2016-12-09:

Fri:
Had a bunch of small adventures today. Helped get the printer ready for transport by reloading the software in the morning. Or trying to, anyway. Wouldn't take. It looked like it was going to, but in the end it just went past it and booted normally. Very odd. Put the patch on as we seemed to have lost it? And then redid the tablet software, and it at least did a copy/scan/print so we said "ship it."

Of course the guy getting the back covers on opened the front door and simply tore it right off. Whoops? Turns out they glue the hinge part to the plastic part and the glue dried up.

So we had to get a new door. Ah well.

Also did a little Office Depot testing, wrote up two bugs (one that had already been found, sigh) and listened in to some meetings.

They want us to work weekends, so I'll probably go in Sunday. Maybe part of the day tomorrow? I don't know, I didn't get any new business for tomorrow because I didn't reach a couple of people. But I'll try them tomorrow after I take my kitty in because I don't want to get too far behind.

Went shopping, got cat food, saw my parents. My mother got in late because of the show she's doing so I got home late too. That's okay, only two calls. Reached one person with a dead HD, he's just going to buy a new machine (no, no, don't ask what my recommendation is, you know, getting a machine from me that might actually be fast.)

Didn't reach the other, or the guy I need to put the HDs in for.

Burned some disks for book lady, she always wants CDs made. Who uses CDs anymore?

Checked my sites, and that's about it. I did look at implementing my "check for updates" in bankbook. As I won't have Sparkle anymore it's a thing I want to implement myself. Should be easy. It won't actually do the update like Sparkle did (*tear*) but it can at least tell you if you're out of date or not.

Sat:
Is it sunday already? It feels like Sunday. Why is that?

Did three jobs today, but first it was kitty drawing blood time. That went fine, went to see a Mac user with messed up mail settings and a printer that wasn't connecting to the wireless. Answered a few other questions, and came back. Got more gifts for the christmas eve game and a few things for me. The entire set of snow white and the 7 dwarves in great shape. They're really cute. A PS2 I hope to clean up and sell, or maybe keep it has the Ethernet adapter on the back. Don't have one of those. And some LED christmas lights.

Ate lunch. Called book guy, hard drive guy and another call had come in so I called the person from yesterday and that new person. So I have monday and wednesday booked. Went both places, first to see about a "won't boot" situation. She insists she wasn't scammed but then why is your machine asking for a registry decryption password on boot up? Hmmmmmmmm? I don't even know how to activate that stupid feature. Used exclusively by scammers. But no, no, it was working yesterday. Sure it was lady, sure it was. So I took that to reload. I'll have to bring it back, uh, tuesday, meaning I have only Thursday free at this time. Great, it's not even the week I'm booking for now. Why did I agree to work on a Sunday again?

Sat around almost an hour because the next one was in Victor so I just went over there directly. Wasn't idle, figured out my christmas eve game stuff. As usual going to be 20% cooler then simply trivia questions. Forgot the lady's CDs both times by the way, I passed her house like three times today. Sigh.

Then set up a new PC. Pulled the old HD out, it seemed to be fine when I pulled their stuff off it. Why is their old machine complaining? (It's only 2 years old.) And the new one blue screened! Wonderful effort, MS. Wonderful.

They did not offer me their old machine, GURRRR.

Came back here, started the reload. What's that, you have Win8 RETAIL which my disk won't accept the product key for? I have to find a place to download it? Thanks MS, your efforts once again amaze and astound. And what's this? I got 8 not 8.1 and I can't install 8.1 without doing ???? updates so I have to do all 162 updates to make sure I get ???? update so I can update to 8.1 so I can do EVEN MORE UPDATES.

*Head Explodes*

Good thing I'm immortal, I came right back from that. Where was I? Just a second, have to clean my monitor off…

I'm back. Wrapped all my gifts, just one more to get and wrap and that'll be done! Yes!

Answered the email and looked at a couple of bugs the lady I'm doing the bankbook for found. She caught some good ones, like the last entry being, uh, lost forever. Whoops. She didn't actually catch that one, she was talking about something else happening and I was looking into that and caught it, but still…

10:00 and the windows machine is still only half done with the 162 updates. I started at, what, 5:00? And that's still not 8.1 that has to go on, mind you.

I'm going to bed. Have to get up for WORK tomorrow! hAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH.

Sun:
It was as grand as I expected. No, no, even more so. Yeah.

I found a few things, and had a garbage plate for lunch. Was more spicy then I would have anticipated. Odd. Was pretty good though.

Got home about the usual time, took care of some Sunday stuff I usually do. Had four calls? AH, but two were Ellen a few minutes apart, she really had no problem at all. So it's just the guy from yesterday and someone wanting to know what time he said he was coming by to drop something off. Silly.

Win8 machine still grinding along trying to update itself. Don't you love that grinding sound? I know I do. It's a song of slowness and mediocrity like no other. And Windows sings it so well. All the time.

And it's finally done and her stuff is back in place. I see on her desktop just a month ago she fell for another scam "computer service." First it was iYogi, now yet another place. You would think she would have learned the first time? No, I guess not. You do know I don't charge for phone help, right?

Mon:
Wait, wasn't I just at work? Huh.

Continued with the officeDepot testing. Only one minor thing found, a slight difference between how two products behave. Really no big deal, but I wrote it up. Ironically, I'm now up to 800 bugs in that database. Shoot, sorry Staples, I wanted it to be with you. I really did.

Loaded the latest build of AT&T as well, and tested the "empty line item" bug in CWW. The new log is not yet there so I can't test that at all. The CWW thing worked out, it's fixed.

Otherwise, why does it seem like Tuesday?

Went to see book guy. He just had the page moved down. And he's back to adding entries one at a time in separate text files! (This is the guy that once told me 'oh, there won't be any changes' like a year ago.) Of course a bunch were missing, and the order was all screwed up anyway. So I had to fix that, then put them into the main book. Oh, and did he make all those corrections he had wanted since I printed those copies for him? Nope! He again tried to get me to do it. Don't have time friend, I'm stretched thin as it is currently.

Got back about 6:30 and ate dinner. Two calls, but one was resolved over the phone. I must have booked Thursday after I wrote yesterday's entry because I just booked my first for Saturday tonight, yay?

Checked my sites, looked into sorting the bankbook, as the lady uses that feature. Managed it! Yes! Added the "about" page and added code to open a bunch at once if someone drags a bunch of documents onto the icon. Man, there's a lot to keep track of writing even this simple a program.

That took until 9:45. At 9:15 a lady called me that she couldn't type on her keyboard, or virtual keyboard. Huh? I don't know, did you try rebooting? I bet you didn't.

Not nasty out today. That'll probably change.

Tues:
Day got nasty! Rainy, not snowing, at least.

Really nothing written up today. There's only so much you can test when you only have three features. I started going through my usual "staples" test of "does every option do something different" and they seem to. AT&T meeting canceled for the moment, and more machines were converted back from staples to officeD. Spent the afternoon trying to reproduce a bug, then worked on bankbook.

Thanks to traffic it took me about 45 minutes to get to my after work job. Loaded *shudder* aol, office, and her printer. She (of course) does not know her aol password but seemed to have at least a couple of usernames? *shakes head*

Got back, ate dinner. Made a bunch of calls, I have the guy way out in Victor at 8:30 saturday, and I'm now looking at two tomorrow. Dropping the monitor off to a guy on my way to the Thursday one.

Tinker goes in tomorrow, took their food away.

Worked on bankbook. Thought it was all set. Nope. The recent items aren't working once it gets full. Odd. Then I realized because of the bizarre way it handles documents (I have to clone the stack, it's a mess honestly. Hypercard and thus LiveCode were not meant to do this sort of thing) I'm reworking it. Trying to instead of having hidden fields, do everything in the preferences file. It's not going so well. Grr, thought I could send it to her tonight. Nope.

Why am I so busy all of a sudden? I haven't even thought about writing.

Oh, and I worked on the iMac that was dropped off. Don't ask me how, but he wiped the drive. I don't even know how that's possible on a Mac without doing a lot of gyrations. But he did it. I reloaded it and it wanted to make a new user. All trace of his stuff was gone. It's just finishing the update from 10.10 to 10.11 and then putting in the .6 update after that. (HEY MS IT DIDN'T TAKE ALL NIGHT WHAT A CONCEPT)

Mailed him, said he didn't have anything on it. Oh, that's fine then.

Wed:
Pretty standard- wait it's only Wednesday? Ugh.

Sorry, standard day at work. Had a few meetings, did some testing, fixed that bug I was struggling with regarding the recent items menu.
Accidentally reloaded my machine with software because I did not follow my standard practice of immediately renaming the folder. So stupid.

Did write up one bug, but only one. Apparently we were giving it to them basically no matter what, so it didn't matter. But at least it's more tested now.

Went to put in the HD for the RAID guy. Oh yeah, Tinker came through fine. One tooth was pretty bad and was removed. But he wanted me to come at 6:30, meaning I would have to pass the place, go pick up the macbook, go see RAID guy, then go all the way back. Grr. But that's what I did. It was getting 1% per minute and I didn't want to hang around so I came back here. Checked my sites, opened up the box. Then went to get Tinker.

Back here I made tasty soup, then ate some of it. So tasty. Made calls, oh look, there goes Saturday. And what's this, the lady I drove 45 minutes to yesterday, and loaded AOL and Office said she tried to "load word" "ten times" and she "can't find the AOL icon." And when I was talking to her on the phone she said her "mouse died." So I have to go all the way back there. I just reloaded that machine. It's fine. What is she doing over there?

So that's Monday! Yay!

But I do have Sean's to look forward to, I'm going over there Saturday.

Thurs:
And let the ping ponging commence. They want me back on AT&T for like a day to work on the test cases for the new features. You know, there's this thing, it's called hiring people to work? And then not letting them all go so that when you have work, you have people to do the work! Strange, I know. But it could work, believe me.

Anyway, that set of requirements has totally changed from the brief glance I gave it, and is going to be a massive feature so it's good that we've tested most of the other stuff before this. Plus I have some fixes to check, and we're porting it to other machines so I have to run the whole test against them as well. But that I think is coming later? No weekend hours are being offered this week, mainly because the India people are working to fix the bugs we've found already.

Only put in another two today. Not having test plans or requirements or test cases or whatever is somewhat frustrating. I don't know how John finds all that he does, he's entered a bunch.

Unwrapped and set back up the printer that left for the demo. It survived the trip and still works, so that's good.

Otherwise just poking at it.

Tinker seems fine, took his pill without too much carrying on this morning.

Dropped off the monitor, and went to see the printer setup guy. He had already done so! I think he was trying to print to the old one, maybe? I don't know, it worked perfectly without me doing anything. I took a few fake programs off his machine and ran Mbam, thank you SSD for letting it take only minutes.

Came back here, oh, only five calls? Fine. Offered some advice, checked and made sure that yes, you are actually online so there's no reason for me to come out. One person was Ethen Allen saying it wasn't the ethernet cable so I do have to go out there, and another confirming the dropoff of the macbook saturday.

So nothing Sunday! Wow. Of course "there's always tomorrow" as the song says.

Talked two people through wireless stuff, that took most of the time. But at least it saved me a bunch of driving.

So tomorrow plans, ATT, shopping, bank, and seeing my parents.

Saturday is a ton of running around and going to Sean's house for Scythe and handing my gifts over.

Then Sunday, getting up late to recover and seeing what calls fri/sat has brought more work. Yay. Then it's back to work on Monday.

I suppose it could be worse.

Anyway, other random trivia- my mutual funds are going up, what's with the stock market lately? (I'm not complaining, it's just suddenly they're making money? I don't buy it.) The town finally came and took my leaves a day or two ago so that's a relief. Could be nasty weather pretty soon. Haven't seen any amazing Christmas light displays as I did last year.

Guess that's it for now. As always I'll see you all next week.