2020-12-17:

Fri:
Another good thing happened. Not as good as the first good thing, of course. Went back to the same gas station as I had been lazy in finding another with no ethenal gas. Turns out it's basically the same people running it with the same gas, it's just branded a sonoco. Weird right? So I can still keep going there. For another 3 years.
When I woke the PC up that morning it was doing the thing of just rebooting over and over. So I guess there is a problem. Sigh.
Had a thought about the pay increase. Somewhat of an irony really. As I'll now make almost a living wage that means no more federal assistance for the health insurance. So I'll be paying more for that. Hopefully the entire increase won't go into that, but it is somewhat of a bummer that making more money, apart from more tax being taken away, will still result in me not getting the full amount.
Not much excitement at work.
Dropped stuff off, did the shopping, and went back home.
Before the game I looked into the PC- Maybe it's the video card? Ugh, that 400w power supply isn't going to do us any favors now. But the video card I have (the better one) wants 550. Well, we'll run it a bunch and see if that's really the issue. I think it is.
Did the game. Beat up the big bad by setting him on fire. The world was revealed to be a floating island, and now we're on the surface of the actual planet. It's over. We won't do this game (probably ever again) but at least not for a while according to Sean.

Sat:
Finished reading book 5, the Susan books, as I was watching youtube videos about "the plan" and that made me want to again. Did Dumbledore have some big plan, or is reading way too much into the guy being lazy, crazy, and ineffective?
Worked on the PC. Called them, changing out the video card has made it work just fine for hours. Put to sleep, reboots, power cycles. No problem. Looks like they can come get it, and with a better video card to boot.
Cleaned.
Had parents over, last Christmas movie before Christmas! If we game next week, that is, as we still have the Saturday game.

Sun:
Sites.
Ordered new video card for mac, hopefully that will solve my resolution problem when turning the new TV on. See, when I do that my main monitor just goes out of whack and thinks 800x600 is the native resolution? And it won't pick up the real resolution so I can't just manually set it back. Sometimes unplugging the VGA cable and plugging it in makes it okay, but sometimes not. So I'll just put another video card in the machine, and plug the new TV into that. Should solve the problem, I mean maybe running 3 displays off one card is a little much, especially considering the resolution of the TV. Found one that doesn't need a power cord plugged into it, so it should be perfect.
Dusted my mac out. Looking into it made me realize it hadn't been done in quite some time.
Made muffins, put them in the toaster oven rather than the bigger one. Worked just fine! 10/10 would bake again. I mean why warm up the whole oven when I'm baking 6 muffins that fit into the toaster oven? Why indeed.
Cleaned out my toaster oven. There was a lot of old junk there and making something in it for 15 minutes is a different thing that just warming up my usual stuff.
Watched an episode of supergirl.
Straightened shelf and basement a bit. My one plastic shelf was tilting and nearly falling over so I took it part and straightened it out. Looks much better now.
More Supergirl.
4 calls today. Internet issue, he's replacing the modem tomorrow so we'll see how that goes.
Dentist guy got the new PC but I don't have the bottom part yet.
Carpet guy with more stuff and transferring files between PCs. Originally tomorrow but called back and now it's Tuesday.
And one guy with security cameras I'm going to see tomorrow. Reloading the app on his phone didn't work. It's one of those cloud deals not the usual boxes I see so I agreed to go over there and see what else could be done. He insists it still works for his daughter so the system is working. I guess we'll see. I hate security cameras.
Got ready for tomorrow. Last week before vacation!

Mon:
Most exciting thing today was picking through the office area that's being torn apart so we can lease it to another company. Because apparently that's a thing? I got a new chair, much higher back so I'll be even more comfortable when I'm napping. Writing! I meant writ- I mean working! I of course meant working, my fingers slipped on the keyboard. Just working. In my little corner. With no one around. Alone. In the quiet. And the dark. Forever. (The lights in the room are motion sensitive and sometimes go off because the high wall I'm behind makes them think there's no one in here if I don't walk across the whole room once in a while) I have some small lamps (which I think I also got out of the garbage now that I think about it) so I'm not totally in the dark. Just no more than usual.
What was I saying? Oh yeah, got a pirate duck, and some unopened reams of paper I just put into the rotation (who just throws away unopened paper?) and some tape and a xerox mug and a garfield mug and an acrylic star. And a toaster oven, and two picture frames with "you have a patent" that were in the garbage. Why throw away a frame? You can take the thing out of the frame you know. Good stuff.
Work wise (what's that?) we put the other version of the voice system back together with the new cert so they can do the security scan of it. Didn't take too long.

Went to go see camera guy. Just needed to be reset I guess, as that's what I did. Stupid thing, what made it fail?

Came back home, filled in my paperwork for the new place. They say my rate is 21.75 but my rate currently is 19.02 so do they take less or is that my raise? Because that isn't 30%. It's 8%. But the lady called (again, my home number) so we'll see what they say tomorrow. I think I will take their health care though, and they offer dental, and it seems like at half the price I'm paying. Maybe it's a worse plan, but as I've never used it anyway, who cares?

Ugh, took me about 2 hours to get through them all. So stupid. The two companies couldn't have just done all this? I mean really? The one has all the info, just give it to the other one. You're the ones making me do all this.

Oh, got the paperwork to get my new badge, I'll do that tomorrow morning.

Tues:
Or I won't. I went over there of course. But no one was there Tues/Thurs. So of course I must go again tomorrow. It's fine.

Went to work. Reloaded a machine to get the smartcard list for Joe who requested it.
Finished and sent in the paperwork to A+ so I can get "hired" there.
Took apart the voice system as that scan had passed, so there was no more need of it.
Looked at a Mac monitor in the trash, but it didn't power on. :-(
Took some RAM from a machine in the trash and put it into the lab pc in my room. 4->8GB baby!
Called the lady at CTG. Still don't understand how I'm being handed off, I just make them money, covid should have nothing to do with it. But $21.75 is the official number she gave me. So that's not near 30% so thanks for getting my hopes up, Don. I mean it's fine, an extra $5000 is far better than nothing, but was my raise really 30% and A+ takes half of it away from me? I wouldn't put it past them.
Went to the dentist. I guess everything was down over there, they didn't do x-rays. Nor could I pay them, or make my next appointment. How can every system be shut down at once? Network issue? But they could still take x-ray pictures, right? I guess not.
Used my new toaster oven, work great!

Nothing exciting after work.

Went to after work, work. She bought a chromebook and then wanted 18GB of stuff transferred to it. Uh, doesn't work that way lady. I upgraded her google drive (well, I punched in her CC number) so the sync on the laptop could finish, and then showed her how to access it. Chomebook, honestly. She was like, yeah, I should have talked to you first. Yeah, you should have, your son is clearly an idiot.

Came back. Two calls, solar guy with just a few questions about his new laptop (what was wrong with the old one? I upgraded it with an SSD that I recall, a new one won't be faster...) and someone with "an emergency" that I haven't reached yet. Ellen also emailed me, called her back. She was "just eating dinner" so she wanted to call me back.

The other guy called back. Apparently he had a printing issue, and decided (in his wisdom) to use system restore to try and fix it. It did not. (shock and surprise) so he decided to try it again. Because of course it's going to work so much better the second time. Now his machine blue screens on boot. Well done sir. I'll probably have to reload the whole thing. And of course he's a half hour away, down by Sean's. So great.

I really do have to wonder if it's time to say "enough is enough." I really do.

Ellen called back. 45 minutes to show her how to make a new folder in the pictures folder so she can import pictures to it. Apparently the older version of photos did that for you? I guess, she insists she never had to do that. Honestly, how does she get dressed in the morning? She can't follow a logical chain of thoughts through from beginning to end, and believes this very easy, click the mouse a few times process is just "so terrible." Really? I think there are far more terrible things in the world, Ellen. Like talking to you for 45 minutes over something that takes a few seconds to accomplish? Is that on the list?

Wed:
Let's frolic and play in the Eskimo way.

Still not much going on at work, just counting down the last few days until vacation time. Went through the room again, got some more goodies but nothing too major. I did pick up a monitor, mine is fuzzy sometimes so if it ever goes I've got a replacement lined up. Some ethernet cables, can never have enough of them.

But then came the after work "fun." Drove out to near Sean's house. Couldn't get his machine booted, it was fairly weird too. It would show the safe mode and almost load the desktop but then flip over to the blue "troubleshoot" screen or whatever you want to call it. Not BSOD even though I turned off the auto reboot, so what did it think it was doing? I tried finding a registry backup, no such luck. So I got to back his files up, wipe the machine, and put them back. Of course windows copies so dang slowly, especially when using spinning rust, that took at least an hour by itself. Even after finding all the stupid little files it keeps around and getting rid of them. Why have USB 3 in the first place if your copy speed is going to be a few KB per second?

My favorite part was him coming in and asking "so do you know what caused it?" Uh, you. You messing around caused it. Did you forget?

So I finally got home about 7:30, because it was really crappy outside. The car got buried just sitting in his driveway. Driving home I didn't go over 40mph. Super. We're expecting a few inches so my new snowblower should get a workout tomorrow. We'll see how it goes.

2 calls, and I got the keyboard and the bottom to dentist guy's machine. So I put the keyboard into the laptop, I'll deliver that tomorrow. Oh look, another hour round trip. Yay! Didn't call dentist guy. I have a saturday appointment to look at his wireless, it's finding the networks but not connecting to it. Odd.

Sites, getting ready for tomorrow. Wanted to watch the last episode of Supergirl but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

Thurs:
Quite a surprise today, we actually got the software for the next test. Didn't expect it until after the holiday. And it works! Sorta! In places!

So I set it up and Christina set it up. She got hers to work. But when I open the app (on the printer, mind you) it just crashes. The whole printer. Yes, the whole thing just reboots because you opened an app. Great. And the test app isn't sending the password right, so I don't know how she got it to work.

What else did I do? Meetings of course, it is meetings day. Installed a new version of the voice system which totally hung it up and was unusable. (He admitted to not testing it before sending it to me. Thanks, bud)

Plants, took a hard drive apart from a machine in the trash. (It wasn't even wiped, isn't that against company policy?) That's about it.

Went to after work work. Set up her new laptop, she had two yahoo accounts one of which was protected by this weird iPhone method. Which wasn't working, because she turned notifications off for that app. Thanks lady! We finally got into the account, turned that off, figured out her password, and added the account to thunderbird. Saw her one eyed kitty and petted them, and another kitty, and saw her third, scared, kitty.

Oh yeah, I used my new snow blower in the morning. There wasn't much snow but I didn't know how much would fall that day. So I did it. Not much more fell, but that's fine. It worked great, though I'll have to figure a different pattern out for the cord. Also had to move it, the cord almost made it to the end of the driveway, but didn't. Eh, it's fine.

Got back at around 6:15, dinner, sites, the usual. Just the one call, from 10:00pm yesterday. It was the guy I had to rebuild the system of. But he figured stuff out. Tried to reach dentist guy to set up Saturday but his mailbox was full? Odd.

You can't say I didn't try. I did. I totally did.

Now, let's look to the future. My vacation begins! But I still have to get through tomorrow. Boo!

Tomorrow: Not sure, there's not much we can do with the new stuff, and it depends on when the voice system comes in. They're supposed to get it to me (the final) by the 18th which is weird because I won't be around to test it until the 28th, but whatever. Maybe that will come in time for me to do something. But probably not. We may try stuff live though.

Then shopping, I go to the bank the final time with my final IRA deposit for the year. Just squeaked into the amount I try for. Yay. Shopping, getting gas (with all the hour long trips I've taken it's getting down there) and seeing my parents. Then back here for the part 2 of the star trek game.

Saturday at least the one job, probably two, and more of the Iron Man game.

Then the off week. I need to wrap gifts, make candy, make a pie, try to find any other little gifts for the game, see my mother on her birthday, make questions for the game, have Eve, have The Day. Buy holiday stuff marked down after The Day. That about covers it I think?

So, everyone, have a safe holiday though technically I'll see you all back here Thursday night where I can wish you a proper bah humb- I mean a proper Merry Christmas on the 25th. We still have a whole week. I'll see you back here then, and by stay safe I mean in the snow as well as the virus stuff. You knew that. You knew.

Bye!