2016-11-11:

More poking at things with a stick, nothing really major came up. With various parts of the software now working I went and passed a bunch of test cases I couldn't before. Then went through the cloning test cases, got most of them.

Looked at the "erase customer data" function. Whoops, it doesn't work you say? Nor does copy or print… what exactly are they doing to this stuff?

Got a muffin from Senpai, and our candy bowls overflow with goodness.

Went to the bank, then shopping. Aldi didn't have cat food, my waffles, and I couldn't find the cider. What the heck?

Got cat food at k-mart, hope they like it! I got the cheeper stuff. 
Then over to the tractor supply for more litter, as I have one more cat now.

Had dinner with my parents, yummy lasagne, my favorite.

Got back here and brought all my wares inside. Oh, only ten calls today? Super, that's just super.

Luckily there weren't quite that many, but still. Didn't get to talk to the whiner about windows 10 she didn't answer, and then I got stuck troubleshooting a very bizarre windows issue for more than an hour. Turned out to be Windows Defender, the built in antivirus. At least I think, it's the first thing that came up when looking for the problem, and turning it off (with a new registry entry, thanks MS) did the trick. Honestly, get your act together MS.

So by then it was 9:30. Yay.

So I have three for tomorrow, and I need to call York because of some Peachtree issue? I was just there, as Rainbow Dash would say.

Got an email from my "contact" at Silver Xis. "Dear worker," it begins, and I notice 14 other names (in the "to" field rather than the BCC field, so classy, very classy move sir) so you know the place cares about you as a person.

"You have eclipsed 12 working months" it goes on to say. Who is writing this? Shakespeare? "Please sign a new Schedule 6 document" it finishes, noting as you will the lack of a period so presumably "and then empty your wallet into our coffers." got deleted at the last moment. That's it. I guess I'm just supposed to sign it. Not get it back to them or anything. I mean it doesn't say that, does it? No, it doesn't. So bizarre. Do I give it to my manager? Burn it as a sacrifice along with a goat to provide a sweet savor unto the Lord? I have no clue!

I just looked at their website. They sometimes call themselves "SilverXis" and other times "Silver Xis." Their site is copyright 2010 so you know it's been updated regularly. Their about page begins "SilverXis Inc. is leading provider of" so you know a native English speaker took care in crafting those words.

If I could do it all again, I'd just start a contracting company. You do nothing, and companies pay you tons of money for it. What could be better?

Sat:
Got to the vet, 8:30 but still had a bit of a wait. Tinker did not like Oliver being there, I guess. He was very pissy. He usually isn't. Even scratched me when I went to put him back in the carrier.

He needs his teeth done, another $400. It's just a little less than a week's wages. It's fine. So affordable.

Then out to the 10:30. I was basically doing a reload after some, uh, person, decided to reload a machine even though they did not know what the heck they were doing. So of course it had no drivers, no applications, and was now worse off because I had to come fix it. So I had to do a reload procedure on the fly, where usually I like to start things off and then go do something else here at home. At least it wasn't totally slow! OH wait it was a PC of course it was.

The lady I helped kill Windows Update called. Twice. She has decided to totally ignore the advice of someone that's been in the business oh let's call the 'computer business' his whole life. And based on what? Here's me on the one hand, with actual facts about WHY PCs are so slow and what to do about that. Buy used (because processor speeds haven't increased in ten years) and just put in a solid state drive, the only thing that has gotten faster in the last ten years.

And on the other hand we have her, with a vague "feeling" about "wanting windows 10" for some reason. (Did I mention my machine could be upgraded to 10? Did I? I think I did.) Not that you have some need to run win10 or that you even know what, exactly, "windows 10" is apart from being "above 7." Because you don't. You have no idea why one would be better than another at all.

So instead of trusting the professional (who has already solved your current PC problem and has helped you in the past) to know what he's talking about, you're going to Worst Buy and getting ripped off. Double, because the PC you get there will most likely be the absolute worst piece of garbage they have on the shelf because it's "cheap" and then they "upsell" you a bunch of services and crap you don't need.

All the while getting a machine with half the processing power and 1/5 the disk speed of the machine I would have gotten you, and you're probably going to pay at least 1/3 more for the privilege! All for some vague "feeling" you have no facts to back up.

Well done. Super informed decision. Let me know when it craps out because it's junk and maybe you'll take me up on my offer to make you something decent at that point.

Got the leaves done before I had to leave again. Still not many down, but at least that's a few less I have to worry about later.

Went back out again, the second one took a bunch of time, google doesn't like showing you exactly where your space is going. On drive or on gmail. There's no way to sort by size! And while his Drive shows like 8GB used, the actual drive itself seems to say less than 2GB. Weird.

Well, cleaned out some big emails anyway, and some pictures off his drive, and he had to leave so at least his problem is lessened. Answered some questions too, so that's fine.

Made it to my 5:30 with 10 minutes to spare and found out he had been scammed, so I did the usual cleanup and recovery of that. They had taken the antivirus off, as well as mbam and ccleaner. He said he saw his passwords being accessed (and still didn't just cut them off?) so I advised reversing the $300 credit card charge before it fully went through, canceling the card, and changing all his passwords. Have fun, sucker!

Got back here. Finished up the latest chapter. Just about to begin the combat, they did a bit more talking than I thought they would. Villains, am I right?

Talked to the afternoon guy, did remote stuff to finish that off. 
And my Sunday at 2:00 canceled, so we moved it to Monday. So I just have two for tomorrow. iMac guy and installing the new printhead. Guess which will be the quick one?

I actually got an Oliver on my lap! Twice even. It's a first.

Started playing The Witcher, so I can play The Witcher 2 and then the Witcher 3 at some point.

It's decent, but I didn't play for long.

Sun:
More playing The Witcher, and then two jobs as my middle one moved to tomorrow.

It's pretty good, but no skyrim. What is?

Got most of the iMac guy's questions answered. Some things he could of course not show me, well done keeping something around so I can see the "problem." One issue was on the other end, the person he was trying to skype with has muted her mic or something. It worked with face time so it's her side. The other stuff, like having mail open to see the unread count, or him turning off Flash Player in pogo and then wondering why flash stuff didn't work I sorted myself. I do blame Adobe for that one, if it's off it should say it's off, not just that it needs to be updated.

Right over to my next one, who had no problem at all. Copied in color and b/w, and then printed. No issue at all. Sigh.

Back to gaming.

Just one call, no new job just some questions, and I got ready for tomorrow. Pretty good day, all around.

Of course I ignored paperworks that needs doing, but what do you want from me?

Mon:
Work was dragging today for some reason, I stayed pretty busy too. Weird.

Worked on the disable admin feature, as it was the least recently done. Some very odd things were happening in the software. Like clone files not restarting the machine yet being applied anyway. Still can't get printouts from my test machine. Logging in different users than you actually logged in? Random crash twenty minutes after a clone file put in? Bizarre stuff.

Anyway, having a meeting tomorrow (with India, so it's 6:00 for them, haha) at 8:00 to "go over" the bugs before I write them up. Because they get "dinged" for having bugs written? Huh? I myself wrote 700 bugs against the Staples program. We, in total, wrote over 3000. That's what happens when you write software. Heck, I can't make a change to the Susan story without introducing new typos, developers working on something this complex are not going to fare better.

Whatever.

Went to look at the ancient XP system after work. Don't see many of those in the wild. Wonder why. Oh right, they suck. It had a lot of problems. Like it would lose the profile, so I would put it back, and next reboot it would be lost again. The registry was damaged. It was hanging.

It was awful. And then I got to experience once again the absolute joy of "driving home in the dark." So great.

Got back at 7:00, made my calls. Two more jobs for this week, and dropping off a monitor for the lady I worked for today. Just ordered them too, nice, sold the extra already.

Checked my sites, that took me up to 8:00.

Got most of Mizzy's gift, spent some time with it because the screws were stupid. Hopefully got it all taken care of. Only need one more piece.

And went to bed. I was pretty tried. Can't imagine why.

Tues:
Not much excitement at work today, no new build so I was stick with the unclone version I had. Wrote that up. But not before my 8:00 meeting with the India people. Went fine, a lot of the bugs are "the other team" which doesn't make me want to froth at the mouth at all. Why do we have two separate teams for all this? Doesn't that just make the job that much harder, because now we have to try to combine the works of two teams and get them to work together? But I'm not Xerox so…

With 2/5 of the program broken, 1/5 done yesterday that leaves 2/5ths, the most minor 2/5ths of the program to examine. I poked around, had some doughnut holes- I mean more halloween candy- I mean testing testing testing.

Once released back into the wild I dropped off the monitor. She's trying to use some piece of junk HP parallel based printer. It just rattled and wheezed and I said "I'll just give you a freaking printer" so he's coming to pick it up tomorrow. Just needs ink, so it's worthless as is. Yay, one yucky printer gone now to get rid of the other somehow.

Then on to see the nearby guy who is moving to Cherry Ridge. I have other customers there. His laptop he had set to 40% zoom in gmail and couldn't figure out how to get it back to 100%, and the desktop…

How hard is it to keep track of icons? I mean my Mac icons have never, and I mean never in what 20 years of using Macs? Ever moved by themselves. But windows moves them all the time. This one was especially bad, simply shoving them all to the left when you refreshed. On various boards the "solution" ranged from anti-virus scans, new drivers loaded, arcane settings changed, rebooting a couple of times, hitting shift-f5, using a program to manage their positions… In other words complete randomness. Well done.

Got back to my 6 phone calls, but it was only 4 and really only questions. Yay, so I didn't book any new ones. I do have the one for tomorrow.

Got a laptop dropped off. Oh look, you're running two anti-virus products! Maybe that's why it's so slow? You think?

Worked on that, got ready for tomorrow, looked over the xmas gifts I got in so I'm almost done with my shopping as I've gotten most everything in.

And by then it was 8:30.

Sigh.

Wed:
I guess there was some sort of "election" yesterday? Probably not important.

But I did get the strangest sensation that my country my becoming great again, even as I sat at work and tried to figure out reproduction steps for the bug I was facing.

Oddest thing.

Anyway, new build came in with the clone working again, so I started testing the clone services. That's when I discovered that if you take the AT&T solution off, after doing a clone file, you can't get back into the printer again. Whoops.

Figured out the exact sequence of steps needed to reproduce the issue, and had a couple of meetings. And brownies. And skittles.

Went 20 minutes down the road to see a dead machine. It beeps when I take the RAM out so that's a good indicator it's alive, but it does nothing. Tried a new power supply, moving the RAM, and a new video card. Sadly, the video card my sister gave/sold me earlier? It was an empty box. Kind of hard to use an empty box… So I had to bring it home to try that. Didn't help.

Set up the new PC I had gotten two days ago and transferred her meager amount of stuff into it. Done.

The laptop is still grinding away at 100% trying to do a windows update. Humorously, the desktop I set up immediately pegged one processor at 100% doing the same. As it has 4 and an SSD the performance impact is negligible so I said "screw it" and once my stuff was on there, pulled it and set it aside to go be delivered tomorrow.

That took me up to 8:00. Got ready for tomorrow.

Thurs:
Started the install of the new build before I read my email. Whoops. Apparently there was an issue and the newest build sort of kills the printer webpage. Whoops. They already knew about it and fixed it but I did have to wait for the install to finish, then revert it back to yesterday's. So I started about 10:00 instead of 8:00.

Got through three of the 5 services today, closed a bunch of bugs. Looks like a few things I had noted before have remained issues, so I may have a few things to write up soon. Also figured out why the web site that controlled all this stuff was messing up for me but not him. I had "put intranet sites in compatibility mode" checked. Thanks, MS. So helpful.

There's some new programs coming down the line too, so it looks like we'll have plenty of work in the future. That's good, my contract expires soon.

Delivered the PC, that went fine. Then came home.

Worked on the laptop which I finally got off saying "windows 10 failed." Yeah, I know, stop trying already. Finished it up while I checked my sites.

No bank tomorrow, veterans' day. Odd, there's no apostrophe on the calendar, is that the right usage? Huh.

No invite from Sean but a few calls. Get to go back to York, I guess her machine is now turning off or something? One other call, so I have three places to go Saturday. I hope to do more leaves in the morning, and it should stay dry until then. They are coming down now.

Then nothing for Sunday? Amazing.

Lady came to get the laptop, so that's taken care of. Did a little Witcher and now it's about time for bed.

Tomorrow, no bank though I have a bunch of checks to put in. Oh well. Shopping, seeing my parents. Not sure what I'll work on at work, I did most everything today! I'll find something I wager.

Hope this weekend trumps the last!

(little political humor for you.)