2021-07-22:

Fri:
And so, finally, the day of installation arrives. Putting a huge wire in the walls so power can be moved from one place to another. And not set anything on fire. Let's do this.
The men came, not between 8:30 and 9:00 as they were supposed to, but at 9:15 so of course I was calling at 9:14 wondering if they were still going to come. Hung up the phone as they pulled in. Sigh. Sorry for my impatience.
But what's really going to cook your noodle later is, would they have arrived if I hadn't made the call?
They proceeded with little effort. Honestly I still don't know how they did it, I see the cable there, but it just sort of vanishes, then reappears out in the breezeway. Weird. They didn't even have to remove house power, wasn't that dangerous? Well, I guess they know what they're doing.
Of course at about 10:30 I thought, oh, I'll get on the internet with that laptop that's sitting there, check some sites while I wait for the power to go off. (every other device was off in anticipation of the "great unplugging") The universe said, "or will you?"
One of the lights on my little box was out. So I then had to call greenlight. What is with the issues with them recently? 3 years without a problem and now suddenly another issue? He was like "can you be there between 1:00 and 5:00 today?" Well, the day was half shot so why not? So I'm still stuck here until then.
Had lunch.
Picked berries, had enough for another bag, so that's 6. A good crop this year. Saw my first monarch butterfly of the year! Plenty for your babies to eat around here, just go in back little one.
Got on the work email on my phone, put in another half day being off work. Sigh.
Put the stop on the board. Not exactly with nails or screws and another board, but it should work?
Cleaned up.
Hey, it's 1:30 and the greenlight men are here! Yay! Maybe I will go to work this afternoon after all.
And my Mac has crashed three times today already, so that's a treat. How do I even figure out what the problem is? It's just rebooting, I guess I could run a RAM check...
2:00 and still here. Must be serious? 2:15, I guess the house connector was broken. Who would have guessed? Maybe if you guys had repaired it correctly the first time you were here, you wouldn't have to come back! Why are there two of them, anyway? Seems like they could have two trucks and do twice the work if they split up. Odd. They left just after that and I got to work at 2:30.
Stayed until 3:30, had some email to answer and I did the garbage and such. Friday stuff. With nothing else to do and not wanting to try putting in a half hour on my time sheet I just left at 3:30.
Then shopping, saw my parents, put stuff away at home. Quickly checked my sites for the day and went over to Sean's. Just managed to finish the adventure at midnight, and I think we kept on track pretty well. Fairly easy with just the two of us. And the troublemaker NPC of course. Sean wants me to give up my guns but I have a plan to turn this to my advantage and do even more total damage per attack so that'll show him. Plus I'll absorb energy at the same time, giving me a double benefit. He'll wish he let me stick to my guns.

Sat:
Rainy!
Cleaned out the Mac with the air compressor, that's what worked last time I has having a crash issue. That upcoming M1X/M2 chip macbook pro is looking pretty good, according to rumors. Behave or you may have to be replaced, big guy.
Vehicle was fully charged so going to Sean's doesn't seem to be a problem. Going back today so it's a good thing. I measure against that because it's really my longest journey. As long as I had half a charge left when I left for there I would feel secure. How that would happen I have no idea but it's just good to know your limits.
Went to my 10:00, another crappy, slow PC. Tried to change to SSD, the clone software said there was a problem. I took the drive out, discovered my little dual drive gizmo may only like one drive at a time when plugged in? Sigh. Ran chkdsk on it, reported everything was just fine. So then why did the close software complain? Humm? Answer me that, chkdsk! Of course this took like half an hour so I'm not convinced. Meanwhile I had already started reloading windows on the SSD because by that point I just wanted to see some kind of progress and figured that would be easier/faster than trying a clone again as he didn't have much to copy. So I finally finished up by about 1:00. Ugh, so not worth it.
Came back home, sites, and lunch.
Worked on rebuilding my character from scratch. She's a martial artist now, maybe this will be the last change? Took a few hours, but I guess it was worth it? She'll take a little prep, so won't be as effective if taken by surprise, but with an action or two after she transforms she'll throw energy into magic, get a fantastic rating on energy drain, then use that magic to enhance an electric strike cast at the same time. With the rapid strike technique and off hand action she should attack 4/6 times per action (Depending on her roll, I did a standard 5 shot burst with the gun) and not only hit for energy gain (and loss to the opponent making them weaker) she'll do more physical damage than the bullets were doing, and then way more electric type damage than the bullets were doing. She'll be gaining energy as the combat goes on instead of losing it, as she won't have to "reload" her guns with energy because the magic doesn't take any energy to maintain. Just cast. As I never (hardly ever) used the gun at range (my skill wasn't that high so I had a high chance of missing) this will work out the same in that respect. Running the "angel fight" as a test like I did before I kicked their butts as reactive actions as they tried to attack me. I stole their energy as they died, so ended up with more than I started with, and that was that. Done.
Watched a bit of a movie my father loaned me, nothing special until I left for Sean's again.
I won the first game, the chicken island one, and Mizzy won the city building game.
Coming home my power dropped a lot more than I expected from going there the first time. Very odd. I had the heater on but last time I didn't drop below 1/8 power, but now I dropped about 1/4. Can the heater really pull that much? I mean it was still estimating over 200 miles it's not an issue it's just an oddity.


Sun:
Why am I getting so many calls all of a sudden? I've gotten like 6 just today and yesterday. It boggles the mind. Go away. I've done 3 jobs the last 3 weeks, and now suddenly everyone wants my help. How can the universe work this way? It doesn't make sense.
Ordered more SSDs as I've now sold them all. As one should endeavor to do.
Berry picking, lots of blackberries still left to ripen, not many raspberries left though.
Cutting the lawn, the front lawn anyway. The neighbor started cutting their back yard, gave up halfway through, but then did finish it a few hours later.
Watched the rest of the movie from dad.
Making spreadsheet to simplify my whole spirit shock plan for my twin character. It's fairly complex because the first part modifies the second part, and there's a penalty that modifies each, and I have to remember what I rolled so the RESolve check can be done. It was just easier to make a two line spreadsheet to do some of the calculation for me and track everything.
Seeing about all these printers and iMac and such. They're actually way too old to bother with. The scanner was around during the Mac OS 8.5 days, no wonder Image Capture doesn't pick it up. The printers are not quite that old, but one is 6 years old. They're all going to the next recycling event, which I hope is soon as my table is getting pretty full now.
Played more of that little RPG I was playing from the bundle.
Made my calls. Didn't reach two, one person was fine, one person is calling me back tomorrow, one person has a very weird message I've never seen and the fix didn't work that he tried so I have no idea, I'll head there tomorrow, one person wanted to know if I did printer repair. I don't.
Got ready for tomorrow, the start of another shining week in the life of computer repair/tester guy.

Oh in better news no crashes on my Mac since I cleaned it out. But I'm keeping my eye on you!

Mon:
Fairly busy in the morning. Looked into a few bugs I had written in the past. Checked some code for a fix on margins when paper is SEF, so I had to load a machine with the latest and verify things. Some things are fixed, but one thing got worse so figure that out.

Nothing much exciting in the afternoon, some emails, I guess. Nothing new. Realized I didn't have to have gauntlets for my "new" martial artist if I'm relying on the magic to do damage anyway. Cuts the penalty down and less energy cost. I can just keep the wand as a broach. With a second to prepare I can drain 40 energy or so per hit, (regular human has 25. Only 12 demons I'm likely to fight from the whole list have more than 80)  do 10-40 points of damage per hit, (a human can take 12 damage before they pass out) hit 2-6 times per action, she's going to be a combat monster. That just gets stronger the longer she fights because her energy will keep spiraling up. I can't wait to try her out. Oh yeah, he's going to wish he left well enough alone with the gun thing.

Went to my after work job. Could not get rid of that stupid message he was seeing. Tried everything I read to do it. No luck. Finally had to break down and use system restore. That did it. Waited another hour for the windows update to get 50% done to see if it would screw up again, but it was 7:00 I couldn't sit there any longer doing nothing. I just couldn't do it. I had to go. So I went.

Finally back here I made my calls, doing a setup tomorrow, didn't reach the one scanner lady, and the other said a friend helped her. Couldn't have been that tough then, huh?

Watched videos, checked sites, tried to forget the horror of slow windows machines.

Tues:
But how could I do that, when the specter of that very thing came to haunt me today? But I digress.

Was woken up at about 2:30 with my boys chasing a mouse. Got it away from them, maybe he has a hurt leg? I don't know, he was holding it funny but he was getting around okay. Put him in a tank for now, we'll see how he/she does.

Voice day, I got a new version of the software that fixed, sorta, two bugs. The copy bug where two sided rotate didn't work, and the enter key not working on the fax number entry screen. I still can't see that screen with any reliability, and some new problems were introduced. Neat. That took the morning. Not much in the afternoon, need to get that combat written here at home so I can move on. Sigh.

Left for the guy down the street, setting up his new laptop. I slowly gave "everyone" permission so I could make the copy, and had a heck of a time trying to make the copy. It was going really slowly, and then the drive dropped out. Fun. My other adapter finally worked, but it still copied so slowly. And it was copying to an SSD. It wasn't that much data. And of course we didn't know anything, like passwords, or how office 2013 got on the machine so he could move the license to the other machine. (You can't get that version's product key with Belarc, it's not stored on the machine. Thanks MS)

So I finally got home around 7:30. Again. Ate dinner and such. No calls, thank goodness, so nothing for tomorrow.

Did a little warframe.

Wed:
Nothing exciting at work, but a few things did happen that were not exactly work related.

I pulled the pots apart for one of the plants I got from Ken. See, it was a pot with dirt, inside a pot with dirt, inside a pot. With no dirt. So I pulled the pots apart and then pulled the pot out of the pot so the plant could just be in the pot. Got all that? I think the roots will be happier in the bigger pot, they were pretty bunched up.

I also downloaded an app that can identify plants and animals. Yes, we now have computer programs that can tell me what a plant is. And what a cat is, should I forget. Crazy.

Wrote the next chapter too, I just cut out some paper squares and the good guys one. Man, NPCs fighting each other is terrible, they miss most of the time!

After work went to good will, got nothing.

Then home. Picked a full container of blackberries, so I'm going to have a blackberry pie for sure, as it was a full bag and then some. There are still more out there. Also took pictures of various plants to try and find out what they were. So cool.

Sites, dinner, videos, no calls today but a guy got a new Mac laptop and wants the info transferred. Shouldn't be a problem.

Got ready for tomorrow. Did some borderlands, got our last challenge in for the cartels and went into the heck hole again.

Thurs:
You know what day it is. Meeting day. Had those meetings, checked the plants as usual. Took some pictures of some for my new app. Nothing else exciting, no new releases of anything despite this being the date we should have gotten the new 4.0 stuff. Worked on my troll character, moved some stuff around on her now that I'm pretty sure spirit is the greatest magic one can use in combat.

Oh yeah, and I looked into the bug my apps had somehow acquired of pressing the last button I had pressed if I put them in the background and then clicked on them again. That was annoying me. I don't know if I ever wrote about this, but livecode has this bug where on windows if you minimize the app you can't get it back. Has had this bug for years. Don't know why it hasn't been fixed but there you go. I worked around it by telling the stack to specifically show the window when it got the message to "wake up" again which seemed to work. But I finally tracked the button issue to that code. Somehow, in recent livecode versions, if you tell it to do that it just goes ahead and hits the last button you hit. For reasons. So I can either not minimize the app or get a different result each time I go back to the window? That's no ideal. But I found another place for that code to live, and it works! No more phantom button pressing and the window hides and shows like it should.

Got back here, MacBook guy is supposedly coming at 5:00 to have his old stuff transferred, but it's 5:10 and he's not here. Anyway, if he comes at some point I'll do that, then eat dinner. Get ready for tomorrow, the usual stuff.

Looking forward the usual stuff tomorrow, with the addition of probably getting cat food and litter. I just opened the two cat food cases I got last time, so it's time to restock. Otherwise the normal stuff there. Shopping, seeing my parents, and then back here for the demongate high game with my "new" character.

Saturday is the iron man game, maybe the last one? It's over there if it's still on, it was 3-4 weeks ago that we set it up. No news if it's still on at this point, but it probably is. Otherwise, picking more berries and maybe finding a place to put the mouse if I can figure out a good spot for the cage. Would the cats get up on it? I don't know. I suppose I could wire the doors shut on the little one I have, as I think that's probably how they keep escaping from it. Don't know. It needs some repair, hopefully my parents will have some screen I can use.

Ah he's here at 5:16.

Left at 6:00. Much less painful than the previous PC efforts doing the same thing. Oddly my dual drive docking station let me down again. Is something wrong with it? I've never really used it. I'll have to look into it more.

Ate dinner.

Called the lady with the scanning issue. She said she backed into her neighbor's car and her laptop isn't booting right. I guess there are people having worse days than me in general. (today was fine, BTW I just mean in general) How do you back into a parked car? I mean it's right there, right? It must have been parked, did you not see it getting into your car? Anyway, bringing the 17" dell I got last year, I've never seen any sign of these graphical glitches the first person I sold it to complained of, so hopefully I can finally get rid of it. Of course I'll disclose this, in case it does keep doing it, and replace it later. But hopefully not, and it'll be fine. So that's at 1:00, I figure I can go there, hopefully it won't take more than two hours, and I can just leave for Sean's at that point. What am I bet it will work out that way? Anyway, ran it for a few more hours and saw nothing. What was she even complaining about?

That looks like it for this week. One more week of July to go. Neat. Hope it's going okay for you this year, see you all back here next week.