2015-04-09:

Do I even exist?

Fri:
Captured the second Sesame Street episode and while that was happening, put some stuff in the car and cleaned up a little around here.

Then figured I should do my paperwork, so I did that. A slight increase in money earned over last year for March but a slight overall decline in revenue.

Tried to figure out, once again, where to actually click on to submit a NYS estimated income tax payment. Didn't have to do so last year because I had paid them too much the year before.

But once again I could find nothing about it at all on the site. Their help says "go here." It does no actual directions on what to do once you "go here" which is quite unhelpful.

So I ended up printing the stupid form and actually putting a stamp on an envelope, like it was the 80s or something.

THE 1880's!

Did my one job, which turned into a real effort somehow. Her machine would boot but just show a mouse cursor, because windows is really well programmed. So I messed with it and got the desktop to come up… in safe mode, anyway. When it booted normally it gave some crap message about explorer and some error code. I looked it up, something about permissions? Having no easy way to run a "repair permissions" (like there is on a Mac, go figure) I downloaded some script/tool that was supposed to do it. It gave me an error message too. So I ran the lines ones at a time, but it didn't help.

Oddly, if in normal mode and booting into the Administrator account, it worked perfectly. So I just moved her stuff over to that and made it auto login. Stupid windows.

Then over to see my parents. Mom has 3 treatments left.

Back here, not much exciting until more borderlands, we beat the boss in the claptrap DLC. He was hard!

Sat:
With the stuff hooked up for digitizing, I decided I should finally tackle that small pile of VHS tapes I still have sitting here. First up: Bye Bye Birdie the play I was in. 1992. The quality, predictably, was rubbish. And the sound wasn't that great either. And that camera work…

…

…

was a great job by Sean, Russ, and Dave! Go AV crew forever! Except until you graduate and 1/2 of the crew disappears like they never were, the jerks.

By the way, speaking of jerky things, it's snowing. It was nice and sunny earlier.

While waiting for the 2 hour play to finish (and save to an MP4) I dug out my old G4 machine with OS 9 on it (nostalgia for the win today) so I could try and get Oni to run again.

Got 9.2.2 finally installed on it, updated the video drivers, opened it up… and it crashed. Could not get it to run for anything. Changed the colors (remember doing that, 256 mode for some games, hilarious) screen resolution, RAM allocation (oh my goodness I'm dying here) but nothing helped. I lugged it back downstairs in disgrace.

Did a bit of solo Borderlands, wanted to check out the arena that's unlocked by beating the last boss. Also put my skill tree points in a little differently. Survived the "half cake" difficultly, if the trek to get there wasn't so long, I might try a harder one. We'll see.

Movie turned out to be 4 GB. That's how noisy it was, I guess.

Then started the Disney Convention one. I thought it was going to be short, it was just the little blurb about the show. Nope! It went on and on and on… for six freaking hours! It was the speakers and the auction and everything. You can even see when the guy hands me the paper plate with Mickey drawn on it. You can't see me, but you can see that.

You can see me wearing my matching shirt, and my grandfather looking quite interested at what my grandmother is doing.

So yeah, I played borderlands on the big screen while waiting for that to finish (and wondering how the freak long it actually was). Switched from Nisha over to the Baroness. She has a whole skill tree dedicated to sniper rifles, my favorite weapon. And she's fascinated by Moxie's boobs, but then, who wouldn't be?

Having some fun playing though with her.

Sun:
More snow, like the whole day even.

Went over to dinner with my family, so we had a nice easter.

Back here, got ready for tomorrow, talked to a few people so I have some jobs tomorrow. And hey, I might sell two more of these monitors I have. Yay!

More Borderlands. The baroness is quickly becoming my favorite character, given her skills. Hit someone in the head, and you get that bullet back in your gun 75% of the time, cutting reloads? Yes please.

Mon:
I can use my front door again! Yes, this is the big news for monday friends. That the snow has melted enough to actually reach my front door.

Anyway, shopping as normal. Dropped off my ink cartridges and got a flash drive to put the footage from Sesame Street on. Otherwise normal.

Right out again to return the PC and sell her a new printer. Well, I say new, the ink was new but the printer was given to me. I only have… five more sitting around the house waiting to have something done with them.

Reset a password on her one machine, as she didn't know it. And set up the printer for the three in the office.

Send me the money! (But they're pretty good about getting it to me, unlike a certain hotel or mortgage company I could name)

Back here, ate lunch, looked for a midi to serial box I was certain I had. In 2010 I bought a USB to MIDI cable that I have no memory of. Weird. Where did that thing go? Anyway, another was only $5.00 and I used my ebay bucks so it was free and I still have $15 to spend. Go me.

Over to the tuffet lady (don't you love my descriptors, don't answer that I can't hear you) and gave her the DVD and flash drive.

Back here, was on the phone 40 minutes (long distance) to discover there are "individual" and "business" accounts on the NYS tax website. Rather than just having "person" accounts, as would be sane.

Having made an "individual" account, I was thus able to pay the state my ninety stinking dollars for the estimated tax.

Played more borderlands, not much else exciting. Did get two calls, so I have two places to go tomorrow.

Tues:
Both were in the morning, the first had a weird printer issue. It worked… sorta? I installed it on both of her machines (or re-installed it as the case may be) and it would work, but not before first saying something about the port being in use. Then it would finally print, then it would go "busy" after the paper came out and then the status window would go away. Weird huh?

The other person was a return visit from last week. Somehow she got Viper antivirus back on her machine (which I didn't see at first), and she was having trouble printing. Well I messed with it and it was only when I removed the Viper that hey presto the printer worked just fine. Also the laptop that I switched everything over to the Administrator account? It was working fine with her old account. AARG WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY WHY.

Why.

Came back here, broke the 6 hour disney thing up into manageable chunks, viewed my websites, and worked on chapter 112.

Finished it.

Then played borderlands.

Wed:
No work, not really, anyway. I dropped off some CDs I made for the CD ladies, and stopped at the mortgage place to tell them as they moved to another email host, their old email is gone. Just because you can create the same email address with the new company that doesn't bring your old email back. Sillies.

I was looking for the Miracle System floppies (you remember them, right?) and found the box to the serial to midi adapter. I knew it existed! But despite looking through a bunch of boxes and finding a lot of old stuff probably better forgotten (and a lot of dust, aargh) I still have yet to find it. Huh. Where is that silly box? It's so tiny, it's no wonder it's been lost since years ago, I guess. Would I have sold it without the box?

Resurrected some speakers I thought were busted. I've had these since the CompUSA days, they've even iMac blue! I took the one apart thinking the caps were bad and that was why it wasn't turning on. Nope. It was just the power supply. I'm dumb. I have my favorite speakers back! I knew I kept them around for a reason.

Rainy today, even saw some lightning.

Digitized two VHS tapes. The Music Man from 1994 (which had actual editing and titles, well done AV crew) and a "video professor" from the late 80s about the Mac. All the things he talks about are basically the same as today. Yet people twenty years later still haven't figured computers out. Seriously.

Ugh, no calls today either.

Thurs:
Got "the memorandum" taped. Personally of the two I wish I had "inherit the wind" but what can you do? I wonder why I never got a copy of that? Weird.

Had one job in the afternoon, didn't expect it but glad I got it. An elderly couple is moving into a managed facility and so he's losing his email address. I set him up with a gmail address and made sure all his accounts knew about the new email in case he doesn't know the passwords and needs to reset them. This took two hours. Oh well, at least I got paid for a job.

Finished the last VHS tape, the signing one. I'll look around just to make sure there aren't any more and put the VHS player back where it belongs.

And the guy has now messed up his address book. Something about "new" address book and "old" address book? I don't know what he's on about. All he had to do was nothing and it would have been fine. Somehow he messed even this up.

No game apparently, at least nothing I've been told about.

And no jobs until monday, I guess. I had a job for saturday but she called back and moved it to Monday.

At least I'll get to see my parents tomorrow, that's about the only thing exciting happening.

What happened?