2016-01-15:

Fri:

Finding lots of bugs in the new software. Scan to dropbox doesn't work on my machine, but it does on two others. Figure that one out. It just gets hung processing. Weird.

Let's see, my PC is dead. Trying to get the new RAID array to boot somehow wiped out some boot file on the main drive, so now it won't boot either. After a bunch of crap performed I just started over with Win7 on the array. It's going to be a complete pain to reload everything.

Went to see my parents, and the bunny! (But mostly the bunny.)
I kid! I kid the parents!

Made calls, booked wednesday and Thursday of next week? Ugh.

Don't have much time, have to get to bed. Stupid windows.

Sat:
Which got worse. It did all 170+ updates last night, and when I turned it on this morning, I was greeted with "reverting updates" and then it hung. Yeah, thanks MS. You're the greatest.

Did my two morning jobs. Setup a new machine which went smoothly, and I called the lady I was going to do later in the day, she was there, and I was close. So that worked out FAR better than I had planned. Saved me 40 minutes or so of driving, let me tell you.

Got gas on the way, and that put me right at walmart, which I said, "wait, Dad's gift he wanted for his birthday!" So I ran in and found that, too.

Apart from the whole PC thing, this morning went super great.

Put the batteries back in my UPS, so that's working again. My goodness those things are heavy.

Okay, got the PC working again. How? Oh, the usual futzing around. Who knows. Anyway, turned off windows update and started the backup process onto the old HD. I've got it just about set back up with one exception. Well, two. Tiny Serana don't work but more serious is the FF7 stuff. I customized it with like 30GB of textures and things, and it did not like the move. I have no idea what to with it now. Maybe somehow uninstall it, reload the steam app, and download the whole (huge) package again? Sigh.

Left at 2:45 for Ray, and putting in the LCD. Turns out Sean did want to see me, so after the fan replacement kid I went over there.

All of these things worked out to some degree or another. The LCD didn't fit, thanks ever so much HP, for using different length cables in the same model of laptop. Why? Why even do that? So now I have to get yet another one and go back a THIRD time.

I'm thinking of not doing any more repairs on things I don't have the parts for immediately. I can't keep going back places again and again.

The fan I changed successfully and it actually worked.

Then it was not as far to Sean's house as I originally thought, so I made it there only an hour later than normal. How about that. We did Stan's game, played a bit of Wii, and I came back.

Sun:
Got up at 7:30 to a rainy day, but that's better than a blizzard. Saw a yard sign yesterday driving around that read "I love you el nino, never leave me." I mean I was driving around, the sign wasn't. That would be silly.

Back to the 7:30. Why am I doing this to myself again?

Left at 8:40 to go past the shops (just a bit) and do a cleanout. That went fine, just poking around deleting stuff, actually. Like he had two start menu replacements. Why?

Came back here, had a whole two hours. Took care of various things. Like looking at my fund. It's down, for the year, $626. My other investments made about $300 apiece so at least I broke even this year, right? Right?

Straightened up the house a little, ate lunch, went out again for my 1:00. Actually did a bunch things for them. Their ethernet port was acting up, so I switched them over to wireless. Showed her how to use iTunes to burn CDs, as ifrarecorder wasn't doing it for some reason. Answered other questions.

Back here, it was now about 3:00 so I debated calling a few people, but decided against it. Was that a good decision? Well, let's just say I now have this entire week booked until Saturday. Wheeee. Book guy tomorrow because he can't figure attachments out, so at least that should be quick. Just copying some of his stupid blog entries that I agree to post for him while he's away to a flash drive.

Honestly, if you can't figure out even the simplest things…

So I finished ripping the next series I get to watch that I got from Sean yesterday, and tried getting through disk 1 of series 3 of battlestar. Almost made it. Ah well.

Rained and was really windy today. Looks like temp is going to plummet and snow is going to take over the next week. Goody.

This week should be all kinds of fun, and I don't mean the actual fun kind. Telling whoever calls tomorrow "saturday at the earliest" will be fun too.

Well, time for bed, I lost some sleepy nap time last night, going to make it up tonight.

Mon:
Back to testing again, found a few things. Like the fact that none of my services work, not just copy and USB. But those that may find the answers were set upon the trail, so hopefully the problem can be fixed.

Went to see book guy, got the posts he wants me to do.

Then came back here, ate dinner, and went into a veritable flurry of action. (by the way, no snow today, but cold. Sunny though…)

Ordered another LCD for the one with the connector on the wrong side.
Made changes to Ellen's website.
Got the LCD installed in the laptop I've had forever and got it working.
Tore about the hard drive he broke the connector on, copied some movies of it (did I say that?) to make sure it worked (yeah, yeah, that's it) and ordered him a new enclosure for it.
Made a bunch of phone calls, didn't reach two people. Got another call for Sunday. Ugh.
Boxed up the defective LCD to go back.
Setup my vista USB drive again as it had gotten messed up in the Great PC frackup of 2016.
Started the install of the crappy vista system I got the last SSD for.
Checked my websites.

Yes, I'm just that good.

Time for bed.

Tues:
Didn't get nearly that much done today. Heck, didn't get nearly anything done today.

What did I do today? Some testing, finished up the last of the test cases I can reasonably run. No news/solution to my printer problem, but it may be a payment issue? But why just me?

Wrote up a few things though.

Then over for an hour and a half of resetting two passwords (iCloud and Netflix) and trying to get a Wii onto Netflix. Both of these things were why I went there the last time. I hate my job.

Really, getting home at 7:00, and then having to make a bunch of phone calls, and finally getting to eat dinner at 8:30? I don't know. I could eat lunch there, shave a half hour off, but most people wouldn't be around at 5:00 anyway because we all leave work at the same time. So I don't know.

Had a ton of calls today too. One lady describing how her cat messed up her keyboard, I thought she was talking about how he/she popped the keys off. Nope, just that stupid sticky film she never removed. Of course I ordered her one on ebay, totally unnecessarily. Thanks lady! At least I didn't waste my time going over there.

Saturday is mostly booked. I could do one more in the early morning. What's with all the calls lately?

Cold and it snowed a bit. Going to keep at it too. Yuck.

Wed:
My goodness I hate windows.

Worked on another machine today, so I got through many of my blocked test cases.
Oh, and senpai noticed me! We were talking about the bug database and such and one of the guys says "I just check robert's bugs now. If he hasn't found it I'll write it up." How about that.

Anyway, performance is abysmal, everyone noticed that. Don't think tomorrow's build will help, and that's what is going to Staples. Whoops.

Tried something new, brought both my lunch and dinner to work, and sat there and ate them. (not both at once.) Not having to drive home meant I could take 40 minutes for lunch, then "leave" work at 4:40 and eat dinner. Then just go out and not be hungry for another 2-3 hours and have low blood sugar and be more surly than usual fixing people's crappy issues.

Kept it in the car, but I found a fridge, so I'll just put them in a plastic bag and shove them in there from now on. Won't even have to go out into the freezing cold and the snow and the ice.

Good thing I did do this, by the way. My after work job was trying to figure out why his machine wouldn't connect to wireless. Finally narrowed it down to… maybe some windows service wasn't starting because of a dll error? His antivirus was 900 days ou of date but I don't think he was infected by anything. The rogue killer scan (that took for freakin ever) didn't find a single thing. But sfc /scannow stopped at 57% with some bogus message.

So I just did the in place upgrade, and left it running because it too was ABSOLUTELY CRAWLING along. Got home right about 9:00. Made one of my four phone calls for the evening. Well, I made two, I think the other is a work number. Not too smart, person.

One was just "oh by the way we back to floppy disk" *gag* before I came Saturday to install her quickbooks.

The other was iTunes lady, as expected, she can not handle the simple and direct direction we went through, again and again, and make a CD.

It is now nearly 10:00, I have accomplished nothing here at all, it's snowing. And everyone is talking about what they're going to do with their power ball winnings of 1.2 billion dollars. (Not each, duh.) Sure, whatever. I said "wouldn't be hilarious if you all did win and the entire Staples team just quit the next day?"

Hilarious!

Bed time.

Hate.

Thurs:
It just keeps getting better.

Thought we had a fix for my machine today, and over the course of the day it got better, but I was excited early when it was working and then stopped again.
Did what I could. Put some bugs against the apps I'm testing now that weren't in my spreadsheets into the spreadsheets, for easier tracking. They really should have thought that through better, maybe some kind of database that tracked everything instead of excel?

Just saying.

My new "eat over there" again proved handy at I got home slightly earlier tonight, 7:30. Had to pry the case apart on her all in one to get her pathetic vacuum close enough to get anything out of it. That cooled it considerably. mbam found a few things, but my goodness are PC slow. It didn't help sitting there watching the scan go though a million second life "texture" folders.

But you know what I didn't expect when I got home?

EIGHT PHONE CALLS. Yes, that's right. With the two I didn't reach yesterday, well, you do the math. One was indeed a work number, not going to help. Shoot, have to remember to change my message, I mention calling during my lunch break. Nope!

So now I have a crammed day Saturday, FOUR for Sunday, and all the way to Wednesday booked of next week. One is dentist guy, back from his trip, oh goody oh goody I hope I'm there three hours as usual!

This is what I was afraid of, and why I spent all that time making the average spreadsheet before I got the Xerox job. My average should be a 1 job per day. Where were all you people when I was desperate for work months ago? Now that I don't want so many calls, I get tons. Yeah, should have expected that.
I mean last year January I got 44 calls. Figure 4 weeks, that's 11 a week. 4 for the week, 7 for the weekend, 4/3 split, fine. I'm looking at 62 calls this month if this keeps up. Last time I got that many is in 2009! It was only fifty in 2010. The most I ever got in a month last year was 49 in March. I've already got 28, and that's not counting the shuff that's been dropped off, the people I've ordered stuff for.

Well, they'll just keep getting pushed further and further out I guess, until they start saying "that's too long to wait" and the problem solves itself. Honestly, eight calls? One called right back and said it was fine, honestly I didn't listen to the message, I had better things to do. So it was only six in the end, but still. That's five too many.

Weekend plans- don't die.

I suppose I might not get any calls the next four days?

Tomorrow, seeing my parents of course, hopefully getting my machine working so I can do more testing.

Then we start all over again.

It's snowing out, when am I going to clear my driveway? I'm never home when it's light enough, and I barely have time to eat over the weekend.

I really wish my contract position was more secure. This creeping up by a couple of months at a time is crappy. I'm just so worried about getting laid off like I was before how can I just drop the second business?
And I don't mind it so much, it's just every job take so freaking long, a half hour just to get there, then twenty minutes home, and everything on it crawls along.

Oh, and the reload apparently didn't work, so I have to go back there Saturday. Shoot, I should have asked them if they actually knew HOW to connect to the wireless. Huh. Oh well, I need to load MSE anyway, as I took off their ancient McAfee so they're totally defenseless now. Not that they haven't been, mind you. I seriously hope I don't have to take that thing home, because I'll never get it back to them.

Anyway, not enough time to watch anything, so yeah.

See you next week, more insane then ever I have no doubt.