2015-01-22:

Fri:
Very quick 9:30 appointment. Her "popups" issue was classic shell generating a UAC prompt to make a change after a system update. Sheesh.
Her word problem was that she had somehow turned the grid on, and switched from print view to web view. So much for "discoverability" with the "ribbon" interface, MS. Still just as confusing and incomprehensible to the average person as the old, saner, system. So congrats.

Came back here, did the driveway again. Very cold, windy, and snowy today. Yuck.

Then out at 11:15 for another short one, showing him how to drag a file into dropbox on one machine… and off again on another. Yes, this is my life.

I owed him $20 for the sale of ink cartridges, so now I do not.

Got sunny, but stayed cold and windy. Looks like it's going to be that way for the foreseeable future, too.

Saw my parents.

Thought of a neat way to have Susan utilize her strength, speed, and skill at physical combat… without danger of killing anyone. A sword made of knockout! So obvious. Started chapter 79 with this premise in mind.

Finished chapter 79. The death burst of the half-demon killed a bunch of people, so Susan's going to try again in the morning. She just can't catch a break lately.

Sat:
Went to the only job for today, it was probably norton firewall. I just turned it off, why even bother "troubleshooting" something like that?

Also ran the standard cleaning, that sort of thing.

Came back, ate lunch, worked on chapter 80, got 2000 words into that and introduced the next Shatra. (Yes, she figured she was going to have to deal with the first one, but there's three hanging around in the kingdom, each with different powers.)

Watched the latest Constantine, a whole episode for an exorcism. Wow, DgH is much faster. But of course, they have holy people, not ESPers pretending to be holy people.

Went over to Sean's, where Neil and I won everything! Yup, if I wasn't winning Neil was. All. Night. Long.

Sun:
Changed my oil, always a fun time in the winter.

Then I basically sat and read the latest Dresden book. Yup, all of it.

Very good, would read again.

Got only a few calls over the weekend, but I have two for tomorrow, so that's good. Are the banks closed? I wonder…

Mon:
They were. They were totally closed up. And I don't think their ATM accepts checks anymore? That's okay, I didn't want to feed them in one at a time, anyway. But I did deposit my cash.

Otherwise, totally normal shopping trip, and then back here.

Worked on stickers. Sort of a mistake, printing them on the laser printer. The colors are quite different, and some of the detail is lost. I did recall that there is a higher DPI setting, next time I shall use that, perhaps it will make a difference?

Went to the first job, it was a Mac, not that it mattered. She was just having password issues. Something about the keychain, which did have something funny going on with it.

The problem was once that was fixed, she didn't know her Google password, despite it having been changed not 24 hours previously. And the only recovery option was her daughter's email! Ugh.

Then out at 2:30 for Windows to impress me again. With how bad it is, I mean. I saw a completely new way of it screwing up, and here I was thinking I had seen them all. Nope. When you saved something it gave some error about "file or directory is corrupt" or whatever, and the external I "didn't have permission" to write to. Whatever. Ran chkdsk and that seemed to fix that problem. Put the printer back, ran the standard scans, that was that.

Came back, finished the stickers up.

Finished chapter 80.

Lots of calls tomorrow, so I have four jobs lined up for the day. That's great and all, it's all the calls I got, didn't have to make anyone wait, all that jazz. Just why do they all have to be a half hour away from each other? Seriously, I'm going to spend the day going from one end of the city to the other. All the way out to where Sean lives, for Pete's sake. At least I don't see any huge snow in the forecast.

Finished chapter 81. She's about to showdown with the "king." WhooHoo!

Tues:
And we made it. Casualties were light, only half the city is in flames, and I'm sure that'll be taken care of soon, really soon now.

Anyway, first one to change the screen went fine. And I got his son's laptop because he obviously dropped it or dropped something on it, and broke that screen. Well done.

Came back here, ate lunch, ordered screen, then went back out.

1:00 finished just in time. The anti-virus didn't want to go on after I took out Norton. It's a problem others have had, it just sort of opened the system32 folder rather than, you know, turning on the antivirus. Yes, windows is that stupid. I found a command line… uh, command, that I could type which activated it. Whew. Otherwise, ran the standard scans.
Oh, right, his other story. He was having problems with his printer, but rather than do the smart thing, like, I don't know, put hp.com into his browser and click their support section, he just googled them and called some scammers in India. Yeah, that's a thing. So I took a bunch of crapware off that machine and started mbam scanning it. *shakes head*

The 3:00 was quite fast. He got a better internet speed than myself so the needed tools downloaded quite quickly. Ran quickly too, how about that.

So I was early for my 5:00, and cleaned that machine out too. Done.

Didn't get too many calls today, but a few. Have two jobs tomorrow.

Read over chapter 81, did 1854 words of chapter 82. She's in the throne room and about to throw down with the "king." I need to work out the "jesters" stats and the battle can begin!

Wed:
Try to follow along with me now:

I can buy 50 CD sleeves for 6.99, okay? So logically, buying two packs of these sleeves would run me 13.98, right? That's multiplication, I don't know how you common core cats do it, but back in the day we had these tables to memorize. Remember that mom?

Oh, she remembers…

Anyway, back to our story, sitting next to the 50 pack is the 100 pack, which you might think was slightly cheaper, given more=cheaper usually. You don't buy that multi-pack of toilet paper for nothing, right? But no, the 100 pack is 14.99. Fully a dollar more expensive than just buying two 50 packs. Is it any wonder I bought the last 50 pack while there were two full peg rows of the 100s?

I think not.

Anyway, went to the first one, a TV issue. Turns out when turning on (accidentally) a certain kind of closed captioning, a big black square appeared smack in the middle of the screen. Figured that out and turned it off.

Went to staples, got the aforementioned envelopes and red paper… which I need to take back because I already had some from last year. Sigh. That's what you get when you have $40 to spend and are only spending 7 of it and think, oh, red paper.

(alert, valentine's day is coming up, guys)

Back here, got the cable for the little laptop I took home last week, so I replaced it. Seems to have worked, the screen is fine now.

Ate lunch, viewed websites. Got the monsters ready for Susan to fight.

Out at 3:20 for my next appointment. Setting up an HP chromebook, and looking at her old laptop, which has… issues. I'm not sure what issues yet. The memory test I usually use won't run, the quick HD test said it was okay, the long test is hung maybe? No, I see it moving again. I reloaded it, hoping it was windows, but maybe it's hardware after all.

Fund is almost back up to the initial amount.

Many places to go tomorrow, though the three… no four places in the morning is just either dropping something off or picking something up.

The two in the afternoon are the real "meat" of the day.

I would like to say I finished chapter 82. Despite 3101 words the combat isn't quite over, though one of the two half-demons just died. So she's just facing two opponents now. We'll see how much longer it takes her to see if it'll become another chapter.

Thurs:
Went to my four places in the morning. Picked up the laptop.
Dropped off a laptop.
Dropped off CDs.
Installed battery.

Whew.

Came back here, had lunch, started the laptop hard drive change. Had a slight speed bump but it was fine later. Left with it just starting the windows update so when I came back it was done.

My two afternoon ones went fine. Set up the printer for a guy, answered his questions about stuff. No trouble.
The other had an odd issue, it wouldn't ping anything. It could tell me the IP address of the thing I wanted to ping, but not actually get a response back. I cleaned it out, which at least got him back online, but still no ping allowed. Turned off the firewall, everything. Weird.

Oh well, he doesn't know or care what pings are.

Started the other laptop, the one with the busted HD. That's doing windows updates, all 183 of them. Tried to do my favorite activity, Windows Activation, and after punching in all the numbers I was told it couldn't be activated, and then told by a real human (well, it could have been some kind of android, who can say) that the system was down and I had to wait two hours. AARG.

Several calls today, but I didn't talk to one person, one person had what I believe is an isolated incident, and one wanted Saturday. I did get back to the laptop lady, so I'll go over there tomorrow at 11:00.

Sean wanted to play some Borderlands tonight but I never heard back from him. So I don't know if we will or not. Same with anything Saturday.
In any case, in case we do, I'm posting this a little early.

I'll probably return the other laptop tomorrow, call that other person again, maybe do some writing. I'll work on chapter 82 after I post this.

The fund is up! I'm back in the black again, having made $100 in it today.

Not much of January left, everyone. Getting all your tax info stuff ready?

See you next week.