2015-05-07:

Fri:
Two jobs today, both that went pretty smoothly. The morning one was cleaning out two, but one was already fine. It was the laptop that took a half hour to finish "updates" that was the real problem. Honestly, what MS engineer saw a machine take a half hour to do updates and think "yeah, that's totally fine."

The afternoon one was a bad quicken update, which they pulled but not before he installed it. I had to apply the update again which had the proper code. Also a weird issue with his printer not printing multiple copies (oh windows) I reloaded the driver for.

Then went to see my mother, who was doing very well and actually just waiting to be released by the doctor. How about that?

Came back here, made another appointment for tomorrow that's just down the street. Love it when that happens. A machine I sold someone is not booting, complaining about the registry, what a shocker. They still have that in Win10?

Wrote chapter 121. It's about 400 words too short, I'll read it over tomorrow or so, see if I can't find a little to add. Getting to the end of this world!

Sat:
Watched some Agents of Shield in the morning until it was time to go.

Two places to go, the first was a minor cleanout, he didn't have too many issues, and I answered some questions for him.

Then over to the next place, where I had to restore a backup copy of a registry file on the one machine, and answer some questions about another. It's an old XP machine I sold him years ago, but it was top of the line then. With some more RAM it could run 7, so he wants to do it. Fine with me.

Finished up to the current episode of Shield.

Finished up chapter 121. Do you know, the first story, Harry Potter and the Magic of Paragon, had 127 chapters? I'm getting there. I haven't done a word count on this one lately. 420,185. Wow.

Sun:
Tried various things to get past the wall I've hit in borderlands. Various equipment outloads, rearranging my spec points, even getting up to 700+ stacks to increase my critical damage with sniper rifles. All didn't help.

Discovered I can go into the claptrap DLC any time, so I figured I'll raise a few levels and see what that does for me. Honestly, it's those three flying things that kill me, they just hover above me and pelt me. I can't get away from them, so I go up and down and up and down and then it's over. I don't even see where I'm getting killed from most of the time. It's very annoying.

At least it was nice today.

Mon:
But not as nice as today!

Not a lot of paying work, in contrast to last monday, but I got some stuff done.

Went shopping. Went to wegmans for some stuff, forgot gift card again but did remember $4 lotto ticket, so I finally cashed that in.
Went to get component of my mother's mother's day gift. In was even on sale! I only needed about 1/100 of it, so…
And the usual Aldi stuff.

Came back here, ate, called a guy I didn't reach yesterday, no answer.
Went down to the lawyer's office, Foxit was hung so she had about a hundred foxit processes open. I started killing them and finally it came up so I was able to close it normally.
Got gas.

Back here I helped a guy open a docx file as he had a Word 2000 version. HAHA.

Finished the gift. Of course the original I took the idea from looks a million times better. Why is that? Why does nothing I do ever look like it should? I mean it's not a complex thing, should't it look about the same? I mean I have no idea the scale of the original because there isn't anything in the picture I can really compare it to, but still.

By then I had an hour until leaving for my 6:00, which was a very odd Mac problem. 10.6. It would boot just fine, but when she logged in, it just showed the original desktop background (the field of stars) and not her weird monkey pattern… and that was it. I could command option esc and bring up the force quit menu (which was empty) and use control F12 to shut it down, so it wasn't hung.
She also had a very beat up laptop and I went through her work machine a bit.

Job took me 2 hours total. Part of it was believing the customer, as last night I asked "does it do that for all accounts" and was given erroneous information that it did. I should have checked for myself. Because the guest account (which I activated as a trial) worked just fine, as did another account I broke into as he hadn't used it in so long he forgot the password. Sigh. So at that point I realized it must be something in that account itself, and started digging. Turned out not to be a preference file as I first thought, but something in the odd LaunchAgents folder. The other admin account didn't have such a folder, and the machine came up with everything moved out of there. So I left it like that. Odd.

Got home a bit after 8:00. Made my phone calls. Someone called just at 9:00 and kept me on the phone a half hour. Something about iPhoto 2 (my goodness his machine must be ancient) and he couldn't make it ask for the library by holding the option key down. So I'm going there Friday.

Cleaned the mouse as I forgot yesterday. Got ready for the next day, three places to go of all things!

By that time it was 10:30.

Didn't want to really start anything with only that time left.

Oh yeah, very warm today, almost an acceptable amount, actually. Going to drop… twenty degrees by tomorrow?! Not going to be nice until Friday again? Sigh.

Tues:
A decent amount of work today. First one was just some loose cable inside I guess. His machine would power up but not power on, if you catch my meaning. I reseated everything inside and bob's your uncle, it came up. It was a crappy slow PC of course but there's not much I can do about that.

Then I came back here, made yummy salmon patties (and ate them) (well, one of them I mean) and then went out for my 1:00.
He had a couple of things, like setting up a new, small, laptop. So he has two laptops, an iPad, the new small laptop, and two desktops. And he's going to be 90 in a couple of months. Do you really need all those machines?

Anyway, set that up, answered some questions.

Then my last one was pretty simple, just enabling the older encryption type on a new RR modem/router for an old XP laptop that didn't understand WPA2. They couldn't do that?

Came back here, started work on chapter 122. Another robot fight, but this one should be far easier thanks to not being surrounded, shotguns, and acceleration magic.

Good number of calls today, so tomorrow is going to be… ugh. First up is taking Squeaker in for the teeth cleaning.

Then nothing until 12:00, returning the watches to the guy and checking his machine.
Then over to a guy who says it's the switch at fault for why his machine won't power up. Dude, it's never the switch.
Then over to a girl who says her machine won't power… wait this is sounding familiar.

Hopefully that won't take too long and I can then get Squeaker. I suppose they don't mind watching him for the afternoon, but I would have preferred a slightly different schedule tomorrow.

Tried getting more of the story written, but spent 45 minutes on the phone with someone doing basic tasks. Thanks for offering to send me some money. I would have refused, as usual, but the sentiment would have… of that's right you didn't. I can just stay on the phone with you until 9:30, it's fine.

Wed:
Took squeaker in, no troubles there.

Got the call about him soon afterwords, he got through fine but he does have one tooth that shows some bone loss. We're going to see in a couple of months if it gets better. At least it didn't seem as expensive as the estimate would have me believe. I don't seem to see it around here but I'm pretty sure it was higher.

Three appointments right after the other in the afternoon. The 12:00 was frustrating. Ninite wasn't working but I got it fixed by resetting the IE settings, because that makes sense. But iTunes wouldn't install. It kept giving bizarre error messages perhaps somehow related to the C++ redistributable library. (or some crap like that.) Honestly, between that and .Net it's like you need eight different versions of supplemental libraries just to run any random windows program. And of course it doesn't help that windows takes forever to do anything.

So I left there at 2:00 to get to a 2:00 appointment. Huh.

Got there at 2:30. It was just the power supply, as I expected. My goodness that machine was filthy. I think it died from overheating, personally. All the fans were blocked, seriously.

But I got to my 3:30 one early and she was having a similar "can't boot" problem but there was a different cause. Her machine got power but just blinked the power light at me.

I brought it home and replaced 9 capacitors and it came right up. Some were a little iffy, but I found replacements so I did it. Might as well, right? It went a little easier, I think I'm slightly getting the hang of it, despite a slight burn on my left pinky finger.

Lots of calls today, and got the Win7 stuff for the guy, so I'm going four places tomorrow. One is just to pick up the system, one is to make the rebath guy a new email, two are more serious.

Ran mbam on the machine I have here. Took about an hour. Seriously, this machine isn't that old.

Finished chapter 122. Turned into a combat and those robots are seriously hard to take down. She needs better non-magical weapons. Hummm

Or maybe to go into Sailor Moon world and become a Scout??????? :-)

Thurs:
Today… what can I say about you? You didn't work out exactly as I had planned. But what does, right? I should be thankful for the crap I have to put up with, no?

So it starts out with the outreach program and they have four machines for me to look at. The first one is ancient, it has a 40GB PATA drive that is slower than a really slow thing. Strapped to the underside of something else really slow. Crawling backwards across a really slow thing going in totally the wrong direction.

The second one is so taken over it can't even move, oh and the hard drive is full. 100%. Really guys, you can call me before your machine is totally pownd. When I was done the drive was totally freed up, how about that? What was it, anyway? Ah well.
Number three, nearly two and a half hours later, and number four just need updates and such, and are also ancient and struggle just to download a website with chrome. In short, machines I would scrap even if they gave them to me for free.

Anyway, given I got there at 10:00 and had a 1:30 appointment, and I left there at 1:00, I guess that means I was there three hours.

Anyway, call Ellen my 1:30 (my phone battery is about to die, by the way. Weird, sometimes it'll stay charged for days, other times hardly a day.) She wants to see me at 2:00 now. So it's too far to go home and eat lunch but too long to sit around doing nothing.

So I sat around for a half hour doing nothing.

"Oh, were you waiting long?" Yeah, a half hour. Because last night you said 1:30 so that's when I showed up. Thanks for the inconvenience.

Her machine needed the RAM reseated so it would boot, which I did. Here's the best part. She admits she bought a PC… wherever it is she goes… and paid $1200 for it. Uh, what? You need a new laptop, why not just put half that money into something decent and just carry it with you. And get rid of your piece of crap dell that's over ten years old you use here? You know, just have one machine rather than a desktop in two places, a laptop that's falling apart, and an iPad. Just get ONE decent laptop to do it all. And the specs aren't even that great. 4 GB of RAM and 500 GB on the HD. The cheapest Dell machine comes with twice those numbers, and it would have been $300 cheaper. More, because she had to buy the keyboard/mouse separately. And a monitor for $200? I have some I'd have sold you for $40 just to get them out of the house!

Passed my grandmother's old house today. They're working on something new. Turning the turnaround into a second entrance to the driveway. It looks weird because it doesn't exactly match up, but maybe it's not done. Ah well.

Then over to the Bath refitter place, straightened out some email stuff and hooked the printer up to the wire rather than the wireless. Need to order a small switch, my only one is a 16 port monster I got at a garage sale a long time ago. I'm loaning it to him.

Finally over to pick up the system I built so long ago and update it to win7 from XP. Going to put it on the SATA drive and add 3GB of RAM…

And it runs pretty well, I mean for windows. Because I did that when I got home, in addition to eating a sort of lunch/dinner hybrid at 5:00. It's running windows updates now, all 196 of them. *shakes head.* Will you ever learn, MS?

Ordered the stuff for people.

Got some calls today, so I have two places to go in the morning, the iTunes guy from earlier in the week and a cleanout in the morning, then in the afternoon returning the two systems I have in my house.

Seeing my parents, giving my mother her mother's day gift.

Then at least one job on Saturday. No news on game. At some point I must do my paperwork for last month I guess.

Watched the latest Agents of SHIELD.

Oops, only three for tomorrow, iTunes guy canceled.

Worked on a story idea for the world after the next one. (because I know what the next one is going to be.)

Ah well. Sheesh, the windows machine is still only up to 81 updates and it started at around 7. It's been three hours and it isn't even half done. How does this product continue to sell?

In any case, that's another week wrapped up and we're in May. The year is almost half over already. Yeah, snuck up on you didn't it.

See you all next week.