2015-12-18:

Because that's for chumps without the Internet, yo! Get with the times, dog! Cat! Lizard? What do the cool kids say nowdays? Get off my lawn!

Fri:
Boring day! Didn't get any new build, and in fact the project leader was asking who was willing to come in Saturday… IF the build came in then. Sure, two weeks before Christmas? Though I have no life, I probably would have said yes… if I hadn't had 4 jobs the next day.

Anyway, found a few minor things and that was that.

Went shopping, then over to my parent's house. Mom's show isn't doing great.

Had a nice dinner over there, got gas, and came back home.

Worked on the little app I want to run my part of the game this year. Got it |-this close-| to being done. Only took about two hours, I'm actually pretty impressed.

Sat:
Wasn't as bad as I feared. Got the router back from the guy, looked at his medical CD. "IBM compatible PC" HAHAHAHAH. Who even says that anymore? They don't even MAKE PCs anymore. Honestly. And it had a Mac client despite not saying so on the sleeve.

But once I got it going and was looking for how to pause the image slideshow, he was all, "oh, don't worry about it, I don't need it."

Really? I got up early for the specific purpose of helping you with this stupid CD and now you "don't need it." Thanks. Thanks a lot.

Finished the little game. The only thing that wasn't working was the scaling, and I fixed that right up. It looks good! So that's done.

Back out at 10:00, looking her machine over after being scammed. Mbam found a bunch of stuff, which (like that mindspark crap I see everywhere) was pretty minor. But I gave her a real start menu (stupid win10) and that was that.

Back here I ate lunch and got to wrapping gifts. Just finished at 1:45 when I had to leave, how's that for timing? Pretty short, he had somehow gotten the firefox (safe mode) icon in his start menu so if course it wasn't exactly the same and he was freaked about it. I put the actual icon back. Started Mbam but this is a crappy XP machine, it doesn't even have SP3 on it! So I left after a half hour and it was still going.

Over to a person with "internet trouble?" but she just had email trouble. It was not a taxing job.

With two hours at that point to go before my father came over I decided to get the sunday stuff done. So I got some gifts for the game and the candy making stuff. Done!

So I have two jobs in the afternoon tomorrow, and it looks like I get the morning off. Nice.

Sun:
Few ups and downs today.

The morning was great. No stress, cold pizza for breakfast, Skyrim as far as the eye could see…

I did also try repairing my trackball. The left mouse button switch was wearing out again, so I figured I still had the old trackball, and the right mouse button switch on that worked fine. They looked like the same thing, I would just unsolder the one and solder it in place of the other. When I got it done it didn't work at all. The button I mean, the mouse still did.

Sigh.

Anyway, got my shows, played Skyrim, oh it was glorious.

Then the afternoon came.

Went over at 2:00 to see book guy. Not only had he NOT made the changes to the single file I sent him, instead continuing to work on the individual page files, he hadn't performed the upgrade as I requested. One thing he had to do. One thing. Double click an icon on his desktop. And he couldn't even manage that.

So I had to sit there about an hour while that happened. Finally was able to run the workflow I made and turn his 300 text files into 1 file. Then messed with that trying to get it to look halfway decent. Didn't manage it because I had to leave for my 4:00, which I was late for by the way. Yes, two hours over there. Two MORE hours I should say?

That one went okay. Hooked her printer up wireless, answered some questions. No big deal.

She gave me a desktop, an ancient dell XP system, to look over. Someone got the brilliant idea to install Win7 on it. Yeah, an XP system with 1GB of RAM. Thing would probably struggle to run XP, and you're trying to use 7? The dell website doesn't even list 7 support for the machine, and there's no video driver for it. Forgot what 16 colors looked like.

Two other calls, didn't reach one, and have one job for tomorrow. Setting a printer up, because that's soooooo hard.

Hopefully selling one of my refurb machines to XP lady, she's making her mind up about what she wants to do now.

Watched my shows for this week.

Got ready for going back to work tomorrow! Wonder if we got that new build we've been promised for days and days. 8 more days and I'm off for another 4. And hey, this will be the first day of my extended contract, as Friday would have been the last day. And I get paid in two days. Life is good.

And then 40 minutes trying to get mr "I need to sell you this router back" to get the pictures off his camera. Yeah, isn't free tech support great?

Mon:
It sure is!

Today went super fast for some reason. Well, okay, I know the reason. We got two new builds. Technically just one, but still. I loaded the saturday build but then was informed about 9:30 to run the update again, there was a build from today that fixed a bunch of stuff.

So I went through the bugs assigned to me, and wrote up some new ones. Like changing the paper size hanging the copy app totally! Or accented characters in filenames crashing/hanging scan from usb/preview. Wheeee! Oh, and I had a donut. Went to the bank at lunch.

The project leader was out today and she'll be gone tomorrow. I have no boss or sub-boss. Mini-boss? Why even work at all? Oh right, my stupid work ethic that keeps me doing two jobs. She wants to know who can work this weekend too. But she's away for two days this week. Doesn't track somehow.

My after work job was as easy as I expected, mostly. Setting up the printer took a few minutes. He still is printing envelopes with it. Who even uses regular mail anymore? I haven't sent an actual letter out of my mailbox for… I don't even know how long. Years, certainly. Was it worth the $30 I made there? Probably not.

I heard on the radio christmas cards are down by like a billion units or something from X years ago. Seems about right.

So nice today! 60s at one point, but somewhat cloudy. Still. Looks like I'll enjoy a few more days of not bitter coldness too, so win.

Oh, and the fedex package containing the PC for the lady that runs the center? That had "scheduled delivery Tuesday" on the site? Yeah, it came today. But I didn't have the signed form out because TUESDAY. And of course it rained, and the tag thing got all wet. Seems like a trend. Thanks, fedex. You're the greatest.

I've put the form out now, hopefully they see it and leave it tomorrow. I have to go to staples, I don't have time to also go to the fedex place.

Got far too many calls today as well. So I have all of this week booked, again, on a Monday, and into Saturday.

Also helped someone cut an audio file in half so it could go on CD. I figured I would have to get Audacity into the mix but the program that came with her digital recorder actually could do it! Neat! Of course I realized this right away, while she was clueless as to CDs not holding more than 70 minutes or so.

Thirty years people. Thirty. Years.

So tomorrow, more banging on the new build, see what shakes loose. Need to buy a flash drive for the lady with the ancient PC. She's going to get a new one I guess, so just wants the stuff off this one. So I'll stop to Staples on the way to lunch tomorrow.

Did my laundry, viewed my sites, wrote this up, and it's 9:30. No skyrim or ponies tonight I guess. Or really at any time this week. Oh well, I guess it's all towards the goal of being able to retire at some point in the future. Right?

Hahahahahahahah.

Oh man, I should have gone into comedy, I crack myself up.

Tues:
Time passed a bit slower today, wasn't quite as exciting as yesterday. I wrote up a few things of course, because that is my purpose there. We should get yet another new build tonight, they are doing a test of the scheduled updates which should go off sometime after midnight.

It's close to midnight, and some creature's creeping through the dark.

Honestly nothing really stands out, sorry. The bugs I found were minor, to be honest. At least I wrote up more than anyone else, right?

I did get that sweet, sweet paycheck, further dragging me 1/10 the way back to the money I had before little sister came along. Magic staff, make my bank balance grow! (That's a power rangers reference by the way.)

Oh, I did write up a little webpage that translates the new version string back into a date in case we need to know when something came out. Yeah, I'm just that awesome. Never really done javascript programming before, but it's close enough to C that it didn't matter. The logic was only a few lines.

After work I did a cleanout. Pretty standard there as well, but my goodness he has an old Dell. Not as old as the one I got the flash drive to get files off of, but still pretty old. I got it cleaned out, petted some tiny white puppies and a friendly kitty (oh, take her home!) and came back here.

The PC came, turned it on.
"Huh, this isn't booting up very fast. What the… OH look, it doesn't have an SSD at all. Ebay dispute time!"

Yes, I could immediately tell the difference. Believe me.

So I don't know what they're going to do about that, if they want the whole thing back or what. Sigh.

I did go at lunch and get the flash drive, so I got her files off the dell. Didn't reach her yet, so I don't know if I'm going over there to drop it off or she'll come pick it up.

My job for tomorrow is at 7:00. UGh. I'll have to make calls earlier, I guess. Just had one today, thank goodness, something about him losing his contacts in outlook. Haha. Just restore a backup… oh, you don't have any backups?

Well then you were sort of asking for it, weren't you? Plus outlook keeps everything in one single gigantic file, so good luck recovering just that.

Hey, they responded, and they are shipping me an SSD. Thank goodness. But will I get it in time to deliver the system on Saturday? I guess we'll see.

Looks like my fund is going to end up down this year. At the moment I'm down $250. Great!

By the way, I sometimes use sarcasm, you can tell that, right?

Just got a call from my Wednesday appt.

"Are you coming tonight?"
"Is it Wednesday?"
"No. Oh, you have me down for Wednesday?"
"Yes I do."

Turns out he really doesn't know what's going on so upshot is I get to go there at a sane time tomorrow, and not 7:00 pm. Whew.

Watched the best ponies episode ever! Seriously. The main characters become the background ponies, and the backrgound ponies (like bubbles, and "Time Turner" and Octavia and Bon Bon) became the main characters. So many references. I was laughing so hard when "Time Turner" came out wearing a huge scarf like a certian doctor we know and love?

Wed:
The boss was back and she's better than ever! Hay Ya! Hey Ya! The boss is back!

Anyway, the new build did not automatically install last night, shocking I know, so we manually did it. Had the team meeting and discussed things. Then I went back to copy.

I decided to bring a little more structure to the whole thing, and started going through the old reliability matrix I made a couple of weeks ago. Found a few things right off the bat because of it. Go me.

Near the end of the day I installed a "preview" of print from email to check a few things out at my supervisor's request. It went about as well as expected.

Tomorrow I'll probably continue the matrix, unless she has something specific for me.

Then out to another cleanout. Went smoothly, he had a few issues but nothing major.

Back by about 6:00, the non-SSD machine had finally finished updating to 10, so I got the number off it. Ate dinner.

Oh goody, book guy has screwed things up again, needs me to come out. Again. How many times is that now? Four? I should have changed him EACH time I come out, that may discourage taking advantage of my generosity so much. Well, I always wanted to do charity work.

Just one call, the lady from a month ago with the all in one I had to lug home and reload. Seems she's infected again? Sounds like it. Didn't reach her, maybe she'll call back?

Got ready for tomorrow, and I have two hours. I think I'll play some skyrim.

Thurs:
Had to hunt around in the creation kit for how to make my new follower less annoying. She kept saying the same stuff over and ever a couple of times a minute. Finally found it.

Anyway, another banner day in X land. Got the latest build today, and a firmware update for the printer… which broke the printer. Really. It wouldn't finish. Luckily putting the old firmware back fixed it again. Whew.

Wrote up more bugs, like the one at the very end of the day where you can't print jpg files from the flash drive anymore. Just hangs the whole thing. And this is what we're giving staples in a few days? Uh, okay?

Lots of screen transition problems too. It's so odd, like this build got a lot worse for some reason. Oh well, I can only report what I find.

After work activity should have been a bit easier than it was. Everything seemed to be going fine, then firefox and Mbam started crashing at the same time. Ugh. Rebooted, that took way too long, but at least the crashing stopped. So I started mbam again, which took another half hour to finish. Got out of there about 7:00. I did see some nice christmas displays on the way over. Even took video. One with about every Disney themed lawn blow up thing imaginable. Not that 8' tall Elsa one though, but a lot of them. It was neat.

Got gas on the way too.

Anyway, got home, had a few calls. The boss sauce people, who of course gave me a work number. I wonder if anyone will even be there Sunday, my only open day at the moment. Yes, I booked up saturday. 3 jobs. 8:00 in the morning with the dentist guy who always wants crazy stuff done. 1:00 with book guy, oh goody. And then the lady I got Tinker from at 2:30. She got a new machine.

Then over to Sean's with the gifts. It's gonna be a fun day.

Sunday of course celebrating my mother's birthday at my sister's house. That's in the evening, who knows what I'll be doing before that. Given it's in two days, probably work, given the number of calls I've been getting lately.

Tomorrow- more testing, as it seems it needs a fine tooth comb go over, then shopping, then my parent's house, then finally home. I'll let you know how it goes.

This time tomorrow will be the Eve. I'll probably work, given everything, but be late at my parent's house for the pre celebration celebration. Not sure if I'll get an entry out that day. Maybe I'll post it Wednesday? Who can say.

Anyway, if I don't get to it, have a good holiday everyone, and I'll see you with more things to complain about next week. Even as my steady paycheck, good friends and family, my health, and clean air and water continue to surround me. 

What sort of horrible monster am I, anyway?