2016-07-29:

Wait, yes you do. You're here.

Fri:
Pretty exciting day today… no, what's the opposite of that?

Anyway, finished up the "payment integration" test cases, which honestly had more to do with log messages than anything really relating to payment. We can't even do payment stuff, not really. A bit too late I realized many of the test cases were so similar as to honestly be exactly the same, and started putting numbers next to them just like I did for the alerts one. Should it ever need to be run again, it'll be much easier.

Rained for like three seconds. Went outside with everyone (social activity!!!!) and it was super sunny and warm and I loved it! A few minutes after going inside it sounded like it was raining to beat the band. (What did the band ever do to you?)

Then it stopped, and that was that.

By the time I left again, the ground was dry as though it had never rained at all. Nice.

Went to staples, found I had printed the $4.00 twice because they had included them in the second email, it was basically just a reminder NOT a separate $4.00 reward. Whoops!

Did the shopping, saw my parents, helped them with some monitor related shenanigans and got a haircut.

Back here I made calls, took a call canceling my 10:30 for tomorrow, so I called the person for Sunday and put them there, so now I have sunday free. Go me!

Oh, and some Supernatural I guess.

Sat:
First one was fairly simple. Don't ask me how, but he had bypassed the motorola modem by hooking his now telephone only modem to his older PC (bypassing the router too!) and then somehow got time warner to disable the motorola and make the other one active again. Oh, and he had disabled the ethernet port on his newer pc.

Is it any wonder the newer PC wasn't online? There was no possible way it could have been online! You took away any means whatsoever of doing that!

I called time warner and had the new modem put back on the system, put the cables where they should be, and reenabled the ethernet port. Done. Twenty minutes and I headed home again for a bit.

Next one was also fairly straightforward. It had a BSOD on it when I walked in, and it was a pretty crappy XP system. Cracked open the case, yup, bad capacitors. They went for the refurbished option, so I came back and found a decent one on ebay. This time I didn't get one with an SSD, figuring I still have one 120GB SSD I'll just use that one!

And of course I completely forgot to apply the ebay bucks again. Why- oh why- is that not applied BY DEFAULT ebay? ANSWER ME. Oh wait you can't.

Anyway, pop the SSD in, put their old HHD in to copy the stuff off, and reload windows onto it. I'll get the (somewhat useless) HD that was in the system, make a bit more on the sale, everybody wins.

Ate lunch and left for my 1:00.

And left for unlucky number 3. Hadn't had it on half an hour and it had blue screened 3 times. What the heck? So I guess we forget that one.

Went over to Sean's. No Other Sean, so we watched The Mummy which was pretty decent and played a very long game of Scythe. I was next to last! Whoops. Pro tip- learn how the game scores before you start playing. Ah well, it was pretty good, so it all worked out.

Sun:
When I got home it looked like the power had been off for at least a while, and my analog clock downstairs showed it had been off quite a while. Huh.

Not much to tell today, enjoyed my day off. Finished Supernatural season 10, and the introduced "the darkness." My oh my. It's like they're begging me to put Susan into that world.

Started a new series, Lost Girl, which I'm liking. Totally Demongate High if you know what I mean. (Sean gave me this and season 2 of dominion, so there goes the rest of this month)

Also finished up Powers season 2, so no more TV shows at the moment for me. I mean current one, you know what I mean.

Cleaned the Serenity event in Sailor Moon Drops!

Looked my berries over. The ones on the far side are totally burnt to a crisp, this year was not kind to them at all. I got a few more but not many. Enough to make a pie (which I did. Spoiler- delish!) and freeze a bag. A far cry from last year. Maybe rain tomorrow for more than two seconds?

Couple of calls, but no action for tomorrow. Some guy that wants me to come out at 9:00 PM. UH, no.

Off to bed, still tired from getting in late last night.

Mon:
Most exciting thing that happened today was the rain!
Rained most of the morning once I got in to work. Something weird going on with the PA system in the building, it was hissing and crackling all day. We might even get more, I see storm clouds on my weather report through the week. Nice.

I did write up two new bugs, so it wasn't a total waste of a day. Tried to figure out why two machines could open the print to dropbox service as many times in a row as they wanted, but mine could only open it once. Had to check out again to get it to reopen. Weird. That wasn't the bug I wrote up.

Had a bunch of calls, but just booked tomorrow. The rebath guy has a BSOD of death, again. Honestly, get rid of XP already!

Oh, and some guy bought a pentium III laptop, wanted to use it. Uh, it's 16 years old and doesn't even have WiFi. Good luck! On the bright side he paid what the machine was worth. $5.

9:00 PM guy said shock of shocks, it was the mouse that was the problem. Amazing. I accurately diagnosed his issue from one rambling phone call. I don't know, when my tire is flat, I think maybe I'll add air to the tire rather than something crazy like, I don't know, replacing the spark plugs. It's just how my brain works I guess. I start with the obvious stuff. Mouse doesn't work? Replace mouse. Does it get better? If yes, problem solved. If no, let's take a look at the place the mouse plugs into, maybe try a different port. AND SO ON.

But what do I know? I'm a 40 year old (or nearly so) single guy that gets excited about a Princess Luna plush and has a house full of… no strike that, my house IS a shrine to geekdom. Could be worse, it could be football. :-)

Watched more Lost Girl.

Tues:
Wow, we are not getting anything done at work. I did write up a few more bugs I found, don't worry. We were also trying to track down why Senpai's SD card would cause some odd behavior when the tablet was rebooted with it inside. But even formatted, with nothing on it, the strangeness continued. So we got nothing.

And dropbox started letting me log in twice in a row, so figure that one out too.

After work job was an odd one. Ran chkdsk which originally told me the disk contained "one or more unrecoverable problems." but a second and third run through (slowly) completed. Weird. Ran the HD tool, the quick test anyway, and it was fine too. But really, can we please get rid of XP?

Finished season 1 of Lost Girl, it was pretty good but not exactly the showdown I had hoped for. But there are four more seasons so…

No calls today, and I still didn't reach the lady from yesterday so nothing for tomorrow. Yay! Shoot, tomorrow turned sunny on my weather tracker, but still rainclouds on thursday and friday.

Wed:
Today's misadventure actually has a happy ending! It very easily could have gone the other way.

Work was boring, no new build until tomorrow. I did somehow get stuck with fax turned off, and no screen saver. Very odd. Reloaded software, still didn't fix it. I'm actually stumped. I was just trying to get excel files to preview, which seems to karma chameleon come and go, when suddenly the tablet went black. Had to reboot it, and it never worked right after that. Tried just about everything. (everything would have included setting it on fire, so I saw "just about")

No job, so came back here and got ready to have a quiet evening of watching the last series Sean gave me. Nope. The PC arrived so I started setting it up.

(This is the story of misadventure I spoke of earlier)

I put the SSD an their old HD into the case and booted it up with 10 pro to do the install. I saw only one HD and thought "that's weird" but didn't think too much of it, and formatted the thing to start the install.
Immediately I realized I had just done the Worst. Possible. Thing. I had formatted THEIR drive NOT the SSD. AARG.

To make matters worse, the SSD wasn't recognized by windows installer. Huh?
I tried a BIOS update, no change. So I put the old drive back in, and looked into imaging it over onto the SSD, not that it worked for the old game system I had.
The partitions were all screwed up, but I found a program to manipulate them and that finally worked out.
Still had to erase the old drive before it wouldn't boot from it, or lose it, or other crazy stuff. I hate windows!

As for the old drive, I called them and they weren't too upset, but I did say I would do what I could. I tried four different recovery programs and the last one actually did something sane, so I bought it ($70, ugh) and started copying the stuff off it. I mean it was 0% so nothing had been written to it. So everything was there, it just had to be found. It's about another half hour to finish, but it looks like I'll get their entire documents folder back. Yes!

Had pie for dinner, and a half a bagel. Got ready for tomorrow, made my phone calls (one job for tomorrow) and bringing the system to these guys Saturday at 9:00.

So yeah, this evening sort of sucked, actually.

Thurs:
Praise the sun, because we can't praise the rain. We didn't get any.

What we did get though, is software. Both machine and tablet, so we loaded those puppies right up. Went through my "resolved" bugs and all but one was actually fixed. The other was much better than it had been, but still was not quite perfect.

We also got new cameras, so I set those up for my worker bee companions. He ordered one for me, so now what am I going to do with the extra one? Maybe a family member would like it?

No new bugs written, which I guess is good? I did get fax back. I unregistered the machine, deleted the profile, made a new profile with a new name, registered to that one, and rebooted twice. Done! Super simple, how did I not think of that before?

After work activities were fine, went quickly. Just answering some questions for her and selling her on the virtues of an SSD because her machine was just dragging like… a… machine with no SSD.

Back here I copied over the data I had gotten from the HD last night and started setting the new PC totally up. Got that done and backed up and everything. So it's ready for Saturday.

Spent nearly an hour on the phone getting someone to upload a couple of PDFs to a website.

And made an appointment for the 8th at 9:00.

Watched the first Dominion Series 2 episode and ordered some quieter case fans for my PC. I'll have to switch cases, which will be somewhat of a pain quite honestly. My current case only fits 80mm case fans, which are not a common size or something because the stuff I want only exists in 120mm. Sigh. But at least I do have this case that will accept them, so I can transplant the stuff, it shouldn't take long. When that machine is on it's being worked pretty hard, so I figure the cooler I can make it, the better it'll be. It gets loud!

Nothing from Sean about Saturday yet, so tomorrow is the normal banking, shopping, and seeing my parents. Deliver the system first thing Saturday and maybe take the rest of the weekend off? We'll see.

Oh, also ordered a cheap PC and got a deal on an SSD to put into it, may as well have a system ready for the next person that wants it, rather than going through all this crap right at the time. Right? I might even make some money on it doing it this way, decent PCs are pretty cheap, and adding an SSD (usually) isn't too much hassle, and is cheaper than having someone else do it. So there.

See you next week for the beginning of August.