2016-01-22:

Please remove any small childern before the song begins.

Fri:
Pretty much as expected, actually. My machine finally got fixed, but not until about a half hour before I was going to leave anyway. Still, managed to do all of print from USB again, verified Scan to USB was completely broken, and got the good news that 3.1 wasn't going to Staples after all. Whew. Because that would have looked really bad.

Left at 4:30, thank you bringing my lunch. Went over to Staples, got a new phone headset, a small whiteboard to stick on the front of the printer, and a new router to replace the one I sold. Took longer than I expected, oddly. Then bought food, tasty, tasty food.

Saw my parents, came back and made phone calls. Even got to watch an episode or two of Battlestar, at last. Of course it was off to bed early to get up for the fun tomorrow.

Sat:
Wasn't too bad, mainly because of luck.

First one was picking the stupid laptop up. The in place upgrade didn't actually work for some reason. I could tell because it was still activated, and it wouldn't have been if it had worked. Stupid thing. I also tried a 10 upgrade, no, that didn't work either. Just gave me some error message. Great.

My next wasn't until 11:00, but it was only 9:00 by that point. On the way back I stopped in to see my 4:00 at her office, and for a wonder she was there. (this is the luck part.) Went to install quicken for her, she's using Version 6… for DOS. Yes. DOS. Sadly, she's also using XP, which the current version won't install on. *facepalm* So I ordered her the 2014 version instead. Glad I didn't make a special trip all the way out there for that.

Then figured I would head to the 11:00, got there about 10:15 that I recall. Simplified her cable situation (like she had both HDMI and Component cables coming out of her Roku. Huh?) Set up her new cable box and cable modem. Why is she paying for the phone service from them if she's not canceling her landline? Maybe the bundle is less money or something. Who knows.

That at least went somewhat smoothly.

Back here for lunch, which I basically just had time for, and went out again. Helped the guy with MS set up a gofundme page, which took from 1:30 to 3:10 and he still had stuff for me to do. Uh, how about having me over more often instead of waiting until you have an afternoon's worth of work for me? Oh, right, because you want to abuse my flat rate, right, right.

But here's the real question; Do I charge the guy with MS, who is completely paralyzed and can hardly talk for one appointment or two? Because yes, we have a time for Saturday.

Then lastly just a checkup. I was originally going there for "email issue" but she wasn't having any problems. So I just checked it over, and mbam didn't even find anything. Ah well.

Back here, started work on the stupid laptop. Battery is totally dead on it, went to move it, pulled the cord out, it died. Luckily I was just doing an Mbam scan as a sort of last resort. Still, now it gets to start over! Yay.

Fantastic, now the pictures folder won't copy the stuff. And dell made the incredibly bizarre decision to require the laptop to be completely disassembled to get at the HD. So I can't just pop it out and plug it into my Mac for a test run. Great job, Dell, let's just throw all your designs out the window and really jump after Apple down the well of non-repairability. It'll go so well! Wait, being somewhat reparable is all you have.

Ran the Seagate tool on it. Gave up at 20% with 83 errors and the screen went slightly crazy. Guess who needs a new hard drive?

Booked Wednesday. Great, one day left for next week, and it's not even Sunday yet.

Watched a little Battlestar and worked on putting together my little metal model of the Enterprise Mizzy gave me. Got the body done, it's pretty hard. The pieces are tiny.

[[image file="2016-01/p1016412.jpeg" alt="Boldly Going" ]]

So that was my Saturday.

Sun:
Got some house stuff like laundry and dishes done before I left at 8:40. On a Sunday. Spent from 9:00 to after 11:30 setting up a new machine for someone. That new USB 3 drive adapter? Blistering fast at hundreds, yes you read that right, hundreds of kilobytes per second. Even up to a thousand in some cases. What's the point of having all these incredibly fast interfaces if Windows still slows to a crawl when copying small items?

Then over to LCD guy, oh, guess what? Yeah, it wasn't the panel after all. The new one did the same thing. It's either the cable or the laptop itself. Goody. I get to order a cable and go over there a THRID time.

Never replying LCDs again, I can tell you that much.

Came back for a quick lunch, as I already knew I was going to be late. I was late to LCD guy, he waited a half hour before calling me. Tree Brook guy waited all of five minutes.

Anyway, I cleaned up his music collection, answered some questions, agreed his machine started up slowly but it's a PC, what do you want?

Then over to a checkup, basically. I hadn't gotten a good idea what their problem was, and the main one was not getting online. Yeah, hard to get online when you turn the wireless off, huh? And who thought a touch sensitive switch on the top of the keyboard was a good idea? Somebody weird I bet you.

Finally home, watched the first episode of Shadowhunters. Huh, it's the same series as the books. And they made a movie of it too. Eh, Demongate High is better. (I said it.)

And as the week begins I have… four checks. Four. After doing all that work this week. Doesn't add up, somehow. Not going to bother with the bank, I guess.

A little snow today, boo, hiss!

Mon:
Which turned into much more snow later in the day. BOO.

It wasn't too bad in the morning, but I did get up at 6:30 to do the driveway. Went to work, puttered around making 80% of the bugs that were found today. You know, the usual. Mostly minor stuff though.

We got a new build at 4:30 right as I was going to leave, so tomorrow we'l see if they're really fixed scan to usb or not.

My new "eat everything there" plan continues to work out as I got home around 8:00 from dentist guy. With his usual list of a million things. Plus his old laptop won't boot anymore. I can hit F8 and get into safe mode, which is weird given it's windows 10. And msconfig thinks it's that too. sfc won't even try to run, so I have no idea what else to do. Maybe I can get it booted far enough into 10 to try the reload trick? Not going to happen for awhile!

Made my calls, no new appointments thank goodness, but the car guy wants me to do a bunch of stuff remotely. Yeah, I have that kind of time now, idiot.

Viewed my websites, wrote this up, and went to bed. WEEEEEEEEE.

Oh, and it's really nasty out, and will continue to be so through tomorrow. So great.

Tues:
Lots of snow… well, there was some, anyway. Did the driveway and went to work.

The new build does in fact fix Scan to USB as they hoped, which is good news all around, and I managed to finish off my testing of that service.
Then we had a meeting about the next stuff to test, performance and reliability. Got the performance stuff done with a little time to spare, and found out something interesting. The first jpg works in about 30 seconds.

The second one takes three or four minutes. Which is odd, I mean why the second one?

Anyway, did my job, it was a quick one. Mac user, just a few minor things because he says he's 90 now and can't handle as much. Yeah, not with that attitude, you can't.

Got a letter from the IRS, some missing form in 2014. Which depended on a form I didn't get in 2015. Had to call the marketplace, figure out how to get it. Turned out it was there in front of me the whole time. Stupid!

Got that done, made phone calls. Booked Thursday and one for Sunday already.

The winter advisory has been extended into Wednesday, but has been downgraded to an Advisory. Guess I'm getting up early tomorrow too, though it's not snowing right at the moment.

Looks like I'll have time to watch one episode tonight, let's get to it.

Wed:
I did not have to get up early but somehow woke up at 6:30 anyway. Stupid circadian rhythms or whatever.

Did my reliability test for the one service after the meeting in the morning. Only had one failure, and actually that bug is marked as fixed at some point so maybe it'll improve. We got 3.2, at least some did, and I cleared two machines off of all the weird "templates" that built up and were causing scan failures. Stupid .net, takes way too long to install. Had to install it to get the 1.73 mb macro program to work. It required a 60mb download. Figure that one out.

Otherwise, wrote up some bugs, mainly visual stuff honestly, but better to document everything I see, right?

Forgot my fork, that was fun. Luckily I had already anticipated this failure of my future self and put an emergency one in the car. Just had to go get it. This is what the "always prepared" background looks like, kids. Don't stare. Thought about buying some plastic ones for the room with the fridge, it might help more than myself one day.

After work job was quick to get to, and quick to leave from. Mac user, somehow switched a lot of things around. Like his left and right click on the trackpad, and his SMTP servers for his two mail accounts. Also somehow managed to install good old Mackeeper and some other junk I gleefully ripped out. I was home by 6:00, astonishment.

And then got to work on the two laptops. The dentist guy I finally remembered I had to put to sleep before the screen comes up. Duh. Made a huge deal of it before, why I didn't remember that I don't know. Oh, right, because I try not to think about it when it's not happening.

Got the SSD for the other one, put that in. Had to take the whole machine apart to do it, that was "fun." Tried to do the win8 trick, save myself the hours of downloading win7 updates. Nope. Can't do it without a BIOS update. Can't put the BIOS update in without the battery being over 10% charged. (Really? What about all those desktops that don't have batteries? Do they not get BIOS updates? OH wait they do.) Can't charge the battery above 10% because it's busted and won't charge.

WEeeeeeeee.

So it's trying to load Win7 updates. Been "checking" for gee, about two hours now? Great work there, MS. Just great. Maybe, like my downstairs machine it'll put them in and fail and have to try and unload them again. Yeah, that'll be great!

Got some more episodes watched, made some calls, didn't reach one person.

Plan for tomorrow? Not sure, hopefully the scan chart will be done and I can do scan to dropbox reliability. Or maybe I'll take USB and free up the people with 3.2. I offered, she didn't get back to me. We'll see.

Thurs:
Say, can I call them or what? Got up this morning with the updates hung at 187 of 207, and we went right back into "failure configuring windows updates." Just like my downstairs machine. THat's two for two, MS, such a great product.

How do people put up with this? Really? How do you do it? Don't know any better or something?

At least it had 177 to go when I got back, so it must have rolled them back properly.

Let's see, testing scan to USB for 3.2 today. Figured it could use the extra attention, given the issues we had with it. Seemed pretty solid.

I might be going 4.0 tomorrow, with screen saver, and FAX! Yes, FAX. All the FAX. Like it was 1998 or something. No idea if it does anything, but the screen comes up. (There was a machine in the lab loaded with it.)

But yeah, wrote up a bunch of new bugs, and just managed to finish the reliability testing for scan to dropbox, which didn't go quite as smoothly as I had hoped. We'll take a look at the recording tomorrow, if I can get it off my phone. Some stupid windows error message as usual when I tried.

After work job was me selling lady with an ancient dell a newer machine. Not much wrong with hers, if anything, but really enough is enough with XP and waiting around for spinning rust.

Got home, finished up the desktop I want to sell her. Started doing the laptop updates 50 a time. (ugh) At least it worked.

Now to download office. Of course it's a version I don't have, because there are 8 different versions of every release out there. Thanks, MS!

Now the Vista machine is spinning about looking for updates. Will it ever do so? Who knows?

Probably going to Sean's, he asked about it earlier in the week, but nothing since then. I guess we'll see. Sunday is booked, but not as crazy as last week. Saturday is a couple of places. The york people in the morning, then returning the laptop. Then Bob from last week in the afternoon. A lady with some Mac questions, like erasing her data, after that, probably just head Sean's after that. I had two hours last time and only did one thing at Bob's, so I hope four total hours over there is enough. Baka jerk.

So hopefully this weekend won't be as crazy as last, but you never know. Huh, wonder if I'll ever get to play Skyrim again, or maybe install that last Starcraft 2 game I bought like before christmas. Yeah…

Tomorrow the shopping of course. Seeing my parents, and having my mother redo my taxes for me because we didn't do one form we didn't know we had to. Weeeeeeeee.

So after all that I have a whole hour to myself. I'm going to have an apple, watch one episode of Battlestar, and go to bed. Getting up early to do the driveway tomorrow.

So fun.

Don't get snowed in, everyone, I'll see you all next week.