2015-09-11:

It went pretty much exactly as planned, with most of the work being pretty short. Stopped in to the lawyers office, apparently "automatically add file extension" was unchecked on the other machine for some bizarre reason. Why would you even have that as an option? Windows (and Macs now, to be fair, as they wanted to be "more compatible" with windows some years ago) can't tell what to do with the file if there's no extension. Why would you let someone turn it off?

Anyway, with that she couldn't open them anymore.

Then to the 10:30, a cleanout. Answered some questions, the usual.

Dropped the MacBook off, send me check soon!

Came back to have lunch, and went out again for an all in one machine I figured had a bad lamp. Nope. Just a loose power cable, made worse as her headphone cord was wrapped around it and so when she tugged it, the cord wiggled out of the socket just enough to disrupt it. I untangled it, and it stayed running. Fan was really going though, but who knows how to get the thing apart to check the heatsink. Stupid all in one machines, and yes, I'm looking at you too iMacs.

Then over to my parent's house, and back here.

Finally played some Dark Souls, got a bit further as I horribly, horribly murdered Logan. He deserved it, he was insane. Technically he's undead so he should return to the last bonfire he used. Odd really that he doesn't. All other hollows respawn, so really he should too. Weird.

Tomorrow: cleaning.

Sat:
Out of control cleaning. Scrubbed my filthy bathroom and kitchen floors. Got cobwebs out, vacuumed, washed the driveway and took some plants out. Made cookies… wait, that isn't cleaning. Oh well. You know, just stuff you have to do every ten years or so.

What do you mean you do that stuff all the time? *shocked*

Late in the evening I cut the grass in the back.

Watched some new Anime. I saw while watching a youtube video on the little sidebar about some best anime fights, and there were some that interested me I hadn't seen. So I found them.

Sun:
Woke up at 7:00. The sun had yet to come up and it was fairly cool out. I figured, "you know, maybe you should start now, given the fact you'll want to wear a jacket to protect your scrawny arms from being all scratched. up." I agreed, and got started.

About 10:00 I was done trimming the berry bushes back and my parent's arrived. We did the usual stuff, sealing the driveway, mom washed the carpet, finished the trimming. Then we watched Brave, though it was too light in this room.

After they left I put the tools and such back, watched more anime, and went to bed super, and I mean super early. I was bushed.

Mon:
Oh, by the way, I didn't reach anyone the night before. Made… four calls? Five? Didn't reach a single soul. Ugh. So I had no work for today.

What I did have is a plan to get my books out of the sun. I had two bookcases on the breezeway but I noticed the covers were really getting faded. So while dumping the water from the dehumidifier I thought about how I could rearrange the basement to fit them down there. It worked.

So now the surround sound system down there (which I got at a garage sale and has a horrible buzzing, grr) is not strewn all over the floor. The systems are all tested and work, apart from the intellivision II which turns on and plays, but the picture looks really, really bad. Sadface.

Actually, I have another surround system I might be able to hook up down there. I just remembered it. It wasn't working for awhile, then all of a sudden I tried it again and it did. It's upstairs, I'll have to take a look at it.

Anyway, it's far more accessible and looks way better. Sweet.

Here's two "before" pictures from some time ago. I should have taken some before I started. Whoops.

[[image file="2015-09/100_1887.jpg" alt="over the table" ]]

[[image file="2015-09/100_1888.jpg" alt="pointing to the wall" ]]

And here is what it looks like now:

[[image file="2015-09/p1016206.jpg" alt="pointing left" ]]

[[image file="2015-09/p1016207.jpg" alt="pointing right" ]]

Finished chapter 177.

Got no calls today, grr.

Okay, I oddly have two receivers, weird. I forget where the other one came from or if it even works. Downsides- they only have 3 video in sources so I would need to lose one and they require a powered subwoofer, where mine doesn't. So buzzing or no buzzing but downsides? Hummmmmmmm.

Worked on chapter 179, but only a little.

Reached a few people. One new person called, apparently I put a screen in for her some time ago and now it's not working. Sigh. That was apparently in February. How long do I warranty an installation for? She's 20 some minutes away.

Then at 4:00 someone having trouble logging into their new Win10 that they just installed Thursday. So he forgot his password in less than two days? Because he called me a few days ago. Just go reset it! I weighed making $30 driving over there for the five minutes of work it'll take vs just helping him over the phone. Oh, and he's 25 minutes away as well.

Why me?

Finished watching Magi.

Tues:
Did the shopping, no bank of course I didn't have enough checks to be worth the bother. Got my ink turned in and handed over a huge pile of rechargeable batteries at Staples. Also bought my $30 worth of ink so I can keep getting rewards.

Otherwise, perfectly normal. Oh, I did get cream so I can use my ice cream maker at least once this year. Now that it's finally getting hot. A week before fall. I had all the other ingredients.

Went to the first house, her LCD is in fact dead. I mailed the people to see if they would replace it, as it's not yet a year old. I hold out no hope this will happen, it was an ebay seller.

I was right. They only warrantied the thing for 120 days. So guess who gets to take a loss of $50 on this years taxes? This guy. Because I'll give it a year warranty because that's the right thing to do. (You know the right thing to do because it's the hard thing. Life tip for you.)

Got plenty of calls today. Where you were people last week when I had nothing to do?

Put the ink on ebay, sell little one, sell!

Got a little more work done on chapter 179 before I had to leave.

Left at 2:45 to put in some new printer cartridges for a guy, it was slightly the opposite direction on 490 of my scheduled 4:00 one in Chili. Reset his MS password, cleaned the machine out, removed his expired McAfee on a laptop, and set up his new printer. So I took in $50, lost $51.51 buying the screen and used gas.

Wonderful, NOT having jobs would have SAVED me money. That's how the universe works. I didn't charge printer cartridges guy, I mean I was there two minutes.

Hey, my fund was up $156 today! Woohoo! I'm only -$173 in the hole with that now! Wait… Wasn't I $500 up a couple of weeks ago?

Spent fifteen minutes trying to get someone to unplug their router. Yes. Fifteen minutes. Apparently "see that box with the flashing lights on it? Unplug it." requires great gnashing of teeth, and rending of clothing, and writhing on the floor in a panicked fury. I guess it was okay in the end? They "unplugged the phone" the first time and when I called them back they lost me again so I said forget it. Wasn't making any money there in any case.

So in the end I have one for tomorrow and one for Thursday. I'll call the outreach people and see if the lady is there, and then go straight over. Still didn't reach one person from last week, so of the five I got today I will get three paying jobs from it.

Ah, modem lady called back, it is fine. How wonderful.

Finished Chapter 179.

It was super nice today. It'll start cooling off though.

Wed:
Another banner day in Robert Land. Morning one started at 9:30, I left at 11:30 with both laptops in my possession. The two machines are the same but were bought at different times, so one has Win7 and one has win8. The win7 one ran in safe mode and did a scan, but then started to rapidly degrade.

The windows 8 one I tried doing a chkdsk on and it just repeated "fixing stuff" or whatever the phrase is over and over.

Took both out and hooked them to the vista machine downstairs. The win8 disk passed the drive test and finally completed the repairs. Once booted it did my favorite "couldn't apply updates, whoops" and rolled them back. It is at least scanning and seems to be running fine, if sluggishly but then it's a PC.

The win7 drive, which of course Toshiba doesn't supply a diagnostics tool for failed the seagate test with 99 errors on the long test, but I think it gave up. Plugging it into my Mac doesn't even mount it. So it appears dead. Once the win8 machine is done with the scan and I'm satisfied it's actually running, I'll call and see what she wants to do.

Did not reach the outreach lady, the phone didn't even ring just went to voicemail.

Oh, and the lady asked me about her phone not ringing but somehow getting a voicemail anyway. Looked into it- turns out that's a thing. Great, another scummy tactic used by telemarketers to try and get our attention. I should really listen to those 20 or so voicemails I have on my phone, maybe get rid of them. Oh well.

Watched the apple event. Didn't see anything relevant to myself, like the new Mac OS or a new Mac Pro. Just mobile crap and AppleTV. Tim said the future of television is apps. Isn't the "future of television" that television goes away? Replaced by personal devices that just download content that is desired instead of streaming it like it's the 70s?

Storage on their devices hasn't changed either. Some still start with an absolutely pitiful 16GB. I can get 32GB flash drives on newegg right at this moment for $13. I'm sure Apple could negotiate for less than that. What's with the stingy lack of storage space?

Especially for things that do "live photos" (what is this, Harry Potter?) and 4K video recording.

Ah, she got back to me. I'm headed over to the outreach place.

Finally back at 7:15. They were saying the machine I worked on before, remember the one with the svchost issue and I turned the speaker off or some crap? And it couldn't open the power control panel? Well, he said he had to turn it off at the strip in order to get it on. So I tediously reloaded win7 on it, and that at least got that opening again. I figure maybe it went to sleep and couldn't wake back up again? So I turned that off and we'll see how that goes. The other machine I reset the password on, got it booted, updated some stuff.
They're pretty good about getting me checks, so hopefully I'll be paid for that job (and the problem is solved) soon.

Answered a minor question about choosing the printer, and that was my only phone call for today. This sucks. Still haven't reached one person, well, two people but I gave up on the one. One person from before. So I have one for tomorrow morning.

The win8 machine is slothfully checking for updates. It wouldn't boot the first time I shut it off when I got it home, but it did come up the second time. Knew you could do it, laptop-chan! (that was sarcasm, in case you missed it.)

Finally finished, it has 1,181.2 MB of updates? 149 of them? WHA? There's no way THAT can go wrong, no sir!

It's been 45 minutes, it's still 0% complete. Windows. So great!

Haha! 49 minutes later and somehow it started installing. Thanks for the updates, windows. It's bizarre, even looking at the task manager under the ethernet port showed zero traffic, yet obviously it was doing something. How does it go from 0 to 100% without any in between?

Got a second job for tomorrow. Their laptop is talking to the router, but the router isn't talking to the internet. We'll have to see about that.

11:30, it's now 12% complete of "working on updates." What's it doing when it originally counts up from zero anyway? It's like it has to do the work two or three times. Three and a half hours and it's not done. Can't say I'm surprised.

Posted the last chapter of Harry Potter and the Magic of Paragon, and the first chapter of Susan's Chronicles. About time!

Thurs:
Actually made some money today?

First up was a "cleanout" though really it was just IE not working. Chrome was, if she used that like she was supposed to, she never would have called me. Oh well. Did the standard stuff, I hadn't looked at the machine in two years, and her norton was expired.

Took the laptop back, as it booted several times just fine this morning.

Then on the way back stopped at my 11:30, oddly her ethernet cable going from the modem to the router was faulty in some way. When I changed it, the internet started working. Huh.

Ate lunch.

Thought I would be going to the accountant guy, but she called again saying all was well. So that was at least my initial plan for the afternoon shot down.

Updated my website with the new URL for Susan's Chronicles.

Finished chapter 180.

Not many calls, but I do have one job for tomorrow. A machine that's not booting, so it might be the power supply? Nothing for Saturday, no news on game, so no Sean's. I'll see my parents, of course. Not much else planned for the weekend. Probably more writing, if I know me. And I do. And stressing about my business dying, you know, the usual.

See you all next week.