2015-10-09:

Fri:
Another rather boring day. My one job was in the afternoon, just making sure his machine recovered from a power oddness that happened the day before. He's not too far down the street from me, and my lights were acting weird the night before too. My UPS was complaining as well, but my clocks didn't reset. Anyway, his machine wouldn't turn off until I told him to hold the button, and he didn't turn it on until I got there.

I ended up pulling 600+ things out with mbam, further reinforcing the idea that machines are just as infected as they were years ago, they're just fast enough to deal with it without being obvious they are infected. I mean his machine was certainly slow, despite being a quad processor model, but that's just windows. It was slow after I finished the scan and rebooted.

Saw my parents, dropped off the items to go to the co-op.

Nothing else really exciting. Watched the latest episode of Heroes and worked on the next chapter.

Made some calls, yes on a Friday, but I didn't reach one person (who said in their message "maybe we can talk tonight" so I figured she would be around. She had called weeks ago but I never reached her so finally gave up.) and the other wanted Monday. So I still have nothing for tomorrow.

Apparently, I sold a book! Take a look.

[[image file="2015-10/bookonline.png" alt="sold a book" ]]

Yeah, see? Not that I'll ever get that money because there's probably some kind of limit I have to reach, just like with my old Apple developer account, but that's not the issue. The issue is the book that sold is Book FIVE. Who in their right mind bought the fifth book in a series? I mean it's the first book in the "Dean's kids" series so you don't need to read 1-4 for it to make sense, because it's a separate storyline in the same universe. But to buy book five is just blowing my mind right now.

So weird. And look where it sold- the UK. How?

I always said I wasn't an author because I hadn't sold a single book. But apparently I did, so am I an author now? Later my mother said I had sold one at the shops, too. How about that? Now to sell 10,000 or so more...

It's kind of disheartening in a way. I have 3D models up for people to buy at shapeways. Books on lulu, amazon, apple, etc. Now a game. Don't see a penny from any of it. Though I admit it's too soon to give up on Matching Seasons, it's only been two days. But the first day is going to be the best, right? Not selling anything that first day is a bad sign.

Sat:
Went and bought things for cake making. Eggs mostly. Should have checked how much oil I had, almost didn't have enough. Tried to use that old Wegman gift card I had, wouldn't work. Gave an error! It is probably more than two years old, but still.

Was able to use the last $3.00 from my rebate card, so it only cost me .70.

Then came home and baked a cake. This cake. With the demongate high logo on it. For no reason.

[[image file="2015-10/2015cake.jpg" alt="cake of black and white" ]]

It took them a moment to figure out what it was. *sadface*

Tried the lady from last night again, still no answer.

Read over the craigslist jobs posting and generally waited for it to be time to go over to Sean's house.

Dominated the castle building game we played. Not sure why. Got Chinese food, my fortune was "your spirit of adventure leads you down an exciting new path." I hope so, cookie, I hope so.

Mizzy's was empty. Whoops.

We all enjoyed cake.

Then I died many times in mario brothers. So... many... times. Wait, could the mario game be a metaphor representing my hopes for the future? Nah, I'm reading too much into it.

Sun:
Mostly worked on my new Shadowrun character, despite Stan saying the game probably wouldn't start for a month. Oh well, it's out of the way. Did a little cleanup, ripped some disks Sean gave me.

Oh yeah, watched some Dr Who, as apparently it's been running a few weeks now. So I'm caught up with that.

Didn't get a single call this weekend. Not. One. I really have to find a new line of work.

I do have two jobs tomorrow, thankfully. Shopping, of course. Welcome October.

Mon:
My goodness, did I just have the busiest day ever or did I have the busiest day ever?

Started out normally enough. Did the shopping. Bought soup stuff, saw that Aldi was still hiring so I dropped off my application. Put in my monthly ink cartridges.

Back here I ate early and got a call from the outreach people about printers and new drives and whatnot. Now, I was just there, and they in no way needed a new drive for that machine. But it was on the way home so I left.

Recovered her password easily enough, but her inkjet was dead. The color cleaned up nicely, but even after the paper towel trick, the black just wasn't having it. Looked into a new (laser) printer for her, seems there's a cheap one at Staples, and they have two.

No. They don't.

So I got her the next one up, and set that up.

Then immediately over to the outreach place. Hooked up their old printer, (which doesn't scan, despite it having a scanner on top. I guess it's just a copier/printer. Who designed that crap? Xerox, oh, okay.) And an old scanner and moved the printer that was there over- I don't know what was going through their heads. But I did it all.

Just made it to my 5:00. Setting up a new laptop. Luckily she still had internet as she had previously said she wouldn't. Got just about everything done and ready to leave. Oh, she wants outlook express moved from yet another crappy ancient machine. Fine. Oh, outlook can't directly import OE files? Wonderful. But Live Mail can, so I just used that. Meanwhile, trying to get her password reset through intuit took about an hour. Left there at 7:45. Compare those two times in your head.

Waited to make soup, didn't want to be interrupted if I got called. Made my three (THREE) calls but only reached two. So I have two jobs tomorrow.

What the heck? No calls for three days, a really busy day, and two more tomorrow? Right after I decide, yup, it's over, better get part time work fast because obviously this business isn't going to cut it.

That's about right.

Made yummy soup at 9:00, ate yummy soup.

Finished chapter 186.

Tues:
Sheesh.

Picked up the desktop at 10:00. As expected, it was the "encrypt the registry" type attack I've seen once before. Figuring there wasn't much to gain, I looked it up again just to see if there was a chance something could be done.

Turned out something could be done! I restored the backup reg files and the machine booted. End of story, right?

Not so fast, partner. The machine sat there, activity light on solid for a half hour and still hadn't recognized the keyboard and mouse. Nor would it pop up the little "what do you want to do" when I put a flash drive in. It hasn't exactly hung, but it wouldn't do anything, either.

Hoping to avoid reloading it, I tried various things. Including putting the VNC server files in the startup folder and having that come up. It did. But of course connecting to it asked for a password. So I set up a password on my downstairs machine and copied that section of the registry to the registry of the other machine, hoping that would do it.

Nope.

One suggestion on a forum was try a PS/2 adapter. Well, I have this really expensive docking station I never did much with from years ago, that's over USB. It had PS/2 ports. The bios picked it up just fine. Did windows? HA, you have to ask?

Tried booting the drive in my downstairs machine directly. Just sat there and blinked at me.

By that time it was almost 2:00 (yes, I started this at 10:20 or so) and I had to leave. So I started the drive copying to my Mac and left.

The 2:00 had upgraded to win10 and his screen seemed a bit empty. Had I never given him any of the usual programs? His windows.old file was also no help. Weird.

Got the browser working, had to install firefox and jump through some hoops of course. Edge doesn't let you pin web shortcuts to the task bar for some bizarre reason. I could only do it by making a new toolbar and sticking them in there from firefox.

After having finished he wanted to check his credit union login. So we did. He insisted up and down (and sideways) that he had the member number right. But the picture was different and it wasn't letting us log in. So I called them.

Guess what? He had the number wrong.

So I came back here and got the reload started.

I love the "to protect you, you need to get this code in another machine" part of setting up the MS account again. It's like, I have the password, that's all you need to know, MS. Don't make me jump through a bunch of hoops I can't even do because I'm not him.

Got 8.1 loaded.

We'll see how the 10 upgrade goes this time.

Hey, it worked!

Now to try doing a restore from the MS version of time machine- "File History."

Seemed to be okay. Of course, it won't do both users, and I can't set that other user up without her email address. *shakes head* I guess you can't make just local accounts anymore? That seems a bit 1984ish. And I love how it asks "are you an adult or a child" instead of "administrator" or "standard user." Sure, just dumb it down so no one has to learn anything. That'll be fine. It's been thirty years, I suppose it's already proven they won't.

Still, it got done, and that's the important part right?

Have another busy day planned tomorrow? First the ABC sale and then three jobs? Wow, sudden influx of work is sudden.

I suppose it's good that Aldi didn't call me back. Perhaps I have a greater destiny yet to play. (now with microtransactons)

Thinking more about it now, I think the PC era will pass onto the smartphone/app era, and that'll be that. Regular users won't even bother with regular PCs anymore, and just do everything from completely locked down devices with app stores. People, regular people, never really embraced computers, despite all they can do. I suppose on the one hand that's better, right? Less risk, and easier for people to use. Most never wanted to learn "computers" anyway, just a rote set of actions to accomplish a goal. But the #1 supplier of software hasn't stopped changing how their stuff works, both the OS and their #1 product, Office. Every version has to look totally different now. It's a strange dichotomy, the battle between users who don't want any change, ever, and the companies who think making everything different is the way to move forward.

Wed:
Yes indeed, a busy day all day today.

Got into the sale, only got a few things. Just don't need anything I guess. I did buy a shovel, and saw two people I knew. A customer and someone I did the IV game with, when Sean ran games.

Picked up the laptop, and yes, it has a busted screen all right. Ordered that. Naturally, forgot to apply my ebay bucks to it until one second after hitting the stupid pay button.

One piece of good news, finally got that check signed. He was home, yay!

Out at 1:00 to see the lawyer people. She had foxit open about 40 times, obviously it was hung up on something. Got logmein set up on that machine too, as she's going to be away for a whole month?

Then just made it to my 2:00, the drop off. Got the final things done there and just made it to the 3:30. Which was an ancient MacBook pro! Didn't expect that. Running 10.4 with only 1GB of RAM. She was using firefox version 3, for some perspective the current version is around 41. I sold her some RAM and updated her as far as the machine could go. 10.6.8.

And back here for yummy soup. Got $14 worth of gas on the way home. I was almost at a quarter of a tank, so… :-)

Got no calls today. Terrific. Turning a corner? What's that? So at the moment, nothing for tomorrow.

Thurs:
Got the laptop listed on ebay.

Got a call from the lady I set the laptop up for. It's BSOD already and now it won't boot. It's less than a week old! Nice job, dell. So I'm going over there at 4:00.

Worked on chapter 187 in the meantime.

Went out to see what she was having trouble with. WD tool said everything was fine. I ran chkdsk and it repaired some stuff, and it booted again. Great, that's reliability for you. Oh, and apparently it wasn't patched, as it's trying to do 120+ updates now. Seriously, if you're going to sell a Win7 machine in a Win10 era for some bizarre reason, (it had an 8 sticker on the bottom so who knows) at least make it patched from the start.

Copied some files I missed, and from her desktop. And that was that.

Finished up chapter 187 after yummy soup.

Made my couple of phone calls. Didn't reach anybody. Wheeee.

Got a tiny bit of good news in the mail. A $15 refund check from the car place, apparently it wasn't as expensive to register the new car as they thought. So yay fifteen dollars? I suppose that's a whole tank of gas, now that I think about it.

I'll try the people from today back, so hopefully I do some work tomorrow. Again, no plans for the weekend. Watching stuff Sean gave me I guess. He gave me a lot of stuff to get through. Going back to looking for a job, that sort of thing?

Oh, there is one plan for the weekend. Go back to the sale, where everything will be 75% off. See if there's anything interesting left. It's pretty far though.

If nothing else, you can take comfort in the fact we're all one week closer to it being Christmas.

See you next time.