2015-03-19:

Fri:
Got my car inspected. There was nothing that caused it to fail, but a few things are in the red on the little sheet they give you. Sigh. Am I going to be getting a new car a year from now?
Let's see, I have only 4mm on by front brake pads, which is in the yellow. My "Fuel system" is in the yellow, "corrosion clamp" is the note there. My LR shock is leaking, LF tire rod (minor) is in the yellow. And the "evaporative control system" has "corroded clamps." Great.

The question I find myself asking, myself, is should I not put anything into my IRA this year? Instead save that money into a new car fund? The effect on my taxes would be the same, as I could take the car off if I bought it at the end of the year.

What to do?

Took a nap when I got home. (don't judge me)

Then worked on the mini-laptop. Turns out it didn't need to be reloaded, it needed a new RAM chip. So that was an easy fix, if not an easy diagnosis. The memory check actually hung, which was weird, rather than showing errors.

Put the ink I bought on ebay.

Cleaned up a bit.

Went over to my parent's house, had a nice celebration and got pony stuff. The only trouble is if I get any more, I'll need to find a bigger place for them. (Don't let that stop you, anyone reading this)

See, here's Vinyl Scratch towering over all other ponies.

[[image file="2015-03/p1016092.jpg" ]]

Anyway, as my phone volume had somehow gotten turned all the way off, I didn't get any of the texts Sean had sent me about game the next day, or playing Borderlands that night until I looked because I was wondering where Sean's texts were about playing Borderlands that night. Whoops. So we did that.

Sat:
Then I paid for all that loafing around. Three jobs, first, setting up the laptop for the lady from earlier. She gave me her old stuff, including a webcam, her monitor and speakers, USB hub, and old machine (for scrap).
I now have quite a collection of monitors I don't know what to do with. I suppose if that's my worst problem…

Next up was returning the desktop with the new capacitors in it, which didn't take long. At 3:00 I went out to a very odd problem. His machine was running very, very oddly. Like just moving the mouse around didn't feel right. Turns out, just moving the mouse caused the "system interrupts" process to spike the CPU and drag the whole machine down. Ugh. After reading up on it, and this is windows 8 by the way, the "latest and greatest" which means so much in the windows world, but I digress, I reloaded his graphics drivers and "chipset drivers" and the problem went away.

And a few things I have to say about that. First, the drivers on the Toshiba website hadn't been updated since 1/2014. But letting it auto find them from MS got me drivers from 12/2014. Seriously, if you can't keep the website up to date, stop shipping so many freaking products that you can't keep the website up to date. Seriously.

Secondly, windows is still SO BAD that just moving the mouse on a system which has the drivers provided by the manufacturer at the time of purchase can bring the thing to a screeching halt. Windows is twenty years old, folks, at least the '95 line is. Have we really not solved a few of these "tough" problems like cursor movement onscreen?

Anyway, just got that done at 4:00, leaving me to arrive only slightly late to Sean's at 4:45 where we did not see Dave or Sean's brother and played a few board games with Stan and Other Sean. Then mario kart and more World or whatever the current title is.

Had cookie slab, so good, and Mizzy made dinner so thanks, Mizzy.

Sun:
Got up late, read through one of my books I got for my birthday and started on the second. Visited my websites. Gray and icky, but at least I saw melting snow dripping off my roof so keep that action up. Maybe 50s tomorrow? Dare I to even hope?

You may recall some time ago where I postulated the only reason I started to get busy was because some major purchase was upcoming in my life. This is because that seems to be how things go. I am lent further evidence to the theory I will soon need a new car because I got eight calls this weekend. That's a Monday, a Tuesday, and part of a Wednesday worth of work. Plus I still have that battery I ordered to drop off, and an email from a customer I haven't heard from in at least five years who emailed me as well. So that's another job there. It never rains…

Played a bit of Civ V as I am often prone to do. Got into some senseless war with the Chinese and they captured one of my cities. I threw a whole bunch of units at it trying to get it back and seemingly couldn't. Finally decided to scrap the game and maybe try again later.

Mon:
Busy day, though in an area I didn't expect.

Did the shopping as normal, of course. No surprises there.

The 12:00 I just went through. She said she was having an "email issue" which of course turned out to be an AOL issue that I didn't even see. When are the last of the ancient AOLers going to be gone?

The next one was quick. He said his monitor "went white" when he opened firefox, but in reality it was just going into full screen mode and his homepage was "llocalnet" which of course is nothing so I took it off full screen mode and changed it to "localnet.com" which he said was fine. How did he even…

Then at 3:30 the long one. Which turned out basically to be Frontier. Her internet was painfully slow, like 320kb/s slow. And apparently that's the max she could actually get in that area? Huh? But she was also dropping packets, something I missed and the frontier guy I was talking to caught. Whoops.
Also wanted to have the 9.99 fee for the "security" package taken off, but she's in a nursing home at the moment. Her two sons were there and gave me her SS number as the authorization code, but the woman wouldn't take it off because I wasn't her. Uh, hello, I'm standing in her house, her two sons are right there, please stop ripping her off. (She has some bizarre linux machine built for old people with minimal function and huge buttons to press. Because why struggle to learn anything new, really?) Anyway, she can't even load this software she's been charged for how many years now?

I was there two hours, charged them for a half. It's a small gesture, but someone has to try balancing the scales, right?

But at least they're going to look into the dropped packets thing. Honestly, why even sell her a service you know you can't deliver on? 320kb/s? Single websites now are in the multi-megabyte range, how do higher ups at these companies even sleep at night?

Oh, right, pillowed by wads of cash they've taken from people too gullible to know better. Right.

Late by 45 minutes to my last one. Another customer I haven't seen in literal years. She also had DSL, at a whopping 768kb/s so that 90 MILLION in upgrades that buffalo is touting lately on billboards around here are really showing, Frontier.

Anyway, her ancient piece of crap machine needed more RAM and just a bit of attention, given how long ago it was I last looked at it, and the fact MSE expired on it about a year ago. Huh.

Got back to everyone… but one person I think, everyone wanted Wednesday. So I just have two tomorrow, and three already then.

Started season 2 of Orphan Black.

Tues:
Saw more water trickling down the roof, but it was a pretty gray day.

Called paypal to ask where my replacement debit card was, as apparently it was sent a month ago and never got here. They had no idea. Hope I get this one.

More Orphan Black.

Then the afternoon began. Only two jobs, but they lasted far longer than they should.

First up was the dentist guy. As usual, I went there to do one thing, copy files from the machine, but wound up with a bunch of bizarre things like selfie sticks and how to make folders. Why does he need two phones? I don't even technically have one phone, but he has two smartphones? Why is that a thing?

Then the second one. It went just fine until I tried to get her wireless password to put her printer on the network. She didn't know the password (this is not the shocking bit) and the login wouldn't work for the router. So I called Time Warner and spent forty minutes on the phone with the script monkey. I was then transferred to level 3 and five minutes later had the password.

Is it really worth paying that person for 45 minutes to do a job someone with actual training can do in five? By my calculation, you would need 8 less people if that one person that I talked to first could have done what the second person did immediately. Can those eight people not be trained to do the job of the one? Instead of a nightmare scenario of me trying things I had already looked up and tried myself be saving the company THAT much money that all tech people on the other end of the phone can't be "level 3?" It would save the company money, and people might actually be glad to be a RR customer rather than obsessively checking the greenlight page to see if fiber is finally coming to their neighborhood?

As with so many things, I just don't get it.

More Orphan Black, and trying to download Bioshock Infinite for free. Legit, it's the free "Gold" game for the moment. I played Sean's copy and wasn't terribly impressed, but I wouldn't mind playing it again someday.

It finally downloaded, and I finished Orphan Black.

Wed:
Most were really quick today. The first guy had some weird email error. I got rid of thousands of his emails from the crappy Frontier system, and that error went away. Maybe some kind of corrupt email?

Next was delivering the battery and setting up her new system. No troubles there.

The first one of the afternoon he admitted we could have done it over the phone, and we could have. It was just changing his login password, and another password for a secure disk image. Both easily accomplished.

Last was making sure a certain file was being backed up for the wood working guy, and getting my money from the previous work I did for him. No trouble there.

Worked on the latest Susan chapter, but got distracted by a call from the friend of a guy I was trying to do blog posts for. We actually got that straightened out, and I worked about an hour and a half trying to get the three column div to work so I didn't have to use a table. Finally got it working and pasted the stuff into it in a few minutes.

I have… no work for tomorrow? I have sort of a return job, but that's it. Sigh.

I'm playing more Civ, darn it.

Thurs:
That's what I did most of today, come to think of it. Ah well. Found a civilization type that a modder made, that's completely overpowered. Usually I can't handle easy difficulty, but I totally rocked on hard or very hard. I'm going to try it on the highest sometime. Basically you get two new city improvements, and one of them gives you tons of everything like food and production, and the other swells your bank account. Sweet!

Had to change a script file and install them manually, of course. Thanks, 2K. Windows users don't have to do that, of course, but whatever. It worked.

My one "job" was just going back to see the laptop guy. I changed it from sleep to hibernate, hopefully that solves his "won't wake up" problem.

Sunny, but cold.

A lot of the snow is melted, but not all of it.

No news on game this week, and I got no calls today either. Sure petered out at the end, huh? Apparently that phrase came from 1840's miners' slang. Who knew?

Now you do!

Anyway, I have one late job, 4:00, so I'll probably be late seeing my parents. Nothing exciting to look forward to vis a vi the weekend. Well, there is the one thing, Squeaker's "birthday" of when I got him. Hope he doesn't invite a lot of strippers over… like last year.

Hope your March is going well, it's marching on towards Spring, and it's more than half over.

See you next week.