2018-11-30:

Fri:
Fairly calm today, and even saw a bit of sun.

Started off about the usual time I get up, because why not?
Looked into getting another gift for my mother, got out more christmas stuff, and left for my 9:00.

You really can tell a good nursing home from a bad one. Anyway, dropped off the laptop and went over to reset the lady's password. I did, and got her a backup drive. She has an ancient HP WebOS tablet I also looked into doing something else with, but even an android package is going to be from 2014 at this point.

Back here I had lunch, checked my sites and went out to replace the fan. Glad I didn't actually order the power cord, I had one that would work, because he said he didn't need it. Super. The teardown went fairly smoothly, and it even went back together like it should. Came back here, called the guy who was trying to get another guy a PC, the one that said he wanted the guy to have an all in one unit against my recommendations.

So I talk to the guy and he's not sure so I call the other guy and he calls the guy and calls me back and basically says he's too old now, so forget it.

So great, now I have an all in one machine I didn't want to have in the first place to try and get rid of. Brilliant.

Put the tree up, and the rest of the decorations.

[[image file="2018-11/tree2018.jpg" alt="tree 2018" ]]

Went over to Sean's, got barked at by the usual barky doggy, and we got through our adventure. Or should I say Mizzy did, who completed the whole thing behind our backs while we were making plans to travel though time and such. Because we like simple solutions to our problems.

Ah well.

Sat:
Tried to take my ease. Cleaned a bit. Read a bit. Snuggled kitties a bit. Book guy called saying he wanted *this* weekend not *next* weekend as he had said in his email to me. Then he acted like I was the one in the wrong. Dude, words have meaning. Say what you mean. There's a huge difference between me saying "I'm going to punch you in the face this time" and "I'm going to punch you in the face next time" now isn't there? Maybe there won't be a next time, get it?

Set up my 401K because I finally saw it in my Fidelity account. Not at it'll mean much as the stock market continues to tumble.

Finally got the A Christmas Carol book loaded into my kindle where it's been sitting on my desktop for some time. Never actually read the original, I figure I probably should at some point, so I'll make a point to do so this year. Despite how much I hate reading and all that. (little joke.)

Went out at 4:00 to see book guy. Rainy and cold, my two favorites. Though honestly I don't mind the rain so much. If it was 80+ degrees out.

Puttered around when I got back, nothing too interesting to report.

Sun:
Started the day off getting the leaves off the driveway. It was "warm" but there was still some patches of snow. But I got most of them off, and into a pile at least. Too heavy and wet to drag anywhere, and even putting them out I'm unsure if they'll be picked up. The ones out there now are still covered with snow, after all.

Checked my pages, then worked on my Minette a bit.

Finally wrote another chapter, 60,000 words!

Two calls. The lady with the website obviously let someone on her computer (again) and they encrypted the registry. Yay! It's an XP machine so I'm not sure it has the same sort of backup as later versions. I've got some directions but they seem different. I sure hope I get to reload her whole machine! *squeals*

And a guy I told to reconnect to his wireless, and he did. Problem solved. I'm a problem solver!

I then spent almost 40 minutes trying to figure out how to tell what windows program had bound to print screen so the guy who can't figure out the snipping tool can use "print screen deluxe" to print the open window with a keystroke. The one program I found that could tell messed up win 8+ and apparently hadn't been updated so I ultimately had to bind it to F7 instead. Thanks MS.

Mon:
As with all things in life, some good and some bad today.

My Aunt passed away last night, rather suddenly in fact. That's just how it goes, I guess.

Work let me into the building, and I could even log on to my laptop meaning I was all back together again.

I went to the meeting in the morning after going through my 94 emails from the past week, and it was, as usual, mostly a waste of time.

After that I began the upgrades of things and went to eat lunch. The one printer bombed out and had to be done twice, our stuff is great.

Went through the CTG security quiz despite not really working for them or handling any of their data, so whatever.

Then going through my bugs for the tablet. 12 of them, and wrote two new bugs now that documentation had caught up.

That done I looked over the test cases, and I'm pretty sure Giuseppe who said he had done print didn't actually do what he was supposed to be doing so while I did fax and 2 scan services I'll start with print tomorrow and actually do them properly. Sigh.

Went to see about the XP machine. Oh look, her 15 year old CD drive doesn't work.
I can't copy her files off using my win10 laptop, it complains about permissions and won't just give the entire "documents and settings" folder to "everyone." And I found an old registry backup from 2015??? and tried to apply it. The machine would boot, the mouse would work, and then suddenly it didn't work anymore. Huh?

I took it home and worked on it until 9:00, when it was finally done. No updates, of course, are you crazy? That would take 2 days at least! But I installed some ancient versions of software that would work so the machine is back to being somewhat useful again.

While doing that I set up the tablet I got, so that can be delivered sometime.

Talked to Ellen (again) about her pictures, the woman is clueless. Totally clueless about anything. Even the most simple, staring her in the face thing may as well be on mars for all she can see it.

Oh, ate dinner in there someplace, and checked my sites too.

More good news awaited me, my contract was extended another year. Hurray.

The ring came. It's… arg! So close. It's so much bigger than the plastic one! Huh? How did that happen? I thought I expanded it like 2mm only because the plastic one just fit with no room to spare and this would be perfect. But it's huge! Grrrrr. Maybe I can fit something into the bottom to reduce the diameter? I don't know. Trying to measure it with my little red ruler it's 3mm larger on the inside. Can that really make that much difference? I guess so, the outside is about that much bigger as well. Should have only been 1mm I guess. Man!

Otherwise I do like it. The pattern actually shows up like I wanted, the head is nice and big. I just can't wear it! AARG.

One idea- buy a flat, plain, silver ring in the right size (I think a size 10) and solder/glue/jb weld/whatever it to the inside. Hmmmm.

Tues:
Looked into small rings I could use to enact my plan last night, got some cheap silver bands that are adjustable. We'll see how it goes.

Anyway, fairly busy today. Doing work other people said they done. Said they had did? You get the idear.

Did the print services and that took until about 10:00 then did a few more. After lunch I moved to the rest of the scan services and met with Gina to go over the errors I had found in the specs. She loves to crunch two tags into one big block of text that you can't make heads or tails of. Loves it. And there's duplicate tags and just regular nonsensical stuff.

Finished up most of them, left some for others, I'm so nice.

Dropped off the XP machine. The fun wasn't complete with it, the mouse didn't want to work at first, but I did get it to go. Then it was time to install the printer. It didn't want to install. It brought up the Brother little wizard thing but would go no further. Finally realized I might look in the device manager and there was a USB ???? that I forced to look for a driver and that kick started the rest of the process. Quality all around. Also she had speakers, but her monitor has speakers built into it. Hey, whatever.

Then over to book guy, printed out his short story thing after putting the pieces of it together into one document as it should be. Changed his printer cartridge, and printed a few pages of the book that had been messed up before.

Finally home at 6:00 I had a machine dropped off so I got to work on that. Good thing I don't want to do any writing or reading, or 3D stuff or anything. Yeah, it's great. It was stuck at checking the disk "10%" for about 40 minutes so I called the dude. He said it was doing that for him too. I ran the disk check, quick which said it was fine, and slow which I let run for 30 minutes. No errors. Huh.

I plugged it into my PC and and running some stuff on it.

Terrible weather out today, rainy and then snow all day. Yucky tomorrow too by the looks. At least I only lost $8.00 in the stock market today. Sigh.

Getting up early tomorrow because I'm going to the dentist. Hopefully won't take too long but I'm getting in front of it. Three days of November are left.

Wed:
Dentist achieved. We're still watching #3 but #28 has developed a crack or hole in the filling. We'll need to repair it. But that's for 6 months from now, he said it was fine until then. So gold stars all around.

But I'm ahead of myself. It was nasty out, and I mean nasty, when I got up and went in to work. But I struggled through, and started looking at, er, book guy's book?
See I had this bright idea late last night that if I could search and replace his page numbers away I could create a header and put them in properly. I managed this for the most part, and started looking through it to weed out the duplicates and fix up the worst looking entries. Of which there are many. Oh, so many. Just what I have done so far has made it look much better. I figure as I'm the one maintaining it now I might as well make it look as good as possible, and make it as easy as possible to work with.

After a little of that I went over and look into my 15 "can you check this again" requests, and of them maybe 3 were fixed now? So worth my time, rather than just giving them to development because really, what where the chances any of them were fixed? I guess about 3/15?

Then went to the dentist, and it was still snowing and yucky out. I don't mean just "snow" it was 33 or so, think heavy, wet, slushy, all kinds of water on the roads, yet somehow still piling up, snow. Yeah, that stuff.

Got back at 1:00, did work the rest of the day. Work, and nothing but work. I did load another printer and get a log, that was something specific.

Left at 4:30 and delivered the tablet.

Oh, got my paperwork for the new badge, so I'm official until this time next year! Yay!

Got back here, finished up the PC from yesterday, put the SSD in because it wasn't booting today. Just hung. HD still seems fine, it copied the stuff off. Weird. It's 8 years old, so figure that out. Dump it. He'll be happier with an SSD anyway, and for $60 you can't go wrong. Oh, I got the latest version of windows before that, which only screwed up once! Nice job, writing those files to a USB drive and all that. It's tricky I know.

Also helped a lady clear a job out of her printer queue so other jobs would print. Love that little "trick" that windows pulls.

No other calls, thank goodness, so I'm free tomorrow. Checked my sites, ate dinner, got ready for tomorrow. Only two days left of the daytime retainer, and then it's December. Got more gifts in the mail, almost have everything.

Thurs:
Today was software drop day for the remoteUI so we have 2 weeks to look it over before we give it to AT&T. I forgot to look and see if anything was marked as fixed. Ah well. Loaded it on the machine model Mitch first said to, but then he sent another email saying no, it was another model. Make up your mind already, I already signed out and loaded this one!

Ah well, with two weeks I'm sure I'll try various models.

Had the usual two meetings today, the first quite long as usual.
Finished up a bunch of the test case updates.

Put the SSD into the CD drive slot with my little adapter, and moved all the oneDrive stuff over to it. Moved the virtual memory file over to it as well, but it doesn't seem to have made much difference.

Also tried one of the other USB/PS-2 adapters to see if it would solve my keyboard issue. Results mixed.

Certainly did not figure out how to easily do the index in Book Guy's book and start from the top again, turning his crap into actual tables that look good. Finally figured out I should make it as easy as possible and did some search and replace to help make that happen. Honestly, the text he did was crap. He doesn't follow his own conventions, the text is all over the place with returns in places, not in others, "tables" made of ellipses and periods, it's a mess. Why I'm bothering to do anything with it is a mystery, apart from not wanting to maintain crap anymore.

Came back here, looked into why my Mac is randomly rebooting itself. Ran the memtest for half an hour, no errors. I took it all apart and cleaned it, so far so good. I really hope it's not the new SSD.

One call, something about sending an email. Said she had an iPad. She didn't. She has some android thing. *shakes head.* Not an iPad lady! Anyway, she had some weird SMTP setting so I put it back to the frontier standard one and that seemed to work.

Talked to Ellen, who had renamed her google shortcut on her desktop. *rolls eyes*

And by then it was 8:00.

Looking to the future I have an invitation to see Sean this Saturday for a new board game he's got going, and of course the usual stuff tomorrow like the bank and shopping. Got gas yesterday so that's done. Don't need cat food yet either.

Last day of wearing the retainer all day is tomorrow, looking forward to, uh, taking it off. And it's December. Stay warm out there everyone.