2016-07-01:

Fri:
Day went pretty quick, mainly due to John. He's like my father in a way, loves to talk. Nursing? Motorcycles? Jobs he's had in the past? Sure, all that stuff! Boy oh boy.

Anyway, I did get through a bunch of print from dropbox testing, and wrote up all of one new bugs. A very intermittent crash of the EFI app. It just started doing that too, very weird.

Got pizza that was left over from the other group, and went to see my boss about the extension. Turns out there's some kind of error from the website when he tries to put it through? But at least putting it through IS still the plan. *whew* Thank you, employment fairy. That's a thing, right?

Stopped at the bank, then went to check on my parent's fuzzies, then did the shopping. Got stuff for making ice cream, figure I can do that for the forth if I'm going to Sean's. (He's invited me)

And hey, I'll have a job to go back to afterwards! Sweet.

Got back, had 6 calls! Two were a guy from yesterday with "come at some point" "oh we figured it out don't come." Yes! The other four resulted in jobs, so I have a very booked up weekend to "look forward to." Yay?

Somehow miscalculated on the latest auctions, they ended today instead of Sunday. Huh. Anyway, 2/3 sold so I boxed them up. Another $4.99 x2 for someone else.

Checked my websites, got ready for tomorrow, and that was basically it for today!

Sat:
Mostly a waste of time.

Fed the kitties and such, that was not a waste of time.

But my first job was. Mostly it boiled down to "you're right clicking." That was the bulk of his issues.

Came back here, wanted to see about something in skyrim. Got it up, wasn't playing five minutes before it blue screened again. Yay.

Nothing like having an hour, and instead of playing the thing you want, instead you get to turn more things off on your PC (like cores 3&4) in an effort to track it down. Also ripped out all the nvidia drivers and put the latest one back. We'll see.

Out again, the book writing guy with just some dumb questions. Whatever.

Back here. Did a bit more skyrim.

Then out to Sean's, passing by the place I needed to drop the keyboard and cable off at, so I did that at least.

We played two rounds of Sean's old/new spaceship game, but it was going to be a long one, so we felt there was enough value gained with what we had done and played something else. I lost terribly with half Sean's score. I was in the lead right away too, with 12 points, but only got another 10 points after that. I just don't get that game I guess.

Sun:
Went over to do the feeding tasks, and came back to check my websites. At 11:00 I called the guy I had put the SSD in for because he said he "tried the printer" but all evidence was that he had NOT tried installing the printer. As he claimed. Also he has this odd "spreadsheet" that is far, far more complex than it needs to be, and won't print very easily. LibreOffice just chugs and chugs, though it does finally print in the end. So I tried to figure that out for like an hour.

Then out to my first one at 1:00, and the crappy day truly began. This is on old customer of mine that lives in a trailer, and my goodness since his wife left him that place has really gone downhill. The man must smoke continuously, as his machine was so gunked up with stuff I couldn't vacuum it out. I had to take the heatsink out and scrub it off with a toothbrush. Not that it helped, it still wasn't spinning.

So I took that one, as I don't carry the box of fans with me anymore.

Went to set up the printer. She wanted Publisher 97 installed, which went about as well as you might expect. As in, it didn't. It was made for Win95 and it isn't straightforward. No, this is MS. The setup program creates a hidden folder at the root of the C drive with a couple of files in it, one of them another exe which is then launched. Of course this asked a few things and then hung every time.

Marvelous. I "installed" it by just copying the files to the C drive, and for a wonder it worked. I don't know, did they even have a registry in 95? I showed her how to navigate the ancient file system dialog box and that was good enough for her.

Took this machine home, oh look, it isn't the fan. The replacement does the same thing, spins a few seconds and dies. This machine is toast.
Was looking at what replacements I had, powered on the one machine and it BSOD immediately. Marvelous. It didn't the second time, it ran a few minutes and then hung. Guess I'm not selling that one. The other one is an XP machine. Whoops. Guess I don't have a replacement for him. Time to get a new PC dude. Try to not smoke 100 cigarets near it a month or whatever.

Ate dinner, then went out for my 5:00.

It wasn't bad, just a standard cleanout, so it didn't take me too long.

Back here I did laundry, made phone calls (reached 2 of 3, then carlos called so I helped him though some stupid crap.) Fan guy was in his car and couldn't talk, so he called me back later. Ordered him a new system.

The guy dropped off the laptop so I spent about 40 minutes taking it all apart, putting his old HD back in, booting it up, getting the office product key, finding out he had yet another bizarre version of office I'd never heard of and didn't have an installer for (2010 pro plus) finding a version of that online, downloading it, putting the new SSD back into the thing, installing the new version, and finding out it didn't need a key anyway. Super. Just super.

Mon:
May as well get the most recent venting out of the way. I was copying a file from my machine upstairs to the PC downstairs. Simple, right? Bits flowing across the wire. We've done it for hundreds of years at various speeds. But no, windows has to go and BLUE SCREEN simply doing this every day file transfer.

And then not boot again.

I had to go get my boot disks, get the driver CD, load the drivers into the boot flash drive, and try a repair.

I am this close to just chucking that PC and saying "forget it." That Witcher 3 game I just bought that only runs on PC? Can't be a good enough game to justify the hassle I go through trying to keep a PC running. I don't know how regular people do it!

Anyway, work or something. I finished up print from dropbox, and moved on to fax. I finished it too. I wrote up four bugs today, my comrades wrote up 0. Capital. With fax done all the major things have been tested for 6 so I have no idea what I'll do tomorrow. Maybe take one of the lesser services? Might as well.

No news on extensions.

At least the after work job was quick. Setting up a new router, didn't take long.

Had five calls when I returned, so I have two new jobs at this point. This week is just about booked.

Got another call, about the time warner router that had randomly turned the wireless off again. I showed him how to reset it.

And then I went to bed early.

Tues:
Pretty much as expected, I fear. With all the major services done it was putz around or run through one of the lesser test cases. I chose to putz around.

I did find a new bug or two, so that's good right?

Still no news. *sigh*

We did find out there was some issue upgrading to a certain version if you didn't start at a certain older version. Whoops! So that could be a bit of work for the guy doing that.

Berries are getting ripe, looks like the bushes in back will produce this year, yay!
After work job wasn't bad. Checked a few things, saved them a bunch of money on their phone bill by telling them they didn't need Frontier Secure or their stupid 40GB cloud service at $15 each a month. Honestly, they didn't even know what the cloud service was, why were they paying for it? And their speed was atrocious, naturally, thanks free market! Oh wait.

Back here I watched the star wars movie Sean gave me, and ate dinner. No calls? What a rare sight.

Just about time for bed. Meeting tomorrow, and… uh, more messing about I guess. Though we may get a newer build, probably later in the day though. We'll see.

Wed:
Well, we saw. No new build, not until next week. Guess they're doing an every other week schedule now, meaning we'll get two more before it has to ship? Seems reasonable. (that was sarcasm)

Had our meeting, and I helped put tablets back into spares so that took a bit of the day. Not much else exciting. No news on extension, and there's rumors of more layoffs? Great, just what they need. I remember the last "rumors" of "layoffs." Sigh.

After work job went quickly, mbam only took 11 minutes to run. Found a bunch of stuff too. After that there wasn't much else to do.

Got the replacement PC in for the smoker, so I got that ready. Found out I ordered the wrong kind of external inclosure. PATA instead of SATA. Sigh. But in the end it didn't need it, because the SSD was installed under the HD holder. Neat! So I just popped it in. I do have a 500GB PATA drive I have no other use for, maybe it can go in there.

Made a few calls, just the delivery for now so Saturday is still open. I'm sure it won't last.

Got ready for tomorrow, tried to copy some content off a disk that Sean gave me (more stuff to watch) on my PC and came back down to find it completely hung.

Again.

And of course it (again) wouldn't boot without fixing the MBR and such crap.

Obviously this system is dying somehow. Processor maybe? I had half the cores turned off, so it's not heat or anything like that. If I still have a job in two days, maybe I'll spec out a system to replace it. I just don't know if it'll be worth it, given the (no) time I have to actually play games. Letting it sit there while I'm not doing anything? It's never had a problem. It's on 2-3 hours a night while I do calls, to look up maps and such. Never a problem. But do anything remotely taxing, and you can forget it. It's so weird.

And my knee feels funny. Standing? Fine. Sitting? Fine. Walking? It twinges and hurts a bit. So odd.

I couldn't resist. It would be about $1000. Ugh. But that's all top of the line, cutting edge components, like M.2 drives instead of SATA drives. Because I hate waiting for windows to do stuff.

Well, it's a moot point if I have no job tomorrow. We'll see what happens then.

Thurs:
Got the good news just before lunch! The paper was signed, and I'm in until the end of the month. (or they decide to get rid of me randomly).
Whew.

Didn't actually do much testing, but did talk about new PC builds, controllers, the current EFI screw ups, got my new badge, you know, the usual.
Couldn't get into the building, apparently there's a bug in the software that shuts the accounts down a day early. Who knew? I did, when I tried to get in.
You have to swipe to get out as well, and John walked me down to the door and I went out to the car and realized my keys were in my jacket pocket. The jacket hanging inside the lab on a peg.

So I just walked over there. Knee was fine, so it seems to be getting better. A few twinges, but nothing like yesterday.
Then of course I walked back. It really wasn't far. And it was so very nice out.

Dropped off the system, his place is still just as filthy and full of smoke residue. Natually there was no "thanks for doing it so fast, you know how like I was whining earlier about absolutuly needing it by the end of the month and you got it in, looked it over, put my stuff on it, and brought it over the next day? That was great by the way." Not that I expected such, but it would have been nice. What he instead did was whine about the cost (which he knew in advance mind you) because he was on disability (why?) and he was in an accident recently and on and on. I felt like asking him how much he spent on cigarettes a week. The whole time I was there he had one in his fingers. And those things aren't cheep.

Just like the components to the new PC I ordered when I got home. I know, I know, I probably shouldn't have done it. But I'm getting really tired of that machine downstairs. I did save some money going with AMD, about $200 to be exact. And I plan to put that system into a different case, then when I'm satisfied everything is in place, wipe it out and start really troubleshooting it starting one component at a time. If I can narrow it down I can at least sell the bits that work, right? I might even do that if I get a chance over the weekend, maybe it's some loose connection or something stupid like that? Very low chance of that though.

So we move into July with job. Long weekend, we have the 4th and 5th off. Going to Sean's on the 4th so nothing this Saturday. Took a few calls today so I have Saturday almost booked up already. (including password guy down the street, who is again experiencing password issue. Odd how no-one else seems to have this frequency of issue surrounding those things) Sunday I have one at 9:00, out in Hilton. Ugh.

So that's the near future and the recent past. I'm breathing a little easier, believe me.

Picked 4 ripe berries! So good!

Have a good 4th everyone. Should be sunny, so safely enjoy official city fireworks and don't blow your faces off or anything.