2015-07-23:

Fri:
So, two jobs today, like I said. The morning one went fine, it was just a regular cleanout.

Watched videos, almost up to date with them (as he has yet to finish as I thought).

Then I went to my 5:00. Ugh, not great. Waited three hours while ccleaner struggled to delete tens of thousands of folders from the temp directory of the machine, (until 8:00) created by that virus or whatever that just spews random folders and odd stuff into the temp area. There were literally millions of files there.

I finally just shut it off and took it with me.

Went to see my parents, who kindly fed me dinner, and came back here.

Left the stupid laptop running all night.

There was a huge thunderstorm about 4:00, I've not seen lightning like that. Wowzers.

Checked the progress a little bit. What do you know, it's back. See, the virus or whatever stopped about January of this year, so I figured the antivirus finally caught up to it or something. But no, after I deleted a bunch of stuff it started making new folders again. IN SAFE MODE. So I let mbam run and went back to bed.

Sat:
When I got up it had finished that, I ran roguekiller and then tried to decide the fastest way to delete millions of tiny files from the machine. I tried linux, Mac OS X, it was still crawling. See, if you look at the reviews of her HD, they're universally negative. Either it crashed and burned after a few months, or when it was working, it was super slow. Yeah, I'm seeing that.

Finally at 3:00 (after doing pretty much nothing else but that all day) I decided to just reload the freaking thing. I called her to make sure it was okay, and that's what it's been doing the last hour and a half.

At least I don't have to use the crappy phone system for activation, or I didn't that time anyway. Still, she was running win 8 rather than 8.1 so it would have been an hour to upgrade it anyway. This wipes out all the crap in one shot, hurray.

Now if it would just do SOMETHING, anything, to show some progress getting the 48 updates it's supposedly working on.

What a crappy weekend, honestly.

Picked more berries. Didn't think I would find as many as I did… wait, have I said that before? Anyway, got enough for a pie and then some, so I made a pie. I might freeze the rest, and be able to have a pie a month the rest of the year. I know, I'm pie crazy but SO MANY BERRIES. Warmer today.

So let's see, that was 4:30, and it's now 8:30. It's still updating. It did 43 updates. Then the 800+ MB "SP" though they don't call them that for some bizarre reason, and now it's got another 133 updates to go, which it says (after what, twenty minutes now?) is still 0% finished.

What a fantastic product this is. And this is a recent machine. It's windows 8. The latest you can get. Is HP more to blame or MS?

Oh right, the consumer who demanded cheaper and cheaper crap so unlike Apple, PC manufacturers have to cut every corner they can just to stay in business. How's that working out for you guys? Why isn't there an SSD in every machine? Why are processor speeds seeming to go backwards? Why does the machine sit there at 0% forever? It's so dumb!

And it's past midnight, and only on 72 of 129. So great a product.

Played some Darksiders 2, because why not?

Sun:
It is Sunday, right? Why is the mail truck going by? Never seen that before. Maybe they got confused? What world am I in?

Seems the updates finished overnight, of course it hadn't loaded two drivers, an "unknown device" (thanks, thanks so much) and a bluetooth controller. Apparently it was the "HP Wireless Button Driver" which of course it was. Naturally, it wasn't even listed on the site for the drivers relating to the machine. I had to do a google search for it, which brought me to a forum post, which provided a link to it. Great job, HP. Super job. Keep it up.

And it had to do another 19 updates, of course. Oh look, .NET. Right, because I tried the HP Support Assistant thinking it might do something useful, and it needed .NET, because reasons.

200+ MB more crap. Why didn't the .NET installer just get these files? How can it have so many "Security Updates?" (15) Is MS software really that… oh wait yes of course it is that bad. What world am I in?

It's finally done at 1:00. Let me remind you I got up at 10:00 and immediately went to see how it was doing. I am turning this machine off and I never, ever, want to see it again.

Wrote chapter 154, that went fine.

Plague released another video, so I watched that.

Several calls over the weekend, might have work this week?

Mon:
I certainly had work today. Of course I started off with the shopping, as normal. Only one more week of the far Aldi. I have come to know you well, other Aldi, but now is the time of our parting. Next week. Next week is the time of our parting.

Then for my 12:00. He got lucky, trying to reload his machine, he must have put the disk in while it was running so it did an "upgrade" rather than trying to put a fresh copy down and move everything to windows.old. So I typed the product number in, checked it over, it was fine.

As that was far earlier than I expected to be done, I called the laptop lady and dropped that off. No troubles there.

My 2:30 I was then an hour early for, and her monitor was red, just as she reported. I reseated the cable and that solved it. Odd, it didn't seem loose at all.
Also her scanner wasn't being found, so I got that going by reloading all of the HP software.

Back here, finished up watching my monday videos and went back out at 3:30. Oh, this is funny. I knock on the door at 4:00, as our original appointment was for 3:30. She wanted it moved to 4:00 and called me earlier in the day. First thing she says: "did you get my message?"

Uh, yeah, that's why I'm here at 4:00 and not 3:30? Some people.
Of course, she was paying for both cable AND dial up for some bizarre reason. For years now. Like, since 2007, and at $11 a month that's… 990? Ouch. I sold her a router and hooked it up, and told her to immediately cancel that crap. Why did she even… I can't even fathom.

And home! Oh, her original problem was with said dial up, so with the router there I didn't care why her PHONE connection wasn't working. I mean really.

Made 4 CDs for my always wanting CDs made ladies, and looked into some dinner.

Busy day tomorrow as well, it seems. As Rick in The Incredibles said: "Money, money, money, money."

Figured I would keep on a roll and do more writing. Didn't get far, was looking stuff up. Got only 1000 words into it.

Tues:
Pretty busy, as I thought. Noticed I used "less then" instead of "less than" on my business cards, so I've been passing them out and looking like a total idiot. Good job past me. Fantastic. Future me punches you in the face.

Dropped off the CDs first thing, then went to see her "firefox not opening" issue. Yeah, her hard drive from 2002 was just gone. Wouldn't boot. I sold her the Lenovo machine, meaning I had to go home and get it, then bring it back. Oh well.

Then to see about a machine someone "refreshed" or something, who knows. Getting a coherent story about things out of someone is nearly impossible. There was a windows.old but everything was still there? Anyway I got everything she wanted done and came back to eat lunch.

The next two were quite quick. I pressed the monitor button on the laptop, because that's a thing on PCs, and got it activated again. Also looked at new machines she can buy. Then to see the guy down the street about the stupid "hp support" or whatever it's called. It had a message for him but after showing the splash screen (wow apps still have them?) it just didn't open the main window. I reloaded it. The message? "Get ready for windows 10." Sigh.

Back here, ate dinner, then more work on chapter 155. Got another thousand words done before I went to make calls. This went quickly, because I didn't have all that many.

Got chapter 155 done.

No work for tomorrow. Wonderful. I run around for two days then have nothing? Aarg. In a word.

Wed:
Finished up the Steins;Gate anime I started watching yesterday. It was good.

Then went back to working on the game.
Even found a couple of bugs, one was on my arm, I took him outside. But there were times when it didn't "ding" when you made a new trick, and I finally figured out why. Also was missing a phenomenon sound effect because I misspelled it in the if statement. And somehow it was using an old desert image. I never would have noticed but the cactus moved when it became a phenomenon in the challenge mode. So it looked really weird. Sheesh.

Oh, and my christmas cactus continues to do well, one even has a new growth, so it might just make it through. Odd that only part out of the several I replanted is making new growth, but just that much makes me a little happy.

Got a check from the hotel from February, only two left to get, maybe next month?

But huzza, the jobs have been doubled. I have two places to go tomorrow. Or should I say only two? Better than zero.

Only 10 more challenges to make. Because I figured I would only do 50. 100 seems excessive.

Let's hope I accomplish a bit more tomorrow, I just feel like I didn't accomplish anything today.

Thurs:
And I did, I guess. Went right out in the morning to see the lawyer's office, got their few things taken care of. Apparently they've been paying for the frontier anti-virus all this time. Must be nice to just have so much money you don't even look at your bills to see what you're being charged for. (As Ron once said to Harry after finding out about vanishing leprechaun gold.)

Came back here, switched my laptop hard drive over to that 60GB SSD I've had hanging around for like a month now. Figured I would get some use of out it. What do I do with the 500GB drive? It's about 5 years old, so…

Then out at 1:00 to someone not too far away. Bay road by the way is all torn up, they're stripping it down and repaving it. Didn't think it was that bad though, aren't there roads in worse shape? Who knows! Anyway, more password issues, answered questions, got his machines all on the same dropbox account, that sort of thing.

Back here, worked on the phone about an hour for a lady I worked for last week. She was getting stuff in her browser again, so hopefully I've now taken care of that completely.

Ate dinner, worked on those last ten challenges.

Finished them!!!!

Now to do a bit more testing and find somewhere to release it to. As if.

Now to start work on the super secret project! Hahahahahahah.

It's another card game. Not sure about it. I started it once, actually, long, long ago. Is a game with three computer opponents really any fun? I wonder. Maybe I should modify it to just be one opponent? I wonder…

Did a bit of testing already, and found a bug. Sigh. Fixed the bug. I hope.

Looks like board games at Sean's this week, so that's fine.

Two jobs for tomorrow, also fine.

No work for Saturday. Somewhat fine?

Sunday? Probably writing, if I have my way. And I shall, I shall.

So really apart from Wednesday this week wasn't too bad.

Hope the same can be said by you. See you next time.