2018-07-20:

Continued on moving on. And why not? My next service chosen was print from dropbox. Not much action there, but I did write up a few things I noticed. Completely blanking on what it might have been though. I know I did two in a row at one point. Well, that goes to show how important I thought it was.

Naturally I finished this service as well, that's four services done by me this week, while my co"workers" have not yet finished their initial service for the most part. Go you guys.

Talked to Chris about video games, systems, anime and stuff before leaving. Huh, that was weird for me.

The place right by Xerox has non-ethanal gasoline so I stopped there on the way home. Nice! No discount card there by the looks, sad face. But it does save me about a half hour of driving because I don't have to go all the way down to nearly Heather's house just to get gas. So it works out?

Went shopping, and saw my parents. And hummingbirds.

Back here I checked the drives over, it seems everything is in place. Perfect. Of course dropbox has to sync all 50GB again? Wait, what? Well, it's doing that as the time machine backup rebuilds, so whatever.

Had a system dropped off, went though it.

Answered some calls, there was two, then the phone just kept ringing. No I never heard it ringing. Never heard it all.

Anyway, I can finish up the lady from some time ago because she got the password for the machine she wants to use, and the tower she wants me to pull pictures off of. Shoot, have to remember to grab a flash drive on the way there. Slight detour but it's fine.

So it's two tomorrow, then wedding!

Not much else exciting tonight.

Sat:
Two jobs, good thing I reserved two hours for the first one, because it took that and more. Got her new machine set up, answered questions, got the printer hooked up, the usual. I remembered I had an 8gb flash so I just took that. Her XP machine wouldn't accept it. But she had a 2GB flash so we just used that. I had to actually get the XP machine working again because it wouldn't let me get the files off the drive. Wha? Stupid windows.

Then went to car guy. He didn't have as many problems as he thought, and he didn't want to actually buy office so I guess his wife is "stuck" with LibreOffice. Seriously, it's a blank page and you type stuff into it. Maybe the controls are in a different place than Word, but come on. How many books have I written with it? It's fine.

Anyway, came back here, had lunch, checked sites, and got ready for the wedding.

It was a wedding!

[[image file="2018-07/alyssa-and-kate.jpg" alt="wedding2018" ]]

No seriously, it was. Without Sean there, did I really belong there? I know all the people I know through him. How do you know if you're friends with someone or just you know them? I legit have no idea how to tell. Of course when the table conversation turned to whisky I was able to offer many suggestions and contribute nicely-

Of course I'm not being serious! You know we use alcohol to actually seriously poison microorganisms, right?

Ah well, it's nice to see things I'll never have. Oh wait, maybe the opposite of that? Who can tell with me? Who can tell.

Back here I hooked up the PC I still had, because they wanted a backup which I felt was a good choice. So I got that going. Ugh, it's the crappy Win7 backup. Yuck.

Made the site changes for Ellen.

Sun:
Got up a bit early because I believed I had flicked the switch on the alarm to "off" but instead had put it to "beep." Whoops.

Picked berries before it got too hot. Where's the rain we were supposed to get?
Maybe tomorrow.

Made ice cream.

Straightened up around here.

Looked over the Pyre stuff Sean wanted us to look at.

Ate lunch.

Read some shadowhunters and left for book guy.

Yay, an hour and a half of listening to him complain again, and straighten the book out. Yay!

Back here, ate dinner, made the second batch of ice cream. So good! Used the hot chocolate mix this time, big difference.

Played some arcade games, got the furthest I've ever gotten in Galaga.

Realized I had, long ago, told time machine not to back up secondSlice. Whoops. So I've really only backed up half my files. Started backing up the other half. *redface* Especially as I guess I've never backed that up, a whole bunch of data was at risk. Bad Robert, no cookie.

Mon:
Did two services today, because I feel the next chapter is going to be a combat of some kind.

I mean because I'm at work to work, darn it!

Also did a bit of fiddling with the card stuff. You update the software one way and it works, but done another it fails totally. HAHA.

Had some rain, but not very much. Hardly enough to get the ground wet. I suppose it's better than nothing though.

Went to see the lady, she was 20 minutes late. She had purchased the useless "driver updater" or whatever it's called and webroot which is nearly as bad. But I got her machine straightened out (it's been what, a month since I totally reloaded it?)

Came back here, dinner, ice cream. Sites.

Made my one call, the lady from yesterday. I had two calls, one hung up, one just sounded like a bunch of random sounds and then hung up. Okay then!

Got ready for tomorrow, did some billing stuff.

Tues:
Did the copy service today, the only service left before we go for the behind the scenes stuff like alerts or security. Also had a lessons learned meeting for AT&T, hopefully some good things came out of it and we'll go full speed ahead making the same mistakes for our next project. I mean less mistakes. Less.

Totally resisted the urge to write some of chapter 22. Nailed it.

Came back here, picked berries. Saw little bun! Don't be such a scardy bun, little bun!

Watched episode 1 of Black Mirror. It was about having sex with a pig.

Oh, wait I'm being handed something. Oh, it says here it was about the dangers of social media, how attitudes can change in an instant because of it, and how repugnant things can be done for the greater good. Weird, I didn't get any of that! I'm still thinking about that poor pig…

Checked my sites, no calls, made more progress on Chap 22.

Spent 50 minutes on the phone with someone that got scammed. Honestly I don't know how they do it. I mean keep their sanity. The scammers. Just trying to get her to type into the address bar took 10 minutes. She didn't manage it. I had to send her a link with the thing to download. Naturally they changed their site, the quick support thing is now two pages deep rather than just a little bit further down the page, so thanks for that, team viewer. Love ya.
Anyway, turns out she was already running the full version and she finally managed to bring it up (as the quick support wouldn't run with it running) and I checked the machine over for 5 minutes. It was fine. Love spending 10x the time trying to do the job as actually doing the job.

Back to writing.

Wed:
Stared going through the lesser services today at work. Good thing I did. I wrote several bugs (that will never be fixed) around the admin area, like values showing up when they shouldn't and some values not being seen at all. Good times.
Also did the security one, it's a throwaway, it doesn't change.

Found a 30 year Xerox pin in the trash today. Weird. Did someone get a 30 year pin, figure it to be worthless, and just trash it immediately or was it an accident? So strange. Tiny thing, I'm keeping it! (I won't get one otherwise)

[[image file="2018-07/xeroxpin.jpg" alt="xerox pin" ]]

Came back here, watched episode 2 Black Mirror and checked my sites.

Then did more writing of chapter 22. I'm keeping track of the combatants but not writing out all their actions, so it's not as slow but still slow going.

Had two calls, my now best customer Sandy saying now she's having trouble with her monitor. Seriously? I've been there how many times in the past weeks?

So she's Saturday. Tomorrow is a person 8 minutes from work so that's not so bad.

Cold tonight, but it was nice today during the day. Should get warmer though.

Meeting day but we'll only have the one as Gina is out. Have no idea what I'm going t do.

Thurs:
Did I do well?

Carried on into the boot up and recovery test cases. I think we're about at 60% of the total at this point, and a bunch of them John does. He's out at the moment. Lots of people are for some reason. Didn't think it was usually that bad but this year the calendar shows a lot of people gone.

I was gone mentally writing chapter 23. I mean I didn't write any of chapter 23.

Went down the street. The lady had purchased some sketchy antivirus that wasn't working on her system. Why? Did you read a single review? Do even a minute's research? How did you even find this so called program anyway?

Anyway. Took it out, got her set up with a real one. *shakes head*

She was running windows 8 on the other one, and defender just did not want to go on for love or money. Had to go into the registry and change some things, oh and use a third party tool to take control of the group so thanks for that, MS. Love ya!
On the way home I got cat litter, as I was right on the street with Tractor Supply, so I figured why not? I have plenty of food still.

Back here I ate dinner, checked my sites, tried the guy who called but no dice. The guy with the dead machine said it was the UPS. Whoops.

Hopefully can finished chapter 22 tonight.

Looking to the future, Neil is coming in so I'll go to Sean's this week. Have at least "tv" lady to see, possibly this guy who can't seem to update to windows 8.1. Ugh.

Tomorrow of course seeing my parents and doing Heather's birthday. Work wise I have no idea. I'm not doing alerts and faults again I can tell you that much.

Probably just poking it. Nobody wrote a single bug today by the way. So sad.

Then hopefully a quiet Sunday? Maybe?

Finished chapter 22, up to almost 80,000 words so that's worked out perfectly. Time to post the blog, watch the start of episode 3 and get ready for bed.

See you all next week, almost August you know, start thinking about your Christmas lists!