2016-04-22:

Fri:
Got almost all my resolves done today! I haven't have this few in a long time. Of course I wrote a few more as I cleared them, naturally. The only two I have left are some google ones that are intermittent. UGh.

Otherwise just did copy some more. Not much to really talk about there.

I was a bit dumb, bringing my garbage over to my parent's house in the morning when I knew I was going home to put my groceries away after work. I could have just picked it up then. Grrrrr.

Oh well. Went to the bank, bought 5lbs of mouse food for $10 instead of 2lbs $9, somewhat odd pricing there. Saw the kitties! But no little mouseies or hamsters or chinchillas. Two budgies and a snake and some lizards though. Maybe they were having a party in back?

Bought groceries, got over there, and we had to put the movie off. Sigh.

So I had dinner (yummy pizza) and came back here. No calls to make so I checked my sites, put in my proofreading stuff and did my emails.

Sat:
Busy day. Went in the morning to take Squeaker in, and the vet said he looked good. One of the technicians said as soon as she heard the name she knew who it was. I guess he makes an impression with his squeaky voice. You da MAN, Squeaker!

Then out to install the modem, which went fine just fine.

Back here, had leftover pizza and left for the afternoon. This also went pretty well, not much to do at the 12:30, he just needed the password typed in for his wireless router, which I had offered to tell him over the phone but he insisted on me coming over. It was my standard password, so… yeah. Also his "smart" TV wasn't all that smart. It would play media formats of one kind or another true, but couldn't use netflix or anything like that. Took me a few minutes to track down an answer but there was no "media" button on the controller which was my first clue.

A cleanout for a crazy cat lady at 2:00 which wasn't too bad, then over to the email lady for my 4:00, but she got there at 3:30. I was proofreading in the car so the time wasn't wasted.

As I expected, yahoo wasn't around to chat with but we did get her RR address (or more accurately her husband's THEN hers, which she insists she doesn't remember) active and logged into. So I sent them a request to get back into the account and waited a half hour. No reply, so I left.

Went over to my parent's house, had dinner, and then left for the movie.

It was good, just rather disappointing that it was episode III not episode VII. Let me tell you what I mean- I'll tell you the plot of episode III, okay?

Person pursued by "legitimate" government body hides information inside droid.
Droid becomes most sought after thing in the universe.
Guy with dark side powers shows how evil he is in various ways.
Person that finds droid meets up with "rebellion" origination.
They discover they must destroy a very large weapon that has one weakness.
The shields must be taken down, so a small team goes to do that.
Very large weapon is destroyed.

Oh wait, did I say I was telling you the plot of episode III? Sorry, that was the plot of episode VII! Or wait, was it III? See what I mean.

Sun:
Cleaned up around here, and as it wasn't freezing out I replanted my Christmas Cactus so all the various pieces are now back in one pot. Let's keep kitties away from it this time, no?

Watched my shows, and started work on chapter 196.

Got it basically done by dinner time, when I watched the Deadpool movie. Pretty good!

Also baked a pie.

Then made my calls. Another person who just needed his own wireless password. Tried to get back to email lady who is still calling road runner despite my explaining, again and again, that yahoo is not road runner and so cannot help her. She did get an email from them but I didn't open it, figuring why bother. It wants some information but who knows what. She was "saying goodbye" to someone and was going to call me back. Hasn't yet.

The lady I set the cameras up for finally got the internet into the other house she wants set up, so that'll be a scream and a half. They have no computer, so it should just plug right and be like, yup, there it is. I suggested they try it themselves, but no, they must have me do it.

And another of my favorite customers for tuesday so I have shuts off by itself lady on monday, the hard to understand guy tuesday and the security camera people thursday. It's going to be a banner week.

Yahoo lady called, now her machine isn't connected to the router, apparently. I answered the security questions they asked for, we'll see what they say. Time warner is coming tomorrow, but if it's the router they're not going to do anything about that. So… yeah.

Finished the chapter. Now it's time for bed. See you Monday.

Mon:
Quite a tedious day. Got about a quarter of the way through the copy reduction and enlargement matrix. It's pointless anyway because there's no standard for the thing to be held to. So whatever it does, that's what it does. But I guess it should be checked to make sure something isn't horribly broken.

Got through it, went over to turning pc off lady. Tried the new keyboard, it wasn't that. Replaced her power supply. Got home, she called it had turned off again. Sigh. She she's getting a new machine.

On the way there I saw a huge traffic back up and decided to go a different way home than that. Didn't help much, traffic up the hill to creek road was awful, and for no reason I could discern. Bizarre.

And who else got a new machine? Yahoo lady! Yeah. Yahoo got back to us so I had her tell me the answers to the questions. Shock and surprise they were wrong. To their credit they asked for different information, like who is in your address book and what email do you get regularly. But when I called, she was like "oh, we went and bought a new machine and set me up with a gmail account."

Fine. You want to lose all your contacts and current email, be my guest. But the reason you're buying a new machine is… what, again? Oh, you're a moron, got it.

Glad I did all that work to try and solve your problem. You're welcome. And she still can't tell the difference between her RR email account and her other email account. "Oh, we had 300 emails from lord and taylor in there." Yeah, that's your RR account, baka! AARRRGGG.

Got the PC dropped off so I moved everything from it. Had to find an alternate tool because belarc wouldn't run on XP SP2 (ugh) but I managed to get his office key and reload that. It's too late now to do more, but it's mostly done. Just have to move stuff into position.

No calls today, thank goodness. Tomorrow is el mar buddy, so who knows what his issue is. Probably mostly in his head.

Let's see, figured out the next step in Susan's journey I think?
Made some corrupt files for senpai.
Counting down 9 days until my contract runs out, haven't heard anything. My hire buddy went to look for our manager, said he's never in his office. Started list of things I've brought in that I need to take back out so I don't forget them.
Ate pie, one slice anyway.
Quite nice out today.

So back tomorrow to finish up the larger sizes from the glass, and go to the tuesday meeting.

Not the best day.

Tues:
Even greater fun was had today! Work was fine, I got more of the copy matrix done than I thought, mostly because I got an extra hour of work time. No meeting!

After work job was crappy. As people can't articulate their problem I thought he just deleted some icons or something and it would be a quick fix. No. His machine is BSOD with good old "critical process died" and it was logging him in to a temporary profile.

He seemed to have lost everything when I finally got it to log in and not be temporary, but most of his stuff is on dropbox so thanks past me for that save.

Needless to say, I got home at 7:00 with his machine, I'm just going to reload it.

Only one call, the ice cream guy has somehow locked himself out of his machine and need me to reset the password for it. The tool I usually use doesn't support 10, but I found a procedure that should do it. Neat. So I get to go do that tomorrow.

While talking on the phone to him, someone randomly showed up and started knocking on my door. Because that's not rude at all, no! No, please do so all the time! Just drop in and expect me to drop everything to talk to you. Really!
Anyway, he dropped off a laptop so I'll have to look at that in a few days. Because tomorrow is the desktop reload. Gonna be so fun.

Finished up the PC from yesterday and finally got to eat dinner.

Now it's time for bed. Still now news on the contract, so we're down to 8 days.

I sure hope tomorrow is just as crappy!

Wed:
They just keep getting better! Or no, wait, what's the opposite of that?

So I learned today that about half our team is being let go next month, which is a great way to motivate employees to do their best work. We have 8 people in our group and a confirmed 3 are being let go. I said "about." What does this mean for my prospects at the company? You can imagine that for yourself I think.

My manger still has not heard from higher levels so we enter countdown day 7 for me needing to look for other work. I guess they are looking to sell the solution to other companies, which is only natural, so it would be nice to transition to another branded interface and continue testing. But who knows if that's in the cards for me.

I did get the copy matrix done, a whole day earlier than I expected. Got a new panel too, in hope that solves my weird issues with copy. Guess tomorrow I'll do a ton of copy and scan to google drive jobs, the bulk of my current open bugs, and see what shakes out. Meeting? Who knows?!

Got to the ice cream guy's place and found he has no internet there now. It was fine, but I wanted to look up the error I was getting. The procedure worked to a point though, and I got a new user made so I just transferred his stuff from the old user to the new one. Done.

Came back here, loaded windows on the freaking PC and… it wouldn't activate. Now I've done this before, where I just load 10 on there and it picks it up and everything's fine. It somehow knows the machine and gets the license number back and it's all happy. This time? No.

Tried the phone activation and had to speak to a person (in india) but without the windows 8 product number they couldn't do anything. Why though? The number should have stayed the same, I hadn't changed the hardware. I guess I should have booted it past the BSOD and gotten the windows product key.

So does he have the information, because the stupid sticker doesn't? Who knows, he didn't answer his phone. And he lost the other paper I wrote him up with some passwords on it, so I'm not hopeful. If not he gets the original Vista license back, I guess. And that's about two hours of work for nothing. WHEEEEE

I HATE WINDOWS.

Oh, and laptop guy just showed up out of the blue again and wanted his machine back. There was a "small chance" that "someone else" could fix it tonight. Whatever dude, just get out of my face. Really.

So looking forward to tomorrow where I get to set up another of those stupid camera systems. Been looking forward to it all week. It'll be the perfect little tip of the universe's hat in my direction.

So yeah. I'm going to basically get ready for tomorrow and go to bed now. Having done nothing except crap for other people I'm not getting paid for.

Remind me why I do this again? Oh right, for the tiny amount of money it does bring in. Right.

I can end with a little good news though- I'm up $66 on my fund from my initial investment. Still down $500 from the highest it ever was but you know. I'm back to my initial amount! WEEEEEEEE.

Late breaking edit- the reason it may not have worked was the fact that win8 PRO was used, but maybe I installed the HOME version of 10? And I can't seem to find any legit links for a pro iso so I had to go to a torrent site. Thanks, MS. The "media creation tool" doesn't list pro anymore, just win10. So how would I tell such a thing to install the pro version? Without the serial number, can that be done? I'm not sure. I'll just get the iso overnight and try it tomorrow. Stupid thing.

What is with needing all these different versions anyway? Why can't there just be "windows?" Is that really so freaking difficult, MS?

Allow me to state it one more time for the record: I HATE WINDOWS.

Thurs:
Found out I lost my screwdriver somewhere along the way. Used my lighter jacket today and expected to find it still in there. Nope. It's gone, along with some canadian change and a bunny magnet. See, their coins stick to magnets, so it was one big happy clump. How did I lose the happy clump without noticing?

Lost most of my fund gains too, shouldn't have looked. I shouldn't have looked.

More copy tests today. Despite changing the panel the "going back to the features screen" continues. Whoops. But I didn't see any of the other odd copy things I had before, so that's a win, right? Of course none of them were more than "once" in the first place.

No meeting, and no news on contracts so we're down to day 5.

Setting up the camera system, yeah, that was a lot of me sitting around. In the first place they didn't have all the hardware there, so it wasn't hooked up. I had to get that done after they went home and got it.

Then I asked what email they wanted it under and they were like "oh, I have that at home on a piece of paper." So I waited again. When he got back and handed me this piece of paper I saw no email or passwords on it. I was like, 'No. EMAIL. E-MAail. MAIL.' They were able to rattle that off no problem. AARG.

So I got home about 7:30.

PC guy doesn't have his product code for the old windows, shock and surprise.

First try at writing the Win10 disk failed verification. And to be fair, these dual layer disks are very old.

The second disk failed verification in the exact same spot. Odd. I'm trying it anyway. Seems to have worked. Both in terms of the disk and it getting activated as I expected. It was Pro all right. Stupid thing. Now to reload everything onto it. Yay. Or not, it's not like I can return it tomorrow anyway.

Not many calls today. One person with a bunch of old equipment they want me to look over, see if I have any use for any of it. Didn't reach her.

One person that needs a cleanout, so that's for Saturday morning.

Wrote some more notes about what Susan will do next, if I ever get a chance to write again.

No news on game, so it looks like nothing this week either.

Tomorrow plans, lots of google drive testing like I did before to finish up those last open bugs against that service. Shopping, bank. Then seeing my parents. Usual stuff.

Saturday the one job, maybe take Sunday off?

So that's been my freaking great week. See you all next week for the last Xerox week?