2016-01-08:

Fri:
Goodness, I only took in $840 for the whole month of December? That's down $900 from last year! That brings my total earnings DOWN by 2941 since last year. Of course, I only put in $1200 into my IRA so it looks like I earned $850 more. But I bought the car so that'll wipe that out right quick.

Changed my message. It's now just straight $50 a job. None of this half an hour crap. You want me? Pay.

Did my jobs. The first one was straightforward enough. Cleaned it out, answered some questions about her phone. Of course windows wouldn't recognize it for some bizarre reason.

Second one was as I suspected, the LCD. Ordered him one. He had some other questions, which I answered.

Came back, ate lunch, then went right out again. The "noise" is his fan, but he wanted it changed. Oh goody, a second place I have to go back to. And how far away is it kids? Right, a half hour. Yippie!

And got back here. Paid my estimated taxes, always a thrill. Was going to watch one episode of Battlestar, but then a sudden thought hit me.

I have two surround sound systems gathering dust upstairs, let's hook one of them up to the "gaming pc" for even more upgrade goodness. Tide me over until my new parts arrive, right? Well, lugged it and five speakers down there (yes, I had that many spare speakers, AND STILL MORE) and started setting it up.

Oh look, the sound card has an optical jack. I'll just pop that sucker in, having borrowed the cable from the xbox. Got the front two speakers working great, was very pleased how they sounded. Now to get the rear ones working, right?

And in typical PC fashion, here's where it somewhat goes wrong.

I notice it's only set up for two speakers, so I change it over to 5.1, thinking that's about all I'll have to do, right? Well, that turns the optical port off! No really! Two speakers, optical port works fine. 5 speakers, it turns off. HUH?

So I had to go with "multi channel input" in the end, meaning I ran three cables out the back of the sound card and into the receiver. Instead of one better quality optical cable. Great.

Perhaps the newer card will work better. This is just one I had laying around.

But I tried Skyrim for a few minutes. What a difference! I didn't think it would make that much difference but it really did. Spell charging now happens behind me, which is neat, and the audio is so much more positional. I was walking around through the rain, oh my goodness did that sound amazing. My hats (such as they are) are off to the sound team on that game. You did a better job then I dreamed.

Got caught up in that and left a bit late to see my parents. Aldi was closed, so I got there just as dinner was being served. I didn't plan that! Anyway, saw the new bunny, and invited my father over to see the last Dr Who.

Came back here, finished up the audio stuff (I lumped it all in above, it actually was broken out into two parts) and then watched more Battlestar.

No calls today, so just one appointment tomorrow? Oh goody, book guy wants to see me. No reason given or anything. I could go without seeing him ever again.

Sat:
Nothing too exciting in the morning, just checking my websites before I left. Got the guy's gmail account set up.

Went shopping right then, figured I might as well.

Came back here, straightened up a little.

Moved my keyboards around a bit. The gaming machine had the mac keyboard I had been using when it was a Mac down there, so I gave it a proper PC keyboard. Of course that meant no more USB hub to plug the mouse into, so I put it into the tower directly.

Where of course it promptly stopped working.

Yup, read that sentence again. Moving the mouse from the keyboard hub to the tower gave me a "device cannot start (code 10)" error. I tried a bunch of stuff. Rebooted with a PS/2 mouse attached so I could use a mouse. It worked. "Oh, that's funny" I thought. Took it back out, didn't work again. Put it back, still didn't work. Finally got out an ancient USB 1.0 hub and pulled THAT in, and then the mouse into that. Works fine.

And you wonder why I hate windows. THAT right there is why. Moving a mouse from one USB port to another should not make the OS freak out and stop accessing the device. It's a MOUSE for crying out loud. One of the first things that become USB back in the day. They are not complex. But oh, no, windows is all like "oh, you moved that, I'm sorry. I just can't use it anymore."

Got my property tax bill. Boy oh boy, they didn't waste any time, did they? It's only the second!

Also got the keyboard and mouse I ordered. No camera card though. Took the laptop out of the bag, it's been through the war! I wish I had known, I would have just gotten him a decent used laptop, probably for not much more than these parts. Which are busted. Keyboard is fine. LCD? It's sort of… green? Yeah. Took a picture, see what the seller says. It looks really bad.

Saw book guy, he just had a couple of minor things.

Watched the end of Series 1 of Battlestar and made dinner for my father. Well, more fair to say I warmed it up. Yeah.

Watched the x-mas Dr Who and Spider Man 2.

That's it for Saturday.

Sun:
Had a very nice, relaxing day, with no jobs. Luxury! Watched Battlestar all day and still didn't get through season 2.

Back to the real world tomorrow.

Mon:
COLD! Snowy a bit too. Hate it!

Not much to tell at work again. Still no new build, so still nothing new to do. We did figure out why the email service wasn't working, and perhaps why I get "your scan failed" all the time too. We'll see.

Set up a new machine as my after work activity. And shivered. Don't forget the shivering. It was between 11-17 degrees today, so dreams of 60 degree weather are once again just that. Dreams.

Got back a little after 7:30. I did stop to get gas, but still. I'm going to look into a USB 3 adapter as I'm seeing more machines with that now. Maybe cut some time off sitting around waiting for windows to move things from one place to another.

Two calls, one person spooked by a website message saying her mac was infected, one person trying to hook up a router when they already had one. Love that. Honestly, if time warner is providing you a router, you don't need to plug in a second one to it. Honest.

So no work yet for tomorrow. Hoping for that new build though.

Both "bosses" stopped by to talk, see how we were doing. "Nearly asleep" I didn't tell either of them.

Would have been true though.

Tues:
Well, we got a new build. Wasn't exactly what I was hoping for though. Apparently it's still a 3.0 build and not 3.1? Why? Isn't 3.0 out of the gate? What do we hope to accomplish by further testing?

That happened just after lunch, so I was working through the bugs marked as fixed I was responsible for. Didn't get through them all, and found a few more things to write up, so go developers?

No after work job. Called several people back, but at lunch one person didn't answer and the other wanted tomorrow. The lawyer guy is in Florida and can't access wi-fi on his laptop but he didn't call me back after I called him. Reached someone else so Thursday is booked up. Anyone else now gets the weekend.

Remains cold, but that's to be expected.

Watched more Battlestar, which is also to be expected.

Let's move on to Wednesday, which is really the only thing that can be expected.

Wed:
Slight retraction from last time. Apparently it IS 3.1, we're just calling it 3.0 internally until it's ready? *scratches head* Yeah, none of us got it either.

Anyway, as it was 3.1 I started my assigned testing. Got part way through. There were some issues that slowed me down a bit, like not being able to get into dropbox, and my machine getting a bit messed up when they tried to schedule the update.

Still, some new bugs written, and that's what it's all about, right? Some old ones reopened, too, sadly.

After work activity went smoothly enough. She gave me a box full of cables too, so that was nice of her. Just a checkup, but there were some questionable things installed, and mbam found a share of stuff. Norton wasn't running, and for some reason had no download link of any kind, so screw it, I took it off.

Back here right at 7:00 (sigh) made my calls. No new jobs, oddly enough. So still just tomorrow and a clear weekend.

My parts went from buffalo to Horseheads, a town I've never heard of. Seems to have gone somewhat far away from where I am, coming from buffalo. Hope they all get here tomorrow, not that I'll have much chance until the weekend to play around with the stuff.

And get this all in one reloaded.

This years holidays work out pretty well. Lots of them fall on Sunday, so I get the non-holiday days off around them. Works out pretty well.

Thurs:
Even better news about holidays, if I'm still at Xerox in May (crosses fingers) I managed to move my dental appointment to the 27th, a day I already have off work! So I don't have to take a day off. Neat-o!

Other good things that happened today- got the big box with all the neat toys, now all I need is some time to install them.

Got the hard drive installed in the all in one, it's installing now.

Major issues found in the software. Now that I've started testing again I found that scan to USB is basically dead. 80% of jobs don't work and it's never the same reason why twice in a row. So a lot of that was skipped as I just couldn't actually run any jobs.

I moved on to print from usb and that seems a bit better.

More nasty stuff, I got a ton of calls today! Plus getting the LCD, and the fan, I had two more people. The LCD isn't so bad, but fan kid wanted 5:00 saturday. As there's not yet any word from Sean, I said fine. Still, this weekend is going to be terrible.

Because I wanted some time to play with my new stuff. So of course, last week when I didn't have the stuff I had nothing. This week I have all kinds of stuff for both days, and I haven't even reached everyone yet. I still need to reach all in one guy, and a couple of people that called.

After work job went fine, the usual "make me a spreadsheet because I can sell anybody a solar system for their house but I can't learn the basics of excel." You know, the usual.

Looking towards the weekend, tomorrow more testing of course, I have plenty to get through now. Then shopping and visiting the parents as usual.

Saturday and Sunday, a bunch of work. Already have three jobs for Sat and two for Sun, and like I said, I still have people to reach and I'll probably get calls tomorrow. Yay me.

At least it won't be below freezing for a few days.

Well, I have a whole hour, I'm going to see if I can't get my new parts installed.

See you all next week, hope it's a good one for you.