2016-01-29:

Went over and poked at Fax too. Oh my goodness what a difference in speed! Apparently the team that makes that (along with the scan/print email apps, which are also much faster I learned. I don't normally use them, so I checked them out too) isn't totally incompetent, and actually wrote a native app instead of using phonegap. Menus actually pop up when you touch them, instead of a second or two later. The keyboard is responsive. Stuff zips in and out. I thought maybe they had chosen a really slow tablet, or something else was going on. Nope! It's our outsourced development team. (These apps are done in the US) The difference is striking. I don't know how Staples will see that app and say "hey, why doesn't the rest of this product perform like that?" Because I would. I noticed the very first time I touched a menu. "Whoa, I know kung fu-" wait, that's a different thing. I said "Whoa, who turned on the speed?" Phonegap. Maybe good for toy stuff you want to go cross platform easily, but crap for something a company like mine should be producing for one platform and proven to produce an inferior executable.

At least there is some hope a replacement could be coded, after all, the two are living side by side now. Will that ever be done? No chance. But an interesting look at what the whole product COULD have been.

Went to see my parents, (and the bunny) had dinner over there. My mother wanted time to study the form so I left the tax stuff with her. All the while my grateful heart sang her praises. (too thick?)

Back here I finished up season 4 of Battlestar, and went to bed. My morning one canceled on me, and that was my only call, oddly enough, so I get at least part of the morning off. The guy I ordered the SD card is supposedly coming at 9:00, we'll see.

Sat:
Cleaned the house up a bit as I finally had some time.

Oh look, it's 9:30 and no guy. How… typical.

He finally showed up at 10:00. Got his card installed, and even moving his stuff over didn't free up much space. 32GB for windows 10, what were they thinking?

Dropped the now finally completed laptop off, was only there a few minutes before coming back.

Next up was Bobby, more work on the gofundme campaign and I cleaned his machine up a little. His internal drive finally died, it doesn't show up anymore. Knew it would, but it was a good thing we got that external all those years ago. Also his time machine disk was messed up, I wiped it and started it over.

Then over to do a few minor things on some Macs. One is currently pretty useless, it's running 10.4 and has only 1gb of RAM. She does want it upgraded before she gives it to her daughter though. So I'll order some memory for it. But she paid me twice my rate for the minor stuff I did, so that's fine with me.

Then over to Sean's house, got there just at 4:30 which worked out. We did Stan's game and did pretty well tonight, I think. Watched the Teen Titans movie and I came back about 12:00.

Sun:

First one was at 10:00 so I did some usual Sunday stuff like watering the plants. It didn't go so great, mainly because of young man, stereotypically living in his mom's basement, who had a stick up his ass. I shall say no more about that.
Anyway, hopefully RR can work out why she's getting 1-3mb/sec instead of the 50mb/sec she's supposed to be getting.

The 1:30 was far more pleasant. A mac user that got scammed and wanted her machine looked over. Parking wasn't as much of an issue as I feared downtown, the lot wasn't reserved on Sunday, and I assured her of certain things and gently chastised her for calling a number on some website and handing over CC details. I mean really?

Back here, watched a bit of Battlestar and went back out again to deliver the system. It would have gone quickly, had I not tried to get her piece of junk Dell printer to install so the scanner would work. Which she assured me she used. No, you use the copy function I later learned, not scanning. AARG. So much for that HOUR. The installer just wouldn't do anything. Wouldn't open.
She made up for it by giving me 3 boxes of old video games and a tub of controllers and such to sell on ebay. I told her it wouldn't be soon, but I'd get to it. Said she had more she just put by the side of the road. AARG^2.

Finally got home, had just enough time to have a bite to eat before I booked next week. I am NOT supposed to be this busy now. 1 call per day, that was the deal. Not several.

And for all that, I have seven checks. I got three more checks this week. Three.

Yes, a lot of people paid me cash this week but as that goes into the IRA I don't consider it earned. Let's just hope I live long enough to pull it out and pay it to some over priced nursing home when I'm ninety.

Wait…

Got ready for tomorrow, finally made the additional changes to ellen's website, and oh look, it's time to get ready for bed.

Such a great weekend.

Mon:
Oh yeah, before I forget. My car is over 10,000 miles now. Yay?

Got a good amount of testing in today, as I got 4.0! Yay! Orange fax! So many new bugs to explore! No really, I only got through half of copy and wrote up 6 new ones.

So I know what I'm doing tomorrow. It's a little more responsive, but it does have a share of issues unique to the build. Like hole punch is there and doesn't work, and different staple options are supposed to be there are aren't. Stuff like that. I don't know how feature complete it's supposed to be.

Did not go to the bank, realized as I don't go home now, how would I? I'll have to go friday. That's not a big deal, I'll just go there first.

After work job went fine. Added 2GB of RAM to an iMac, looked it over, that sort of thing. Going into the place I saw eight deer stroll by and head across the street. This is only four, and of course the only camera I had was my crappy cell phone. But it was cool.

[[image file="2016-01/0125161721a_1.jpg" alt="4 of the eight" ]]

Went through the games, tons of xbox games, there dreamcast, bunch of PS2, a couple of PS3, xbox 360 and one Wii game oddly. Oh, and some gamecube ones. Saw some duplicates, I'll have to go though them and weed out those, maybe sort them. After all, a person who would buy a lot of sports games wouldn't buy FPS right? But would anyone buy old sports games is the question?

Watched a few episodes, only had one call and it was resolved quickly.

Tomorrow though, it's about 40 minutes away. Yippie.

Well, better get to bed, wanna be sharp for that copy testing I have planned for tomorrow.

Tues:
Testing! Driving! Action! Adventure!

Some of these things I had today!

Got through all of copy, didn't find too much more, but I did write up a few things. Went through my resolved bugs, found not all of them were resolved to my satisfaction, exactly.

Left right at 5:00 to get to my next task. She didn't have an IP address so I opened the network control panel to have a look. Suddenly she had one. Huh? Good old windows.

Otherwise just going over her piece of junk ancient machine, really it was 1.5ghz. Come on.

Then drove back here. I took 390 to get gas, so I was a little delayed, but got home just after 7:00. Had two calls, a cancelation for Thursday, and setting up the replacement Thursday appointment. I'm giving a guy one of my XP referb units just to get rid of it. Good riddance.

Washed my cups, fed the cats, checked my websites for today, oh look, it's after 8:30. That was a nice… evening.

Not too cold out today, even saw some melting. Windy tonight though. Looks like some more snow is coming though.

Think I'll have time to watch one episode!

Wed:
I did. Have time, that is.

More copy goodness today. Mainly just running various jobs. Didn't really write up anything until I learned at the end of the day that R4 was supposed to be feature complete, and the "done" column just hadn't been filled in. Whoops. So I wrote up bugs against the new features. Yay.

Guy came in looking for plastic forks. Oh, gee, wonder if you should ask the GUY WHO BROUHT SOME IN FOR YOU? Oh, you did! Here they are, enjoy! Glad I could help. He thought he was thanking me for showing him where they were. What a fool he was!

Bit of snow in the morning, but it had melted again by the time I left.

After work job was a cleanout, and boy it was pretty bad. Also her internet connection was awful as well. DSL, 5mb/s down but 100-200 kb/s up? How can that be?

Booked another job for Sunday, so I have two each day. Tomorrow is the traditional call Robert day though. I should have offered tomorrow, I forgot it had been canceled, so at the moment I just get to come right home. Obviously when I get home I'll just go right back out if I can reach someone.

It would be nice if my phone had the feature where you could call it and hear the messages. No such luck.

Then I remembered I had this quicken package to install for the lady. And I had forgotten, again, to get my mail. Inside it was the LCD cable I had been wondering if I would ever get. I did!

"Certainly one of these two people will want me to come tomorrow."

Nope.

Both wanted Saturday. Ugh. So now I have four places to go Saturday, and two sunday. Had I just been thinking business was slowing down a little? HAHAHAHAH.

Well, it's 8:30 now, where did this evening go? Oh right, I got back after 7:00.

Sigh.

Thurs:
And did testing continue? It did, that it did. It's slow going, for some reason. I still am not through the reduce/enlarge portion of copy. It doesn't help I have to check out after most jobs so I don't start getting the wrong paper.

But I did write up a few bugs, helping us past 2000 bugs in the database. Yay?

New build tomorrow. With a little luck it'll fix my paper issue and I can quickly finish up copy and move on to something else.

And apparently we're splitting into two companies? One for hardware and one for software? And I learned this on a news website at a customer's house? Bizarre, if true. I guess we'll know tomorrow, and if they let me back into the building or whatever.

What else? Didn't eat dinner there, came home. Had two calls, didn't reach the first one so I went to the second one. There I switched their mouse buttons because how the heck did they do that? And just general stuff taken care of. Nothing big.

Got back right at 7:00, made the other call. Talked her through turning the power off her machine and back on, which seemed to make it boot so let's hope it stays that way.

Looks like 4 saturday and two sunday, but of course we'll see what tomorrow brings in. After work it's shopping, buying valentine's day materials, and the banking. So I might be a little late seeing my parents, as I have no idea if the craft place will even have what I want, now that jo-anne's is gone. I have a whole three more checks to deposit. Go me.

Then over to see my parents, and that should be that.

Crap. I forgot about the iMac lady and the RAM. Where is that stuff? FedEx? What? I paid for 3 day shipping, and it shipped monday, and fedex can't give me a date? Super, thanks a bunch.

As it's a bit earlier than yesterday, going to try and get two episodes in tonight.

See you all next week, hope your weekend isn't too snowy.