2017-08-18:

Now I could go for some delicious pancakes!

Fri:
Did the final thinprint demo in the morning, and it works fairly well. Oddly enough, the TLS issue we've been fighting with weeks on the other product? Works perfectly here. AAARG!

Anyway, after that I went through the test in a preliminary fashion and sent them my observations. It just being a demo writing real bugs seems rather unfair, no?

Then out to the shopping, bank, and saw my parents as is the usual. Helped my father move a treadmill downstairs, which he is going to use more than that exercise bike we had once upon a time. Oh yes, he surely will.

Came back here, one call, but he wanted Tuesday of next week of all things. Okay. Then spent an hour cleaning up after yet another person who fell for a scam and called them and let some random stranger on the internet onto their computer. *shakes head*

And I spent this hour so I didn't have to go over there. But he wanted me to check his three other machines, so I still have to go over there. Sigh. Why me?

Put in the latest edits, up to chapter 22 of 28 so it won't be long.

Sat:
Oh my goodness, this day, right?

Got up, actually got the last chapters proofed and put into the indesign file.

Then the day stared to go south, and not south of the border over the wall that Mexico is going to pay for. My 1:00, the guy I was doing a favor for to clean his fan out wasn’t even there. Waited 15 minutes. Thanks dude.

So I went to my second one early. He was there, but shaving at 2:30 in the afternoon? Did he just get up or something? Huh?
He had thrown his book away, again, so I had to restore it from my backup. He had also filled out some bizarre page to “get his email back” or something which I’m sure won’t come back to bite him later. Also needed to reset his email password for some reason, which did work because his cell number was in there. Put MORE pages into the book, and he want me to print one copy? Why? You have a printer right there, dude.

Then to the 3:30 one. This was the lady I was on the phone with for an hour yesterday. I did her husband’s right away, that one only had one thing in mbam. Her desktop though, that was a different story. Running mbam, combofix, hitman pro, and roguekiller her machine still was hitting tons of domains and trying to open popup windows in firefox. This was nearly 6:00, and I wanted to be at Sean’s by then. So I took her machine, I’ll have to reload it tomorrow. Honestly, they all found a ton of stuff, how can it still be infected? Also, how did she let it get so bad?????

Finally made it to Sean’s at 6:40, but they were still working on characters anyway, so it didn’t matter. I ate my tasty subway sandwich and we were finally ready to play at 7:30. Seesh.

Stayed on track fairly well, but of course it was just dungeon crawling after the "you get into town" intro. Not much could really threaten us at the first level, so I'm looking forward to lower levels where I can hit things a few times and maybe stack up some nifty chaos breaches.

Sun:
A whirlwind of getting stuff done.

Ordered the 3 proofs of the books after getting them revised, yet again, because every time I look I spot something else. Sigh. Pretty cheap, without the ISBN number they're only about $6 apiece. Sweet.

Made ice cream.
Bought my first treasury bond! Adulting!
Worked on the stupid PC from yesterday. I had run the full antivirus scan overnight, which found YET MORE STUFF but the problem still existed. AARG. Removed firefox and reloaded it. Hey, that seemed to work. Tried to run windows update. Couldn't. Had to make a registry change. Tried to run windows update. Couldn't. Tried to run SFC /Scannow. Couldn't. As the machine booted okay I just did the in place "upgrade" procedure. When it was finally back I started the windows update process, which I'm sure will take the rest of today, and into tomorrow just to figure out it needs to download every update there is.

Did my paperwork for last month, less procrastination for the win.
Straightened the car out, at least the huge box of cables in the back. Organized them into bags, we'll see how long that lasts. I try something new every year it seems, still don't have a method where they don't ultimately get all over the place. Also, I have a TON of VGA cables for some reason. Odd.
Played a little sailor moon drops.
Put in the last of the big box of comics into the database program.
Ate ice cream. A standard portion, I didn't go crazy just because I made it and it was yummy and everything.
Checked my Sunday websites.

It's now 9:30, look at that, the win7 machine is still struggling to know what updates it needs. (all of them.)
Made my calls, oh look, I have the entire week booked again. Why does that keep happening? Some stupid stuff too, "oh, set up my printer." "Oh, I'm the idiot who wasn't there Saturday, come back." You know, the usual. Hate.

Mon:
Very busy day.

Got our apps back so spent the morning looking that over. How did they slow it to a crawl like that? And preview doesn't work from google, and the email service crashed the whole tablet, and dropbox won't even show. Oh, and I can't print from google either. I was like, I can't even test this crap!

So I went and did thinprint stuff in the afternoon. Made certificates and worked on SNMP stuff. Wrote a script to help test it in the future so I have to run one command instead of 14 to fully test it. Got most of it done, it wasn't working exactly right. The reads all work, it's just the writes that are giving me issues.

Then out for the THREE places I went. The one wasn't far from work, and he had a system I sold him some time ago. That means it had an SSD so mbam took about a minute to run, ccleaner a few seconds. I really, really hate machines without solid state drives. So I came back here, the PC rebooted and did more updates, and I called them to take it back. That happened, and then I went across the street to their neighbor's house where I have worked before to look at his laptop. It had been wiped so I just put my stuff back on it.

Finally got home at 7:00, only had 5 calls to look forward to. So I have two booked for Saturday, didn't reach one person.

Ate dinner, ice cream sandwich s'mores are as good as I imagined.

It's now 8:00, yay!

Worked on the next christmas gift. Basically the back of the second one. I think it looks REALLY good! It took some doing though, but I used one little trick and made it happen. Now for the front. I'm 1/2 way there.

Tues:
Not quite as crazy today.
Finished up the scripts in the morning, you can thank me later, future me. I don't think SNMP stuff is quite done. One of the queries returns "" which can't be right. But until we get the pre-release version on the 25th?? I've done all the testing I can do.

Put some stuff away in the lab. We had just boxes of stuff sitting there, and as Paul is gone I figured it was up to the only person in the lab to take care of them. So I did.

But there were two ladies in my lab today I had never seen before. Where did you two come from? They were there when I came back from lunch, left to go do tablet stuff, and then came back to get my stuff to go home. That's dedication or I don't know what's that word? Doing your job? That's the one.

Anyway, tablet stuff, it's boring as ever really. Wait, wasn't today the day it was supposed to be 100% content? Huh…

Went to my after work job. I shall not relate what happened there, it was rather… odd.

Anyway, got back here, ate dinner, checked sites. Started work on the other parts of the gift. Really like the front of number 2, back of number 3 is pretty good, front of number 3, I don't know. I guess it's okay. Hopefully they come out the machine all shiny and looking as I imagine them.

Made one call, going there after seeing the guy who wasn't there Saturday. That's thursday, they aren't far from him, and just his fan thing shouldn't take long, so might as well make the most of the trip down there.

Huh. With the gifts made and the proof copies of the books winging their way to me from the printer (soon I hope) I'm at a loose end. Time to start the next story!

Wed:
Or not.

Why? Oh, I'll tell you why. But we must start at the beginning.

It was mostly useless meetings in the morning, hardly worth the effort of going in. But we did get "release" software meaning everything should be there. And so our testing begins in earnest. Well, really in building 111 but you get my meaning. I've started with print from dropbox, though I still have no specs or visual aids to actually test to. I'm sure it'll be fine. Mystery ladies did not return.

One minor thinprint test, only took a few minutes.

Out to set up the printer after work. She's got a rouge airnet signal coming from someplace, along with her spectrum wireless signal. Also a very energetic puppy. Couldn't find her other router, but did figure out her wireless password so the printer could get on it.

Came back, the gifts were all rejected due to our favorite reason, thin walls! So I thickened them and sent them back in again. You know, maybe if it wasn't so expensive I could make bigger things, shapeways, and then my walls wouldn't be so thin!

Then I got to do my calls. And I talked to people from 7:00 to 8:45. Four people total. One lady who moved away but still wants me to fix her machine remotely. That's fine, just fine. One person who needed to be told to click on "date" at the top of his email columns. One person getting kicked off AOL because apparently AOL desktop is end of life. Now there is AOL Desktop GOLD that you have to pay for, in a desperate attempt by AOL to shoot itself in the foot and dislodge the last of the over 80 crowd still hanging on to the thing. $5.00 a month? To use this crappy thing? Well, I guess older people would have more money, so it's a smooth move on AOL's part. Why do they still offer the regular download if they're not going to let people use it anymore? Huh.
And lastly a collage girl who says her macbook is slowing down as she types in word in class. Odd. I had her check various things and told her to try textedit just for taking notes. You don't need the power of the most bloated software on earth to take some class notes. (You need a pen and paper, nach!)

Got ready for tomorrow, fed the cats, and we come to 9:10. Guess I can start, I was really looking forward to maybe getting chapter 1 pounded out but any start at this point is a good one, right?

Got started!

Thurs:
Didn't finish a whole chapter, but at least it's a start.

Went in to work, finished up the dropbox service. Had a bunch of meetings today too, so didn't get as much done as I hoped. Wrote up a few new things, a hang or two, and made a new series of test cases for the document conversion/preview that the apps do now.

Have a thinprint thing to do tomorrow, or at least certificates which will never end.

Went to both places, the guy that wasn't there last time, who said "didn't you get my message." Uh, no, I was at work all day, how would I have? He misplaced his brand new mp3 player so he wanted to find it again before I came. His fan seemed fine. Sigh.

Then over to see about that laptop. Dead HD. It's an XP machine, similar to what Mizzy gave me some time ago, actually. I think it's the same machine.

Anyway, going to get her another. Then back here, ate dinner. Only one call, didn't reach them.

Finished chapter 1 and started chapter 2, finally on my way to more wandering bliss.

Coming up: Normal stuff tomorrow, bank and shopping, then over to see my parents.

Quite busy Saturday by the looks, and may be running my game which is fine. Hopefully some writing Sunday?

My proofs are on the way, and two of the three shapeways gifts passed muster. I again fixed the third, nice of you to tell me that was wrong when you said the other stuff was wrong, shapeways, so I could fix it all at once. But you know, whatever.

Well, going to get back to writing. August is more than half over, hope you're not too sad about it, but it'll come again. See you all next week, hope you get to see the eclipse, if you're into that sort of thing.