2015-04-16:

Worked on chapter 113 in the morning. Got it about half done before I ate lunch.

Got a little more writing done, then went to see the guy. He had moved his addresses around and erased his groupings of emails and so I just completed the job and put everything on gmail. Little more backed up that way, right?

Had a good visit with my parents, my mother is glad to be done with treatments and is feeling better, so that's all to the good.

Came back here, finished 113 up.

Found a girl with a beautiful voice singing Melodies of Life, for some reason I went searching (through the dark) for someone singing the english version and hers was on top. She's only done a couple of songs, and nothing for a year, which is a real tragedy. Take a listen, you'll wish she had done more things.

Then played more borderlands, because I will never have talent like that, so I'm gonna stick to the stuff I am good at, darn it! (headshots)

Sat:
Downloaded the latest OCremix torrent. I last did this in 07 so there were a few more songs in there, I think.
Of course, in the last 6 years they've subtly changed the names, so I couldn't just drag the folder into iTunes because then all the songs would have been duplicated. Aarg. But I didn't want to lose those fifty or so I had ratings on, so what to do…

Ended up taking out everything but the rated songs, dragging the new ones in there, then sorting by name and redoing the ratings. Not perfect, as they had added ' or turned 2 -> II so sometimes had to traverse just a distance (digitally, not physically) to find them. I know, it's a white person issue, but I'm just telling you what I was doing.

Messed about with my music collection more, finally turned those ancient MOD files into MP4s so I can put them in iTunes.

Removed all my MIDIs from iTunes because it won't play them anymore.

And general moving about of my music folder, which had in reality become quite unruly.

Played some borderlands, man, beating the denial subroutine took me many, many tries and a lot of deaths.

Sun:
Heard about, and started watching, the latest Marvel offering, Daredevil. It's pretty good.

Uh yeah, not really much else. I'm so boring.

Mon:
Had a job! First went to the store as usual, hardly worth it to go to the bank but there it is. Nice out. I wouldn't say warm but rather "a good beginning and keep trying you'll get it soon" but at least it was warmer outside the house than inside so I threw my windows and such open. Strange how it just become spring on one day. Going to be in the 60s the rest of the week too by the looks, so, yay for that.

Job was the case of the strange beeping. It wasn't her RAM, nor did her internal video give up the magic smoke as I had thought. But reseating everything and resetting her BIOS made it come back to life. Updated everything and put the printer on the network so the laptop could use it.

Came back, cleaned my car out a little, and got all the crap off my kitchen table so I have that back. It was mostly fans, ("I'm commander Shepard, and this is my favorite shop on the citadel") which now have one large box instead of three smaller ones. Brought most of my ancient PCI cards in the house, keeping less than half out there. Anyone have need for ancient computer crap? I'm your guy, right here.

Watched more Daredevil.

Which, if you think about it, could be dared-evil or dare-devil. Finished it, pretty good overall.

Created second Sesame Street DVD, now leaving out all footage not related to Tuffets, because why would you want all that crap in the first place, really? But you have to give the client what they want, right?

Not much else to report, I got a call or two, so I have some work for later in the week.

Tues:
And a pretty boring morning, I did take my plants out to the breezeway and get the dead leaves off the one.

The afternoon was a fine counterpoint, being both somewhat fruitful and somewhat obnoxious. I left at 1:45.

The first (of the two) went fine, and we discovered having the one camera turned on interfered with the wireless to a much greater extent than I would have believed. But there it was. In any case, I set up the extender and got the printer working on the one machine, and that was that.

Off to York, I spent a futile few hours trying to discover why their crystal reports from peachtree worked for the February report, left off more than half the information for the March one, and gave an error message thus far for April.

As I know neither how Peachtree or Crystal Reports work, it was quite futile. I got a sense of how it might have been put together, but given I saw no way of "debugging" the report by stepping through what it was doing one line at a time, and the error message "error in formula" (or something to that effect) was totally useless, I had nowhere to even start from.

Needless to say, that didn't work out so well, and I got home at 6:00.

So… yeah.

Got 2000 words into chapter 114.

AND THEN ACTUAL CANNIBAL SHIA LABEOUF!!

Wed:
One job in the morning at 9:30. She had some odd issues, like she had accidentally dumped some paper clips and thumb tacks into her printer, and now it was insisting there was a paper jam. (Why does it say paper jam when there IS no paper jam?) So it must have knocked a sensor or something? So I hooked up the printer that she had previously used, and that worked fine.

Her second odd thing was not getting any sound. The speakers weren't muted, and looking at the control panel while a youtube video was playing showed the levels. I plugged in some speakers and sound came out, so she's stuck with them now. (It's an all in one unit) Some general questions answered, and crap I forgot to see how mbam did, shoot. Oh well. Got back about 11:15.

Checked my sites, ate lunch, then finished chapter 114. Downloaded the Tenchi TV series as I'd never seen it, despite being a huge Tenchi fan from the original OVA. Watched a few chapters of that.

I tell a lie, I watched the whole thing.

Thurs:
A few jobs today, how did that happen?

First was the spice guy. Ugh, six machines. Six. I guess someone knows how to optimize "one job" to pay the absolute least he possibly can. In other words, gather up every machine you possibly can, wait until all possible machines are broken, and then throw a stack six feet high at the guy who comes out and has a pricing policy not unlike that of the "all you can eat" bufet. I suppose I should be thankful more people don't take advantage of my rate in this way?
Anyway, did the usual scans on a couple, set up a new one with the standard software, figured out why one was dead, answered questions. Got back a little after noon, ate lunch.

Second one was at 2:30, her machine is dead-dead-dead. Won't beep, nothing. I suspected the processor given the heatsink was totally clogged with dust, but that old Lenovo I got from the guy uses the same processor. I popped it in there and that one booted, so that's not it. Sigh. Also tried a new power supply. No go. Removing the RAM doesn't even make it beep, so this machine is toast. And not the hot, buttery kind of toast that your toaster spits out in exchange for that bread you feed it.

Worked on Mizzy's gift, as I got the (hopefully not too large) last pieces of it a few days ago. I think they came out pretty well, I just hope they aren't too heavy. Hummmm…

Good number of calls today, three.

Three jobs tomorrow, two of them in the afternoon and then one monday of all days. Looks like we might do board games this weekend. Remember when we did role playing stuff? Twice a week even. Yeah, those were good times. But I guess Neil is going to be here, so that'll be nice.

Of course also going to see my parents tomorrow.

And my morning one canceled on me because he called time warner, the place he should have called to take care of his internet issue in the first place.

Should I be happy I don't need to drive forty minutes for what would have amounted to resetting a router or sad that I won't make a tiny amount of money from the job?

Got most of chapter 115 done.

Weather has been nice, but still cool. Sounds like it's raining out at the moment. 60s on the horizon for the forceable future, I think.

And exactly two weeks left in April. Hope it's treating everyone well.

That's it for this week, see you all in seven days.