2015-06-04:

Fri:
Got the first job done no problem. Just a standard setup, and she gave me her old laptop. It has a tiny hard drive. I'll probably use the SSD I ordered for the outreach place that never called me back. Then try and get some money for it.

Stopped at some sales on the way home. Got two shadowbox frames that need some repair work, the corners are a bit separated. Still, I'll do that repair and take two frames for $7.00 rather than one for $10-20. Also got some small lights for my room's ceiling fan.

Came back here, finished up the furniture place's PC and got the RAM installed into the Mac because that came in the mail. Got it updated.

While that was going I traced out Rainbow Dash. My blue isn't the right shade of blue, sadly. Gurrr…

Did not go at 1:30 to the guy that emailed me because he did not get back to me. So there I guess. He get back to me after 2:00, "oh, I was waiting for you." Well, I didn't know that, now did I? Because you never emailed me back and said that was fine.

So I stayed here until 3:30 when I left to go see my parents. I worked on tracing Ariel, as I have nearly every color for her. Just needed a few more shades of red for her hair.

Stopped to get that and the blue on the way.

After the visit I went to change the screen. She had an original bondi blue iMac sitting there. Haven't seen one of those in some time. The screen change went fine, sadly that was not all that was wrong with her machine. It would BSOD on boot. And my XP CD wasn't working all that well, and pro doesn't give the option to allow you to run chkdsk because it just blows right by that part. Ugh, booting XP from CD, hadn't needed to do that in a few… years.

Oh, and I can't save anything in chrome because it gives some permissions error nonsense, but at least I could use the D drive. Took the machine at 6:45 to get to my 7:00, and brought it back here.

The 7:00 went fine, changing the back wasn't all that hard.

Finally home at 8:00 or so I ate dinner. Then started banging this HD with a hammer- I mean combofix and other scans to see if I can work out what's wrong with it. The task bar doesn't come up when it boots, and gives some error messages, and half the control panels don't work and I can't uninstall anything controlled by the "windows installer" because apparently it isn't running. The services.msc is blank… what did you do to this machine?

Combofix didn't help. Gurr.

Mbam didn't help.

Doing the repair did! That only took until 10:30.

Did some writing while I waited, finished chapter 144.

And at almost 11:30 it's still installing SP3. I HATE WINDOWS.

Sat:
And of course that failed, and wanted to roll back the changes. I said "no" and just rebooted the thing. It said it has SP3 on it, but the windows installer still didn't work.

So this morning I set about reloading the machine from scratch. Backed up her stuff, reloaded Media Center 2005 (ugh, on a laptop? Why?) and then found out windows update doesn't actually work with XP anymore. It just gives errors, despite my trying it with IE6, IE7, and IE8. After that I stopped caring.

Went to my 1:00, which took about 5 seconds. Her monitor power cable was loose. That's all. That's it. Did you try even the most basic of troubleshooting tasks? Oh, no, of course not. "Dur, no power to monitor. Maybe monitor not plugged in? Hurp a durp."

Sorry, just frustrated with windows right now.

Got the win8 system in for Barbara, set that up. Even with an SSD, applying the 98 updates Win8 has already is taking forever. Oh, and the 32 GB SSD, yeah, that's had 7GB stolen rather than include a flash drive with that, so there's like 14GB free on the thing. Good thing she's just using it to write with when she travels.

Did some cutting of Rainbow Dash.

Remember that morning last week or two that I said would be revealed if it was good depending on when I got the money? I got the money for the one job, so I guess it was a good morning.

Finished Rainbow Dash. I really think those guys have one of those cutter machines, my edges just look like crap compared to theirs. and I messed up where I put her body so that messed up everything else. Oh well, one more and we'll call it quits on that sort of thing for the moment. I've got her printed out, I just need to muster the enthusiasm for doing it.

[[image file="2015-06/myraindowdash.jpg" alt="sonic rainboom" ]]

Sun:
Which I did today.

Took me… well, from 11:00 to 5:15 with one break for lunch. So about five hours? Sheesh. I'm actually somewhat happy with her, astonishingly. Her tail fin isn't nearly as long as the original which I have no clue about, as everything seems to be in the right place. But that's a small detail.

[[image file="2015-06/mermaid.jpg" alt="under the sea" ]]

Hopefully, should I sell her, subsequent ones won't take as long because at least part of the time was spent cutting out the templates. Don't have to do that now.

Cold and rainy.

Got a few calls over the weekend. The guy I replaced the back of the laptop, apparently I missed a wire, and have to shove it back in.

One for Wednesday, getting a guy a new PC. The laptop lady is out of town, so tomorrow won't be as busy as I hoped, because I still have jobs coming up but no one to do them with. Oh well, they'll get done.

Watched the Sailor Moon episodes I downloaded.

Mon:
Rained all night, still cold this morning.

Went shopping as usual. Did get a few extra things like mouse food and a bale of litter, and dropped off my monthly ink tribute. Gimmie my free stuff now! I mean… I'll go again Saturday as that'll be the last day to go to "my" aldi so I figure I might as well.

First job was rather a disappointment. Hooking up a printer, to a Mac, that was already hooked up. Okay, it was there three times, but still. He said when he tried it the job didn't go through, but okay. It worked for me. Showed him how to scan, that was worthwhile right?

Came back here, waited until 1:45 for my next one.

Did some writing of chapter 146 and watching up to episode 2 of Sailor Moon.

Went to fix the wire issue, that was fine.

Came back here. Guess who got no calls again? This guy! What the heck?

Tues:
Painted the detail stuff on the guns. Started the reload of Vista on the laptop. Given I paid $50 for the SSD I figured I wouldn't get that out of the machine, so I just erased the current drive.

Thought about using tiny wooden squares, painted, to make a pixel art picture. But the smallest it seems I can get in bulk is still pretty big.

Then I thought, why not just cut tiny squares of paper and use them? Duh. I can use my paper cutter so they're even. And 400 squares of paper is a lot cheaper than 400 wood squares. And I probably already have the colors I want, I just want to make a Mega Man, he needs like four colors?

Did my paperwork.

Dug up an old ethernet card out of my box 'o ancient crap and put it into the Lenovo I have been reloading. It picked it up right away so that machine is ready to sell.

Looked up when the next ABC sale is, figured I would donate my older XP machines as I now have two vista… three vista machines to sell. (the laptop is getting there.)

It was last month. Gee, wonder why my mother didn't volunteer?

Sun finally came out. Finished the laptop install as after four or so hours the updates were done.

Waited for the lady I want to sell this HD to email me back, didn't. Waited until 4:00 as I had another call who wanted me to come today.

Went to her place, her router was dead. Wireless or wired, it wouldn't respond to DHCP requests for an IP address. Replaced.

Went over to drop off the hard drive, she was there. Started that process.

Got over to my parents, gave them the two shadowboxes. <waves goodbye to them>

Only had one other call, but got a few tonight. So I have some scattered about the week, which is fine. My one for tomorrow morning I talked through something earlier today, so that's gone.

Worked on a crappy "sylvania" laptop running, get this, Windows CE 6. Really. Some part of IE crashes when you launch it, and I can't find any real troubleshooting information about the thing. Spent way too long on this piece of junk. Why does it even exist?

Anyway, probably work on the sailor moon shadowbox tomorrow, given I have until 4:00 before my (only) job of the day. Or maybe take a stab at the paper squares thing? What to do…

Nope, found a cool FF7 poster type thing I can totally turn into something 3D. Three layers, a bit of printing of the city in the background, cor mate, it'll be a smash.

Made a slight rewrite to chapter 146, I thought of something last night I wanted to have Susan do. I always forget to have her save!

Wed:
Started the next shadowbox on a bad note. Cut a piece of cardboard thinking I could paint it. There was a line in it, which did not go away as I painted. So I figured I would have to buy another backing.

Worked on the actual picture, as this one is going to be a bit different.

Right after lunch I went out to do a call, an odd hardware message. Turned out the old hard drive I had put into her machine was failing, and the dell she uses has some kind of monthly diagnostic program it runs which caught it. So I took it out, ran the test again to make sure it was that one it was complaining about, and it passed. So it was.

More work on the box, then out to a laptop that wouldn't boot right. Ran chkdsk on it and that cleared it up. Haven't been there for 600+ days, as that's when malwarebytes was last run. She didn't actually have anything, so how about that?

Back here, worked more on the box.

Found my christmas cactus destroyed. Yes, destroyed. Every bit of it.

To do this, one cat or another had to stand on the small table I keep the water on, and put their front paws over a large gap without knocking the whole little makeshift shelf… look, I'll just put a picture.

[[image file="2015-06/plant.jpg" alt="quite a distance" ]]

There, see? How did they even get up there? They couldn't have jumped atop the thing, they would have knocked all the pots off, there no place for a cat to stand up there.

But they did. One of them. Just chewed the leaves to pieces.

I stuck the larger pieces back in the soil, we'll have to hope they root. The main plant still one one tiny line of leaves left, perhaps it won't die.

Why? Why do this?

Got the box done pretty late. Painted the backing to be a darker green, which worked pretty well. Also put in the spotlight which was okay. I totally forgot to take a better picture of it. This one will have to do for now.

[[image file="2015-06/midgar.jpg" alt="midgar" ]]

Made my no phone calls. I am going back to iPhoto lady as her copy didn't complete. Hopefully I can just copy what didn't get moved rather than the whole thing.
I'll also go see the hotel people and the new guy. He wants to move everything to one machine, instead of two? What does that even mean? Brining my unpaid invoices, see what they say about the $150 they owe me.

I'll probably also drop off the machine I worked on for Ethan Allen. Running around, nothing better to do. Might as well.

Then I need a new project to work on.
Maybe the squares thing.

Thurs:
A rather involved "morning." Lots of running about.

Got the iPhoto remaining copy started. As it was me doing it I decided to just open up the package and copy anything that was missing from the one into the other. It wasn't a lot but it was still not the fastest thing in the world. So I eventually decided to go to the radisson while it was happening.

Went over there, the maintenance guy's profile was again messed up, so I brought that home to just reload from scratch.
Got the new guy's files moved from the older to the newer computer. Did you know outlook won't move mail from outlook express anymore? I do. I know that now. Ask me how I know that.

That code was already written, why was it necessary to get rid of it? It's still useful.

Did a few other things, like asking where the smeging heck my money was. Well, the two I put in with the maintenance guy didn't actually get processed I guess? And the one from February? Yeah, literally cut yesterday. That's four months ago. Wasn't like at the end of the month either, it was 2/3. That's four months to pay me $50. They now owe me $200 once I return this system tomorrow.

Maybe I'll get it all before the year is out. She said she would try to get them through a little faster.

Back to iPhoto lady. Finished that up, formatted the temporary drive and put it back in the box. Yes, that's finally over! Dump some of your pictures, lady!

That done I returned the system to Ethan Allen, and found two of the three P4 machines (yes, ugh, right?) had seagate hard drives while the "okay" one has an IBM hard drive. Imagine that. I offered to replace them. For money, of course.

Finally back here at 2:30, ate lunch and started the reload.

Super, got it loaded, the key is wrong. The sticker is worn off (how?) so I just used my Win7 flash as usual. Sadly it's PRO (thanks MS, gotta have 18 versions of windows) so now I have to "upgrade" it. Luckily I found my pro disk, right away even!

And it's finally done at 10:00. More than 7 hours to get a PC up and running and with all patches. And this is acceptable how, MS?

Worked a bit on the darkbolt document, made a new way of taking powers based on the magic system.

Several places to go tomorrow, plus visiting my parents before they lave for ohio. Then one job Saturday and that finishes off this week. Not great, not even as good as last week. But at least I've had some jobs.

Hope next week is better, and that my stuff is selling at the shops!

See everyone next time.