2015-08-06:

Fri:
My parts won't be arriving today, apparently the faster shipping service wasn't selected. I pay separately for that shipping service, you think they would automatically select- no wait why would they do that? So silly of me, if they can save money on shipping even though I'm paying for it, why shouldn't they? Baka.

So what happened today? I'll tell you. I'll tell you so hard!

The 10:00 was pretty slow. A windows 8 machine with only 2GB of RAM and McAfee? Yuck. Also her wireless driver decided to, I don't know, just not work. Uninstalling it brought it right back so whatever.

By the time I got home it about 1:00. Ate lunch, watched videos, went to my parent's house.

They were not there.

While I waited I petted a kitty.

They came. I helped move some bags of pellets and went to get my laptop. Which I did. Idiot. Enjoy your $70 too expensive power adapter.

Back here I ate dinner, finished up chapter 161, and I got no calls today. Sigh.

Sean texted me, might go over there tomorrow?

Worked on chapter 162.

Sat:

Jobs went fine today. First one was the "booting to nothing" in Win8 I saw the last time I was there. Ran chkdsk which said everything was fine. Ran the startup repair that said it couldn't fix anything and to check the log. The log had no real information. But the machine booted. Huh?
Made her a windows8 disk and typed up the procedure to use it.

Over at the next one I looked at all the cables he had running through the RV and finally found the antenna one. Got that hooked up to the two TVs in the thing, so he was happy about that.

Finished up chapter 162, basically working out what I wanted Susan to work on before the next world.

And then I immediately left for Sean's house.

Started the 2d mario game, which is about what I expected. Mizzy wiifused to play after a time, she said it was rather wiidiculous to try and cram 3 players into 2d mario levels from a genre originally meant for one. I can see her point. Also, I suck at platforming apparently. Who knew?

We did have a tasty dinner and got ice cream though.

Sun:
Got a bunch of stuff done today.

Watched frozen again to get a sense of what happened before Susan shows up, and thought about what should happen afterwords.
Watched the movie Sean gave me.
Looked at the scooter I got from the guy. Still don't know what the issue is.
Mowed the lawn.
Cleaned the mouse.
Looked for ancient RAM to put into the laptop, but it's too old. I have some that would work, but I don't want to "waste" it on a machine that hardly ever gets used. Also cleaned off what I had put on for the guy.

Made a few phone calls. I have… one job for tomorrow. AARG. It's not even worth going to the bank, so I probably won't. But I will go to my regular Aldi.

Got the other disney movies I want to reference so I can rewatch them.

Mon
Went to the new Aldi, it's a bit more open, sort of like the other one. At least it has the proper number of rows. Bought a multi-meter as well, my little analog one, well, I guess you could say I had no clue how to read it. And given I was looking for an exact 26 number for the scooter meant I really needed a digital one. The batteries do seem fine on it. It's missing that click, that's what concerns me. I've ordered a replacement control box.

Actually did two appointments today. The first was just a tuneup, he wasn't there because apparently he had fallen off his chair and gone to the hospital the day before. But I checked it over at least.

Did my paperwork. Actually made a whole $60 MORE than this month last year. Take that, last year! Of course, that's not saying much… I'm down $1200 from last year, total.

Then over to the 4:00, again really no problems, did the standard stuff.

Got a few calls today, one job for tomorrow, and I have really no idea. It isn't even computer related. It's the guy spending all kinds of money on "dating" sites for girls not even in this country. So it's something about that, I really have no clue.

Possibly York if he's there. Something about email, again, who can say.

I do have a short job taking some machines apart for a guy Wednesday, but we're into August so more work would be great, humkay?

Tues:
Two whole jobs today.

The weird guy was just getting scammed. On the phone he said he wanted to send this woman (in Ukraine or someplace) food. But he couldn't figure out what she was saying? Or something? Well, she wanted a "gift" which was a $600 rose arrangement. Look dude, when every picture on a site looks like it was taken in a studio and chat requests pop up literally nonstop, some kind of alarm bells should be going off in your brain.

Came back here, wrote up what I hope the plot to be for the next world. Because you never know how it's going to turn out.

Then over to York, looked into why IE wasn't showing his bank site anymore. It's because, I think, it uses 256 bit encryption while IE 8 only supports 128. Oddly paypal still uses 128, but both are using somewhat out of date algorithms, according to Chrome. Ugh.

Had a call or two today, so two tomorrow in the morning, then calling Ellen at 3:00 and maybe finally getting over there? I know, it's a lot to hope for.

Messed with the basement computer the rest of the night. Took a bit to get the old Macally iShock working. But I did. Had to find a program that emulated an xbox controller, but it exists. How about that?

Wed:
Goodness, so much work today.

The two morning jobs were pretty non-taxing. The first, just tear a bunch of laptops (and one desktop) apart for their hard drives, and then destroy the hard drives, went just fine. The desktop had two, so that was twice as much work but hardly counted.

Then over to do a checkup, make sure after a scam site popped up nothing was amiss.

Ate lunch, the accountant office had called, so I went over there. She had messed up the file association for both .lnk and .exe file, so well done there. How can windows even allow that? I mean changing the .lnk association is NOT something you're going to want to do. EVER. But yet apparently you can, it's not hard coded someplace. Same with .exe. Did a bit more stuff, her machine was not updating but I got it to.

When I got back the monitor a guy wanted me to look at was there. Tore it apart. Not the capacitors as I thought, but whipping out my trusty new multimeter I checked the (blackened) fuse and got nothing. So I think it's that. Of course I can't just pop it out. No. Dell decided "you know what we should do? Solder it onto the board. Yeah, that's gonna be hilarious!"

And you were right, Dell, you were right. I'm still laughing about it.
It has these weird wires out the sides of it so I had to unsolder the thing and try to find some. I managed it, ordered them.

By then it was 4:00.

Installed the new version of LibreOffice onto my machine.

Was cleaning off my desktop and saw the rebate form I had to fill in for the video card. Whew, glad I did that. Jumped through all their hoops. For a small fee ($3.00) you can get your rebate faster, rather than 8-10 weeks. Sheesh, I'll have forgotten by October!

[[image file="2015-08/smallfee.png" alt="no wait" ]]

Thurs:
Not much to discuss today, I fear. No jobs. And here I was thinking it was picking up again.

Wrote chapter 164 and did some PC stuff finally. Like installing the mods for FF7, launching skyrim for the first time in ages and making sure my mods were up to date. (got the high res textures too.)

Tried to fit 80 minutes of audio onto an 80 minute audio CD, which you think would be a thing. No. It started out an hour and 32 minutes so I had to cut it down substantially, still didn't work. They're leaving for a week so I guess when they get back I'll ask them what they want to do with it.

Helped a guy over the phone, he messed up his outlook.

And I have one minor job for tomorrow. A windows machine connecting to the same wireless name in two places. So I'm going to change their wireless name at home.

Uh, what else? No Sean's this week? Seeing my parents tomorrow. More writing probably. That seems about it. Unless I get some calls of course, I'll probably just go out and do them.

Why has it been so slow lately? Aarg!

See you all next week.