2015-09-04:

Fri:
Sat:
Sun:

I'm writing this sunday so I'll just give you the highlights. Been a pretty busy weekend, if only for stuff around the house. One short job Friday, answering some questions and checking it over.

Saw my parents, I was just leaving as they pulled in. Helped them move a bookcase.

Went over the cracks in the driveway with the other type of filler, (I had just enough!) and used up the rest of the hole filler patching some holes. Looking today I realize I'll need to buy more. There's a bunch of holes by the deck, which didn't get very clean when I washed it off. Humm. Anyway, pieces of the driveway seem to be sinking so I'll need to fill them in.

Messed with my new iPad. Yes, prices finally came down on used ones so two years after mine was stolen, I decided to replace it. I felt I owed it to Neil to replace what I had lost. Of course I can't jailbreak it yet. Tried to load 8.4 rather than 8.4.1 but it wouldn't let me. Gurr. Updated my book list with the books I've gotten in the last two years. At least I hope I got them all. The case I had before should come in a day or two, so it'll be back to being exactly the same as when I had it stolen. Even found the stylus, just today, that hadn't been in the case. How about that?

In the words of a famous queen: "So good to have the power back."

Watched more Andromeda.

Played more Dark Souls. Got through Andor Londo (Thanks sunbro!) and got the lord vessel. Almost through to where I can beat Seath.

Painted and repaired the heat collector. The bottom was somewhat coming off, so I nailed it back together. The paint was really faded. So that should be ready for another winter.

Cleaned the mouse.

Watched the latest Plague video, getting near the end!

Watched Monsters Inc again and finished chapter 175, the first foray into the monster world. It's not going well. (For Susan.)

Cleaned the house a bit. Vacuumed the breezeway rug. Probably should do that more than once a year…

Got only a few calls, but I have two places to go tomorrow. Buying the driveway stuff as well on the way back, shouldn't take long. Last day of August, here I come.

Mon:
Lots of shopping today. Much money spent. So product. Much capitalism. Wow.

Of course the largest purchase was the labor day stuff. I bought a (as we say in Rochester) HUUUUUGE tub of sealer and cleaner. I won't have to buy sealer for years. Does that stuff go bad? Don't think so, but what do I know? Also I couldn't buy the small tub of asphalt patch as they only sold it in large bags. Grr. Also a deck brush to try and take care of some bad areas on the deck and a trowel. Never had a trowel somehow. Odd.

Then to work! The first one was short. He had stacked his two modems together (he still has the one from the phone, despite it being the one that also drives the internet normally and yes, Time Warner is freaking insane to take the charge off the account for equipment he's still using because another piece of equipment doing the same job that other piece could be doing is there. Really, how do they justify that to themselves? Oh right, by not caring.) and it was getting really, really hot. So we unstacked them, I ran some checks, somehow got him out of full screen mode for IE (USE CHROME, it's RIGHT THERE) and that was that.

Then the next one which was a little more involved. It started fine in safe mode, found a few things, no big deal. But when I started it normally it just sat there. Sigh. Started turning stuff off. Took out the old Panda, installed the newer version. That seemed to perk it up.

Then back here. Cleaned the oil spots off the driveway. Scrubbed part of the deck. Of course, that just shows the areas where I didn't scrub. Seems I'll have to scrub down the whole dang thing. And filled in the holes with my huge bag of slightly sticky rocks. Sealed the rest into a drum from last years driveway sealant. That should keep it nice and moist. For more holes in the future.
Also put some of the deck sealer into a smaller can for greater ease of use.

Then ate dinner and watched more Andromeda.

Oh, got the case for the iPad. It's a newer model or something. It has the screen protector built into the case, so no bubbles. Nice.
Also got the screwdriver, thanks Obama- I mean Apple. Seriously, why not just regular screws? Did your stupid 5 star screws stop me from replacing the battery? No. No they did not. So what was the point?

And I have no work for tomorrow. Lovely.

Time to start thinking about what I want Susan to do in the Monster world. I have a vague idea mind you.

Started writing.

Tues:
Helped my father seal his driveway in the morning.

Came back here, did paperwork. Good news, I'm up $339 from last August. In fact it's $200 up from two years ago. Sweet. Of course I'm still a net negative… booo. Oh, and the stock market continues to plunge, so… yeah.

Scrubbed off the deck.

Finished chapter 176.

And hardly got any calls today. Didn't reach the only person who might have work for me. The only other was the hotel people, something about not being able to print. I'll go over there tomorrow, not that I'll be paid for three months.

Gurr.

Wed:
Not much to report today, sadly. This has been one crappy week, let me tell you.

I did go over to the hotel, where I closed Chrome that was consuming about a gig of memory. His machine printed fine, so I'm not sure if that was the whole problem or not. The machine had no antivirus, two anti-spyware programs- yeah, messed up. I set it to rights.

On the way home I stopped into good will. Got some CD labels for $2.00 and what I hoped would be more labels for the invoices. Turns out they're too small. Boo.

Waited for the package with the HD to come. It finally did, but far too late. Plus it's been a real pain trying to install 10.10 onto it for some reason. it just keeps crashing. I did a RAM test (as I had installed new RAM as well) but that seems fine. And the drive works in my machine with 10.10 installed. I'm currently just copying his HD over to it. Says it'll be done in 1.5 hours. Ugh, why so slow?

Not sure what I'll do, it's running the awful 10.8. I'll try 10.9 I guess, that was fine. He obviously has no interest in keeping it up to date, don't see why I should. So hopefully that'll be done by 11:00.

Got no calls today, and still didn't reach the lady I didn't reach yesterday. Well, I did get one call, the lawyer's office but she's not in tomorrow.

Oh, and hey, would you look at that? I'm actually below my initial amount for what I put into the mutual funds. Super.

11:30 it finally got through the verification process and gave me some error message that it couldn't do it. Why me? It booted, but didn't stay running for long. Great, just great.

Thurs:
Spent all freaking day, 9:30 to 5:00 on this stupid crashing problem. You know what it was? The RAM.

Yeah, the RAM. Which passed the memtest check I did on it.

After trying all different ways to get the machine loaded I finally said "screw it, I'll just put both drives into my Mac Pro, copy the one to the other, and shabam, it should be fine, right? It'll just be the old drive in a new body."

Nope. It still crashed. So I thought maybe it was the SSD, as stupid as that sounds. So I put an old spinning rust drive in there. Still crashed.

Finally it dawned on me, there was a system, deep, deep in the past if the past can be said to exist, where I had a similar phenomenon.

A machine just crashed all the time, but the RAM was okay. I know it was okay because I simply swapped it with the RAM from another machine, and both machines turned out to be fine. So I put the old RAM back and the crashing stopped. AAAARRRGGGG. So I put in a 4GB chip instead. The machine beeped at me and wouldn't boot. So I pulled a 4GB chip out of my machine, the MacBook Pro Other Sean gave me, and put it in the machine. That it liked. Along with one of the original 1gb chips so it now has 5GB, rather than 4. Huh.

It's now 4:50 and it's AGAIN installing 10.10. This has just been the worst.

Of course I got a bunch of calls today, because that's how the universe works. Sit around doing nothing? No work! Desperately want to solve this problem and move on? Tons of work! Where were all you people days ago?

No more crashes! Hurray. Honestly, why didn't the RAM test give me some idea it was that? And this was RAM that Stan gave me, that came out of Mac, so I know it's compatible and whatnot.

This week, I'm telling you. I must have done something terrible to someone to deserve it, I guess?

I did manage to finish chapter 177.

I have three places to go tomorrow! Hurray! The lawyers place right in the morning, a cleanout, then in the afternoon a person I'm pretty sure has an all in one machine that she said died. Great. Oh, and dropping the laptop off of course. Guess I just blocked that out of my mind, huh? Yeah.

No news from Sean, so this weekend will be cleaning the house a bit more Saturday, then the Labor Day stuff with my parents on Sunday. Tomorrow I get some work like I said, and we're into September proper.

Two weeks until Fall begins!

See you next time.