2009-12-29:

Got a call early this morning who wanted to cancel, so there went my 12:00. But I did go over to my 9:30. Some poor guy suckered into buying some weird remote help subscription for almost $300. Which of course didn't cover anything "new" that is, loaded after the "subscription" was bought. So if you buy a new computer, or load anything onto the old one, you're out of luck. Also had AVG 8.5 (obsolete and crappy to begin with) and some weird other "diagnostic" software loaded. And can you guess: only 256 of RAM. Nice. So I got to clean it out, including "get high speed internet" from six years ago, along with all kinds of other demos that were never used from when the machine was bought. Oh, and we has another of those "oh, I have road runner so shouldn't the machine be faster?" type losers. No, the speed of your internet connection does not determine the speed of your computer. Or to put it another way, the size of the pipe leading away from your toilet does not determine how fast your personal business gets taken care of. Hope that's not too graphic for you out there, I do like to keep this blog safe for work and all that. Came home. Ate lunch, checked my sites. As I now had no 12:00 I finally turned on Don's system and got it checked out and ready to rock. I'm going to be down the street from him tomorrow at 10:30, so hopefully he can be there either at 9:30 or 12:00ish. That would be nice. Then off to my 1:30. Apparently he bent the pins on the DVI connector trying to hook up his new machine. Nice job. Had to carefully unbend them with a knife and they didn't even break, so that was a plus. Got the machine hardened, loaded up with firefox, etc. Only took me a half hour, meaning I spent more time driving there and back then actually working. Love that. Came back home. Couldn't call my 12:00, I only had an hour, by the time I got there it would have been 3:00, and thus I would have needed to leave by 3:30 to get to my 4:00. Not enough time. Had two calls at this point. But one is just a "yup, when I plug my external in my machine goes nuts" (which I anticipated that why I had her unplug it) to which I'm going to say "You need to buy a new external." as there's not going to be anything I can really do. So I left again. One silly little fake antivirus product to clean out. I mean, come on, if you're going to infect a machine, at least do it properly and make me put some effort into cleaning it out. Took me half an hour. Came home, ate dinner. Had four calls by this time, so I booked tomorrow with three. The iMac is still acting up, worse luck, and didn't reach my 12:00 from today so that'll have to wait. Got an invite to play more Borderlands with Sean, so I did. Good game. Tough. But fun. Apparently you can't play split screen AND on LIVE at the same time, so Mizzy can't play without another copy of the game. Stupid... everything. Oh, but they may add that "based on how well the game is received". Translation: We don't want to do any more work then we have to, so there. Now I'm done and getting ready for tomorrow. Didn't reach iMac lady, I'll have to try again tomorrow.