in the dish? Just one of those mysteries, I guess.

Got all the price stickers off what I had bought. They use crappy tickets, with tiny tears in them so it rips every which way, and they're very sticky.

And then did more reading for the next Susan adventure. Found all the books written on this particular world on PDF. Oh, I've read or have most of them already, I just want to refamiliarize myself with the whole world. I want to redo a late book, but start the processes earlier. Hopefully it'll be a more unique story, as I'm not going to follow the events of the book I'm "replacing" with Susan. At least, not as directly as the other stories I've rewritten.

Three calls today, so at least that's a bit of an improvement.

Washed out the bottom of my dishwasher, which I had left wayyyyyy too late.

Helped one person over the phone, by telling them to quit Safari rather than close it.

Didn't reach one.

One appointment, something about his email and possibly a slow connection? I don't know, so I guess we'll see.

More reading, the Dragon's Blood book is kind of boring, but at least I'm learning more about witchcraft, and I think I might put a witch on the boat? I have nothing but vague ideas for what I want to write next.

Tues:
Called the guy I didn't reach, set that up for 12:00 so at least I have two for today.

They both went well. Set up a new printer for #1, looked the laptop over he said he was having trouble starting the day before, and it seemed fine today.

Then reseting a DSL router to get a bit more speed out of it. It's DSL, and they admitted to having "light" service so it still wasn't that great, but it was enough for them. They were also paying extra, every month, for the crappy Frontier antivirus. Saved them that money. Cleaned the machine up (mbam found 440+ things, good job f-secure) and answered some questions.

That was that. Back home, did more reading for the next Susan adventure. I know I want a homeless girl, possibly a witch, a pirate ship attack, should the little girl be an enemy somehow? So many ways it could go.

Didn't get many calls until later, but then I ended up with three, so that's good.

So two for tomorrow morning, and one for Thursday. The first one is just setting up a TV for a guy, so that should be fairly quick. He said it was worth paying my full rate even if it took me less time, so I'm all for that. The other is just looking into why his Vista laptop so slow. Gee, could it be it's a Vista laptop? Nahhhhhh.

Picked up a third for the afternoon, setting up a new Mac. Quite the transition, actually. From a G4! to a Macbook Air? Yipes, none of his software will work, hope he knows that.

Well, if he doesn't, he will soon.

Wed:
Got all three done with a minimum of fuss.

First one went fine, just setting up a TV like I said. He was replacing this old CRT job in his basement… with a 40" lcd thing. Okay. He actually paid me more than I asked for, so thanks, TV dude.

Then over to the Vista laptop. As I suspected, it only had 1gb of RAM. I had some chips for it, put them in. Ran CCleaner, then went to figure out what was taking it so long. Somehow there were 50,000+ IE temp files. Of course it was not many megabytes, but maybe IE should work off number of files, not just size? Just a suggestion.

Ate lunch, just enough time to do that before the setup. Not sure what all it was transferring for so long, it didn't seem like he had that much stuff when I looked at his document folders when it was done. He gave me the crappy G4, yay? And he knows his software won't work now, and he was surprised. Got his crappy old printer and scanner working, but it was a close thing. On the one hand, yeah, the stuff isn't that old, but on the other, it's pretty old, and support has to drop off sometime. Right?

Rainy, cloudy, nasty, and then started snowing a bit as I got home. Double yay.

Markets went back up. Fund somewhat recovered! Now if I could make $143 every day!!! (I'm still not back to my original amount, don't get too excited)

Good number of calls today, and a good number of jobs tomorrow. Putting in the RAM I got for the iMac guy, a cleanout, and some crashing or something at the lawyers place. Work-work-work! Let's pay off that dentist bill!

Thurs:
Morning one went a little too long. It was our good friend the fileless virus. Didn't realize that's what I was dealing with at first, but there it was. Ugh.
I did get rid of it, I think, finally.

A very quick lunch, then out to install the RAM.
That went smoothly, and then I went to the lawyers office. She wasn't there, but I looked some things over. Everything seemed fine, so I'm not sure what she was talking about.

And then home.

Found out I was more of a witch than even I realized. "You know what witches are like, always looking for ways to do good and insisting they don't care about money' -The Spriggen Mirror

Sound familiar? Found that line in the next book, I'm getting through them, and I wrote down all my ideas for what I'm going to put Susan through in this world.

Fund went up 2% today, and here's me not insisting I don't care about money. I do. I guess investor confidence has returned just as swiftly as it was lost?

Good number of calls today, so I have three places to go tomorrow, and one for Saturday. The morning one is hooking up a used DVD player he can't get to work. Then in the afternoon, back to the dentist guy for something about his tablet, and then back to the lawyers office to actually talk to the person I'm supposed to be helping.

Then I'll go see my parents, give my mother her first birthday gift, and that'll be that.

Saturday we might actually do a game! Yes, we did those, you know. Then Sunday, watching the last two DVDs from grandpa so at least, in a year, I can say I watched or at least tried to watch those five dads. Also wrapping the game gifts, and generally looking forward to the last few days before christmas.

Oh, you know Winter starts this week. Yeah, you thought it started earlier, with 5 feet of snow, but no, it doesn't start until later. So that shows what you know.
It was still pretty nasty and cloudy again today.

The year inches closer to an end. See you all… well, I might not post on Christmas day, so either the day before or after. Yeah. Probably not before though.

Have a good one, y'all.