2018-01-05:

Fri:
Had some yummy chili today, and corncake (that is sweet corn bread) Good stuff.

Also cleaned out the lab a little, took all the old calendars down, threw away a bunch of garbage that was hanging around, you know. The lab was empty later in the afternoon, there were like 6 cars when I left.

Not much else to tell about work.

Went to the post office, dropped off the mastery package I had seen for many days in the front area of the building. Then over to Staples for some 8 GB flash drives. They only sell them in packs of 2 but I got some really tiny ones, perfect because I have so many already, my case is full of them.

Then shopping, and over to see my parents. Saw many deer, had some yummy foods, and came back here.

Two calls, so I have two for Sunday now, yay! 10:00 and 1:00. Changing a guy's HD to an SSD because he's complaining about it being slow (uh, yeah, it's windows) and the guy with the broken hinge. Should be a barrel of laughs all around.

Weather report says a "lake snow advisory" is in effect for tomorrow, 2:00 PM on. Great, just great. And still super cold. Going to Sean's???

Made a 10.13 installer with one of the flash drives, got ready for tomorrow.

Sat:
Lots of running around, but at least the weather cooperated for the most part.

Started right at 9:00 with two cleanouts and three friendly pups. Just the usual stuff, firefox crash and such, no problem.

Then over to a relative of mine, and my goodness does Mac OS X install slowly. At least on ancient hardware with no SSD. It still hadn't finished totally after 2 hours. So I left, told him he could keep the flash drive, I had bought the pack of two after all.

Home for a very quick lunch and then to car guy. He just had the usual minor stuff going on, all taken care of. At this point it wasn't even snowing, and I headed to Sean's.

Kate didn't show because she's, you know, days/a week or two from giving birth. But we had some games, some yummy dinner and cake, and watched The Labyrinth. Never had seen it, very interesting movie. I kept seeing things that I had seen in other things. Like the "cleaner" from Bleach and the talking "hat" later used in Zelda. It's either a very influential movie or just had a lot of ideas ahead of its time.

Left at 12:15 and it had snowed all right. Took me until 1:15 to get home. Roads were very bad, it was about 9 degrees out or so. Maybe less? Still, gave them my gifts,

Sean got a copy of my latest books

[[image file="2018-01/hardcover_books_2017.jpg" alt="books 2017" ]]

along with a complete set of Pyre coins, brought into this world with the magic of imagination!

And 3D printing.

[[image file="2018-01/bronze_coin_front.jpg" alt="Bf" ]]

[[image file="2018-01/bronze_coin_back.jpg" alt="BB" ]]

[[image file="2018-01/silver_coin_front.jpg" alt="Sf" ]]

[[image file="2018-01/silver_coin_back.jpg" alt="Sb" ]]

[[image file="2018-01/gold_coin_front.jpg" alt="Gf" ]]

[[image file="2018-01/gold_coin_back.jpg" alt="Gb" ]]

And here they are in the holder. I had to make the inserts too, but it worked out pretty good.

[[image file="2018-01/coins_in_holder.jpg" alt="coins" ]]

and got some in return. Thanks everyone!

Sun:
More work, and the roads were still awful. Snowblowed the driveway, it wasn't too bad because it was pretty powdery. Then left for my 10:00. Got there basically on time, he had a list of things. Reloaded his older laptop so he could sell it, took care of the newer one's issues. Did not sell him a router, as he had one already. But he didn't know the password for it. There must have been 2 dozen wireless signals in that area, never seen so many before. Weird. I mean the houses there weren't that close together, were they?

Called my 1:00 and asked if I could just go over there, it was 12:00. Actually made it at 12:30 because it's not park rd, it's EAST park road, sort of different? Little bit? Yeah. Thanks for making sure I understood that, the people at park rd were very confused about why I was there. He even admitted people get it wrong all the time and he should have stressed it.

In any case, I took his whole computer apart, then put it back together using the new bottom part. And with no guide either, I might add. But get this: at the end? It still worked. Amazing, I know. I could feel the achievement popping up and my XP counter going up.

Finally got home and had lunch, then watched the Mortal Instruments Season 2 the rest of the day. Got a few calls, too bad I'm not working tomorrow, because I didn't call them back. If I had they would have just wanted tomorrow. The usual whining, book guy called last with some problem now with his main machine. He'll probably get saturday at this point.

Mon:
Truly took the day off. Baby it was cold outside! Watched the rest of Season 2 and did some reading. Then made my piled up phone calls. Wasn't too bad, just booked the next two days. Huh. Installing an SSD and book guy, who says he's messed up his computer. Sure.

Tues:
More doing nothing at work. We should get a new build with all the apps in it fairly soon, then it will be, well, not exciting again, but at least we'll have something to do. Nobody is writing anything up.

Installed the SSD for the guy, couldn't get up his mountain he lives on top of. Reloaded windows, put his stuff back. My goodness his internet is crappy. Dude. Move.

Got home at 7:00 yay, spent 40 minutes on phone with lady trying to figure out why her space doesn't add up. Left the backup copying to another drive.

No other calls.

Checked sites, ate dinner, and now it's time for bed.

Yay.

Wed:
Got the new build in, I did two installs, one office depot and one our generic service. The generic one sorta failed? It complained it couldn't find the internet after I first installed it. Odd. Did an "upgrade" and then it did. This was rather late in the day so I'll give it another try tomorrow. Otherwise one "bug" written up, mostly just a "it should work a little better" sort of thing.

Went over to book guy, his machine was fine but he's screwed the book up again. I once again restored it from my backup. Give it up, dude!

Came back here, ate dinner. Spent 40 minutes on the phone looking mortgage guy's machine over. Don't really see anything wrong with it, though it is doing a big update in the background, which would impact the spinning rust. I suggested an SSD, because machines that don't have SSD are useless.

Called another person, got their machine going over the phone. Yay, nothing tomorrow!

Watched an episode of Orphan black, season 4.

Thurs:
Know what's falling? Not my IQ, but rather the temperature. Going to be -1 for a low very soon, and more snow is falling. We had our white christmas, it can all go away now.

Redid the wipe test first thing, and oddly it worked just fine. Could have been a fluke, I suppose. Got busy testing my resolved bugs, most of which were actually fixed. Wrote up a few new ones, but nothing really major.

Then after lunch I started with the print from dropbox service.
Got most of the way through it, but really I needed something to do tomorrow, right?

Came back here, cleaned the driveway off for all the good it'll do, then ate dinner. Made some calls, yay a BSOD on Saturday morning, when it's all nice and freezing outside.

Future plans: More testing tomorrow, then bank and shopping. Hopefully not freezing to death. See my parents, drive home, while trying not to freeze… oh you got it.

Saturday the one in the morning. No news from Sean so nothing on that front yet. Then hopefully staying under the covers Sunday.

So that's it, we're four days into 2018. How's it treating everyone so far? Good? Good. That's good. That's real good. Let's keep that up.

Stay warm out there everyone. That's an order.