2016-01-01:

ri:
Had a very nice Christmas with the family, and I hope you did as well. The only real snag was the Eye-fi card didn't want to be recognized by my father's camera. I ordered him the exact one my mother uses in hers, as it's the same camera. Stupid thing, why you gotta be like that? So what do I do with this one? Sean already has one, and the camera I usually use is too old to accept it. Hmmmmm.

Saw my aunt and grandfather, ate lots of yummy food, and came back to put things away. Looked over the phone. "You've got to be kidding me."

Yes, some nut actually called me on Christmas day. It was the guy who lost his outlook contacts, like I can do anything about that. He still hasn't gotten them back.

Moron.

Well I think it's time for a bit of Skyrim.

Sat:
Rather a busy day today, all told. Got up at the now normal time to get busy, and took all the christmas stuff down. Even the lights outside, all gone bye-bye.

At 10:00 I called the people that had called me over the past few days and reached most. Not Tinker lady, but the guy with the outlook problem he said he spent hours on the phone with Microsoft to solve. I actually looked up the error message and found the answer as the first google result. So with that and answering a few questions for him, I was gone in half an hour. So much for "tech support."

Oh, what was it? Some weird thing related to the Win10 upgrade, I guess. I just logged him out, logged him back in, let it sync again, and boom, done.

See, he didn't actually lose his address book, he lost his connection to the iCloud account his address book was being stored in. Or more specifically, outlook couldn't access the file or something. Whatever. It got fixed. He gave me two jobs worth of money, too. So for that I thank him. Must be nice to be able to pay someone three times what they ask with hardly a thought.

Came back here, ate lunch, read I bit I think, then went out to deliver the new system. She didn't have much, so that didn't take too long, thank goodness.

Dropped off the CDs and went to kMart on the way home. Got some more wrapping paper (the silvery stuff I love!) and looked at all the cute pony things. There was lady in the same isle as I was cooing over tiny applejack in a cute little bed. Wonder if I thought I was mental?

Then Skyrim time. Got another dragon priest mask, found a sword in a sunken ship, did some random missions I've had hanging around forever, found a few people for the adventures guild.

Then had supper and finished Wizards at War.

Decent book, but suffers from the same old problem her other books suffer from. Her villain is too powerful, her heroes don't get to solve the problem by being clever or throwing something unexpected at it. Like it just waved a hand and took their wizardry away. Okay, where do you go from there? Why doesn't it just squash them like a bug? No, it gloats, and says "maybe I'll just let you live and suffer for a bit," and then a secondary character has to take action.

When Susan went through the same thing, she forcibly threw most of her power away, because there was someone that was copying it. So she then relied on her skill with a blade, and powers the guy she was fighting couldn't copy. And then he STILL pulled something unexpected out and made her retreat to come up with a new strategy. She didn't just stand there and be helpless, she thought her way around the problem. Because that's what the hero of a story should do.

But what do I know? She's the one that sells books, and I don't. So go figure.

Well, tomorrow just the 11:00, and then the "rest" of the weekend is mine. Back to the grind for four days, and then the new year begins.

Sun:
At least I got a little time off today. So dark and rainy when I got up. Temperature is hovering at 36 or so, worried!

Got up, tackled that big pile of comics I had sitting there. Putting them into the tracking program for my books. I usually do it Sunday but I've been slacking off, so it was pretty tall. Took a while.

Book guy came for his box of paper. Not only did he NOT sign and leave the invoice as I requested on the phone, he left some some weird note AND stole the pen I left for him to use to do the signing. And a dollar, for some bizarre reason. Was he paying me back for the postage due envelope he sent me? Because that was included in the bill. *shakes head*

Nothing else major until leaving. My appointment was a half hour away, so I went there. Looked his stuff over. His one machine was BSOD with my good buddy "IRQL less than or equal" which I just love. Ran the memory test but it didn't show anything. Neither did mbam. I suggested upgrading to 10 figuring it was a windows thing. His machine was at 100% cpu usage for good old Windows Update, love that. Oh, and this is a single processor machine! Yeah! What a piece of junk, and it's fairly new. Yuck. Checked his other two over, set up a hub so he could plug the TV and direct TV into his crappy Frontier connection, put some ends on some other cables for some kind of security system.

Came back, (yay half an hour of driving back!) ate lunch, played some Skyrim.

Then started watching Battlestar Galactica at last, that Sean lent me a couple of weeks ago. Decent. Also did a bit of reading.

All my shows are off until January, but I did get the christmas special for dr who.

Reached my one call from yesterday, she wants Friday, ugh, my day off already taken? But nothing for tomorrow unless someone calls in the morning. Can't complain though, right?

Cleaned the mouse and went to bed, so I could be bright eyed for testing tomorrow.

Mon:
So winter arrived.

Yeah.

Like someone flipped a switch, it was bitterly cold today and look at that, snow everywhere. I look at the radar picture right now and it's HUUUGE.

Gonna be fun getting into work tomorrow. And by fun I mean not fun. When am I going to do my driveway? Hummmmmm.

Anyway, not much testing went on today. I was going over the four spreadsheets for when we get the newest release. Putting them in order as per the spec documents. Got three of them done, which was pretty good. They needed a lot of cleanup. Why they can't just put the numbers in order on the spec document I'll never know.

No after work activity, so just more watching Battlestar Galactica.

Not pretty out there.

Tues:
Yuck yuck yucky. Didn't get too much snow, I think it turned into rain at some point. It was all slushy and nasty. Got up early to see about the driveway, but it didn't need it.

At work I came in thinking I would finish up that last document I needed to do in advance of 3.1 testing starting. Whoops, I had done it last week. I'm so good, I'm even ahead of myself I guess.

So I went and did the others, so now all the major services are in order, share a common format, are complete, and more accessible. Some are even spell checked, when I remembered to do it. Finished the last one just at 5:00. I started it at 3:30 wondering if I would have enough time, and it turned out I just barely did.

Parking lot still pretty empty, and the place is quieter when I walk in than ever before. New build tomorrow? We'll see. I'm ready for it, have no idea what I'll do otherwise.

One short job afterwords. He was having trouble pulling photos off his iPad (And he had taken a lot, ugh, get a real camera or something, have some respect) but his PC wasn't cooperating. He already had Dropbox so I just installed that and said "yeah, it'll be automatic now."

Got a TON of calls today. A shocking amount, I tell you. Didn't reach everyone, and some people I could talk through things. But that was scary. I have tomorrow and Thursday booked, one for Friday morning. Yeah, day off. Nope.

Got a bit warmer, almost 50 by the time I left. Rained on and off all day. There wasn't much snow left thankfully. Let that be our one snow "event" for the season and… I'm dreaming aren't I?

Time for some Galactia.

Wed:
I don't even know where to begin today.

To start, no new build. I ended up going through the more minor test cases today, which was quite boring. Apparently the payment stuff, which needs to get integrated into 3.1 so Staples can, you know, charge people and such, broke it. Jobs would never finish. So that was a bust.

So boring.

Then my after work job. I haven't seen a machine that messed up in a long time. Two hours it took me to clean it out, of course the crappy spinning platter inside the thing didn't help. And the forced update when I went to reboot it, love that. The crawling along of 12 updates, then another screen that slowly moves to 30%, then it shuts off, then it turns on again, then the percentage slowly moves to 100, then finally the login window shows up.

Probably should have brought it back here, watched something while it worked, and then brought it back. It belonged to the lawyer guy, he left and just told me to lock up. But really I couldn't leave the door unlocked.

Made my three phone calls for today. A half hour journey to see a laptop that is making "a noise" but no other information than that. That's Friday afternoon, so I have three for the first, and one for Saturday morning at 9:00. Yay.

Thinking of going back to by the hour. I don't know. It's just driving twenty minutes, waiting for some piece of junk laptop to uninstall the twenty or so malware programs, then tediously run mbam, making me get home at 7:30, then making phone calls for a half hour… It's starting to annoy me, that's for sure.

So, last day of the year tomorrow. Remember to send in your estimated taxes, boys and girls, all of you, like me, who do so.

Thurs:
And so 2015, a terrible year for most my my family, ends.

Good luck in the next year, suckers! I mean, uh, loving family of mine. Good, good people! May your next year of life provide you with much more richness and fulfillment than ever before.

No new build today at work either, because everyone's missing. So it was pretty painful to try and get through. I did find one thing though, I tried the scan to email function as I'd never used it. Didn't work on my machine or the other slightly flakey one in the lab. Across the way they both worked. Weird. So 2/5 machines just wouldn't do it.

My job was an odd one. Windows wouldn't boot or repair itself so I went poking around at the drive. Couldn't quite make out what I was seeing in linux or with the command line boot so I tore it apart (stupid all in one machines!) and hooked it up to my mini-mac laptop. Most of their files were just gone. The windows folder was completely empty. In fact they only had about 200mb worth of stuff left. So bizarre.

I suggested not trusting the drive anymore and then an SSD, which he said fine. Oh goody, I get to drive another 50 minutes returning the system to him. Yay.

Spent a little of my christmas money on hardware for the downstairs pc. Gonna be so great. Ordered an SSD for a vista machine, and I'll toss an XP one in its place, and the 512gb one for the all in one.

Let's see, Sean is in a bit of pain around the ribs area, so no going over there. Tomorrow I have three jobs, thought I would have four but my one call said everything was fine so three it is. Including another one 30 minutes away.

Then shopping, seeing my parents, and probably some more Battlestar. No, wait, paperwork first. Can't forget that. Saturday just one job at the moment, and nothing for Sunday. That could change.

About 9:00 now, probably get ready for bed in a little while. A co-worker asked what plans I had for tonight. HA! "Going to bed," I told her. "I already have three jobs for tomorrow." She thought I had a life or something. Silly co-worker. Lives are for other people.

Maybe it'll calm down a little? I don't know, for how crazy it seems like it's been lately, the stack of invoices I'm looking at is pretty thin. Weird.

Ah well.

Happy new year everyone, see you next year. Don't look at the forecast, you'll just get depressed like I just did.

Bye!