2015-07-30:

Fri:
Everything took a bit longer than I wanted today, let's get started with the complaining.

The morning one was a fairly recent windows 8 machine that ran mbam pretty quickly, but then we were greeted by our old buddy "reverting windows updates." Oh good, another windows machine that can't seem to move files from point A to point B without smearing its own poop all over its face and shouting "Look at me go, I've been under development since the early nineties," (that's 22 years in case you were wondering.)

Fantastic imagery there, don't you think? Honestly, more than 20 years later and they can't even get updating to work right.

I wanted to start doing them individually to see if that would help. I did one, it went in. I did two. It was sitting there "installing" so it said for several minutes and not getting anywhere. I figured, maybe it needed to be kicked in the poop smeared head, so I rebooted it. And it promptly started doing the 22 pending updates again. NO! BAD WINDOWS. This of course failed, so after… twenty minutes of disk thrashing it had rebooted, decided it hadn't liked it after all, unrolled them, rebooted, let me log in for two seconds, rebooted again, did more unrolling, and let me get back to it.

I ran the tool MS provides for "fixing" windows update, because I guess it breaks all the time for them to need a specific tool for just this issue. It said it fixed just about everything it could possibly have fixed, (there was a bunch of stuff in the results window) leading me to wonder what the heck happened to it to screw it up so much.

After doing them in ones and twos for a bit (rebooting each time of course sweetie!) I decided (it had been 3 hours at that point) it was probably fine, and let it do the non-security updates all at once. Hope it worked out for ya.

Couldn't go back because they were paving the road where I was. Of course they didn't have a "paving road, turn around" sign FAR in advance of the event so we (the cars I mean, with us inside) crept up on the scene and then turned around, slowly, slowly, like windows trying to move bits into some backup folder so it can move bits from a temp folder to the real folder before it restores the bits from the backup folder because it didn't like how they moved into the real folder.

So I figured out another way to get onto 490, and let me pause a second here. WHY are they paving THAT road? Bay road is torn to pieces from the entrance to 104 to creek street. But is there a single person working on getting it back into shape? (Would I be asking if there was?) Why not start work on a road and then (and I realize this is a radical idea) FINISH the work on that road before moving to another? And there must be more than one road crew, right? Why just abandon a whole street with the job half done? I don't get it.

Anyway, back to 490, and got to my 11:30 about an hour late. He didn't care, it was the boss sauce people and they were there. The machine with the BSOD didn't exactly pass the HD test I did. Tried it with the seagate tool, which insisted the drive wasn't there. Tried it with the built in tool, it didn't say pass or fail and didn't list an error code. There was a space for an error code, just no code in evidence. Plugging it into another machine let me copy stuff off, but failed the seatool test at 10%. So it's getting replaced. They still use a dot-matrix printer! Wow. They're expensive now too, like as much as a laser, or MORE. GIVE IT UP WILL YOU? I modified their quickbooks form to print invoices they can use in the meantime, despite never having done it before. Must be that pesky domain knowledge or something. Darn you heuristics, why am I so good at you?!

Finally got home to eat lunch at 2:30ish, which I did. Ordered the parts for the HD replacement. Also got some RAM and things I was short on.

Went to see my parents, and came back here.

Thought I would play more darksiders II, was going fine, then randomly, because it knew of my seething hatred of all things microsoftian, my Xbox hung up completely, so I figured that was enough of that. I turned it off to see what else I could do.

Thought about a two player game rather than 4 player that I was originally going to do many years ago. I wonder… Read the rules over, that sort of thing. I don't know.

Seems like there was one other thing I had to complain about today but darned if I can't recall what it was. Maybe there wasn't?

Nah, guess that's it. Bedtime! JUMPING ATTACK!

Sat:
Got up, wondering what to do with myself on a slightly rainy but then the sun came out sorta day.

"What about those motherboards, and that piece of glass, and tearing stuff apart, and, and, and…" my brain helpfully supplied. Not one to squander the insane ramblings of my own gray matter, I set about to do just those things.

Of the two motherboards I figured out which was the good one, and got a surprise. It had a 4 core processor attached to it! No lie. The other one wouldn't even work. But I knew that was going to happen, so no big deal.
"So I hate to leave this thing just laying around," my brain further mused. "What do you think we could do with this thing?"

Well, I popped it into a case, assembled some (temporary in the case of the RAM and video card) parts I had lying around and what do you know, it's working like a champ. I put the HD that used to be in my Mac into it and that booted right up, so with a better video card (even the one in my 2008 mac is better, oddly) and some actual RAM (I borrowed what I carry around for customers) it could be a decent system. Now of course, the astute among you will be saying, "but Robert, how can you sell it if it's your actual PC HD with all your PC stuff on it?" And you'll be right. I'm not. I'll sell the iMac that's downstairs I got from a customer and put this PC in its place. Now, I still need a 10.6 Mac for any work on the old co-op book for Mom (really should redo that sucker in Live Code. If only there were like six of me…) so I dug out the Mac Mini another customer had given me and boy howdy, it actually had more RAM than the iMac. Huh! Almost as fast too. So I'll stick that on top of the thing if I need it.

This way I don't need to close everything down and reboot every time I want to use windows, allowing me to more easily make the installers for the livecode stuff I do and play PC games. I usually have six things open so rebooting, while not that awful, still had a sort of mental penalty that just made me not want to do it. No more excuses!

While the files from the one to the other were being transferred I tore apart the ancient machine the lady I sold the vista machine too, set up the piece of glass I picked up by the side of the road to replace the broken piece I have in front of my Replicator, and did some other general cleanup around here. Oh, moved the files off the 8GB little compact flash card I carried around in my case to the 60GB portable I had. The small one was full so it wasn't able to do its job anymore, which is hold drivers I download in case I need them again, so I don't have to download them again. It was handy but I haven't been able to do it for years now, and I've missed that easy access actually. Now I can start it again.

That took until 2:30.

Got the bulbs out of the xmas lights strings while watching more dark souls videos.

Straightened up a little and left for Sean's.

We only played one game, it's a long one with so many people. I got screwed in basically the first turn, getting cut off by aliens I didn't have the resources to fight. Then Sean took the spaces over because he didn't have to fight them. So I spent all of the game left alone, cut off with nowhere to go, very few resources, and passing after 0-1 actions. Weeeeeee. Still a good game though.

Won the Mario game.

Sun:
Set up the PC downstairs, got everything going related to that. I think it'll work out.

I still wonder how a quad core machine with twice the RAM can be so slow though. Honestly, it's painful, and I thought it would be better than that. You fool!

Wrote chapter 156.

No real calls over the weekend, shocking I know.

Mon:
A somewhat disappointing start to the day when I started up the car and my radio didn't go on. Just dead, nada. Perhaps the universe is telling me to listen more closely to something it's trying to tell me?

Went to the bank, and to the far Aldi for the last time. No troubles there.

Took the console apart and plugged the old radio back in, which worked so it wasn't an electrical problem with the car itself. Took off all the wire caps, made sure they were all tight, and put the caps back on. Hurray, it works again!

Then had lunch.

Watched the latest plague video and made some site changes for Ellen.

Then went out. Delivered the 4 CDs I made for the ladies and went to see the guy on Ayralt rd.
Now you might recall this person some time ago "my machine won't boot" and it just turned out to be he hid the icons on his desktop. But not so this time, he had a legitimate issue, that is, his machine wouldn't power up. I tried various power adapters I had (why no standard!!!?) but they were just not fitting. I'll have to order him one. Meanwhile I gave him my loaner, which I didn't think was as slow as it turned out to be. Aarg.

So I was there for a while.

Came back here, ate dinner.

And I got all of one call today, so I made that. And she wants… Wednesday. Super. So I have sod all to do tomorrow.

None of my craft stuff has sold, so there's no point in making MORE of it, is there?
I could put the guns I made on ebay.
I had a thought, I haven't updated the projects page on my website in a long time, I could do that. Not that it makes me any money.

I don't know.

Worked on chapter 157. Getting near the end of this world!

Tues:
And I didn't. Totally forgot about it actually. How about that.

Looked at the better of the two guns I want to put on ebay. It started leaking that shiny, sticky stuff right through the paint, so that's out. Sigh. The blank seems okay, but how can I be sure? That one seemed fine, and the worse of the two seems fine, but what if they start leaking later?

Did a lot of writing. Got almost through chapter 160. She's in the next "world" which should be a short one? It's sort of grown in scope as I've been putting it down, but whatever. We'll see how it goes.

Made pie. My berries were very squished. I have a few left, I think I'll pop them into jello or something. Maybe I can make jam? Made the crust with part whole wheat flour to see what would happen. It worked. Maybe I'll use up the rest that way.

Got two calls today. One was just a question about destroying some old equipment, while the other was about a scam call he fell for. As usual I doubt anything malicious was left on the system, but he said to come check it out anyway and I didn't argue. So I have two places to go tomorrow. Whatever will I do with so much work?

Wed:
Two jobs today were accomplished, not much to say about them, pretty standard actually. Checking the laptop there was really only one thing, the "driver… driver… something" shoot, I don't really recall. Anyway, updated his stuff with ninite, updated windows (unchecked the 10 upgrade, are you crazy?) and that was that.

The second one was a bit shorter, she had her homepage changed so I took off the add ons that had been installed and did the usual stuff.

Other "accomplishments" are getting chapter 160 done, and 1772 words of chapter 162.

Got three calls today! The unfortunate part is, not a single one left a message, so what's up with that? At least one name on my caller ID I recognize too, it's so bizarre. Who calls and doesn't say anything? Several people apparently.

Suffice to say, I have no work for tomorrow either. I was supposed to go see Ellen, but no, she's put it off until next week. At least the historical worst month is nearly over.

Worst. Week. Ever.

Thurs:
Managed to get a few things done this morning as the mail guy delivered a UPS package with a bunch of the stuff I ordered. Odd, but okay.

Installed the RAM into the iMac and got that reloaded.
Installed the SSD into the PC for the boss sauce guys and got that installed and updated. And it didn't take all freaking day, how about that?
Installed a little bit more RAM into the Mac Mini, not really important but I did it so there.
Started the copy of the installers from the toshiba 1tb drive to the old 500gb drive I pulled from the iMac. It's going pretty slow, oddly. But once that's done I can erase and sell the toshiba drive.
Put all the RAM I ordered into the trays.
Got the latest edition of Ubuntu to put on a flash drive as my current drive was too small and I hate booting from CDs so I bought an 8gb flash for that. Whew. Got that onto the flash drive.
Took pictures of the iMac, found a box for it.

Then went to go return the system. Hooking up their ancient Panasonic Dot Matrix printer with a USB->parallel adapter took FAR too long.

Oh, and the guy with the laptop and possible dead power cable? Yeah, he went to microworks for some bizarre reason and got one. $80 he said. Know how much I was going to charge him? $10. Nice job buddy. Way to show good freaking judgement.
I mean he KNEW I was ordering him one. And I specifically told him not to go to microworks. I should still make him pay for this one, jerk.

I did get some calls today, so I have in theory two places to go tomorrow, but one is just getting my own stupid laptop back. The other seems to be a cleanout. And I have two for Saturday, hurray? One is seeing why a TV in an RV isn't working, not my usual purview but okay.

Back to writing.

Got up to 2,700 words, stupid videos of dark souls 2!

Anyway, no word from Sean so probably won't be going over there tomorrow. I should be getting my "gamer" PC stuff though, so that should be nice. Then Sunday, I don't know. I did a lot of writing this week, but I guess we'll see.

Have a good weekend everyone, see you back here next week.