2013-10-24:

Fri:
Called the prison outreach in the morning, but didn't actually reach them until she called me back… right as I sat down to eat lunch. Aint that the way?

Anyway, as I hadn't reached her, I went over to my parents house early. They were working at the sale, so I priced some RAM keychains (could not find a highlighter, and I know she has like a hundred of them) and then came back here.

So I told her I was just eating lunch, it would be a few minutes before I left. She said that was fine, she would leave the problem up on her screen and let someone know I was coming. (She had to go to the bank) So I get there, and she locked her door, so I couldn't get in.

At least, when she got back, she admitted to be a moron for locking her door.

Cleaned her machine out, and got to my 2:00 a little bit early. He said he had an FBI warning bug, but I didn't see any evidence of one.

Back home I worked on the story, writing part of chapter 112 until 7:00, when we started IV at 8:30. Yeah. But we got our new crew members, had them tear a couple of people up, and put a stop to an illegal mining operation on the surface.

Sat:
Did a job down the street, just hooking up the guy's new DSL box he got Friday.

Then worked on Sean's gift, got what I could do of it done, now Mom needs to show me a technique to finish it off. It looks pretty good!

Then did some more writing.

Sun:
Forward thinking x-mas day! Got a birthday gift for mom started, figured out what I want to give Neil, and started working on what I want to do for Mizzy, as well. Neil's will be a combination of something I bought, then modified. Mizzy's will be partially done by me, then finished by a pro service.

Was going to get something for dad, but then read reviews on it that said it was a terrible product. Trashed.

Did some writing, chapter 113 is done, now I have to figure out if I just sprint to the ending, basically condensing the final Harry Potter book into a couple of long chapters, or if they should snipe back and forth at each other a bit. Hummm…

Mon:
Shopping in the morning, as usual. They sell huge bags of candy now, so I got one, not that I get more then a couple of trick or treaters usually. My red bowl is full and the bag is still half full! Didn't realize there was that much candy in it.

I'll have candy until next year, the rate I eat it.

Got a third bin to use for the upstairs litter box, a new headset because people were complaining they couldn't hear me, and some forms from staples for $5.00 with my $40. Don't know how I missed the $20 from last month, but I managed it.

Work! Two jobs, the first was useless, just setting up a printer for someone that moved from a verizon G3 network to road runner. Had to set it up on the new wireless.

Then back here to work on Mizzy's thing, almost finished it.

Then back out to the annoying one. Two machine, one ancient XP one that was SO SLOW and they both had craptons of junk on them. It was the machine from months ago that seems clean but still BSOD when you go into safe mode. So that slowed me down, not being able to run malwarebytes in safe mode. But I finally got them clean. Sold her that router I got someone else, too.

Then back again. Finished Mizzy's thing, now I just need to find a service to make it a reality! Shouldn't be too hard.

Wrote a bit of chapter 114. Made some phone calls, reached half the people that called, so I'll probably try them again tomorrow. One job at 11:00 tomorrow, a cleanout, but a new customer, a referral. So that's good.

Bit nasty and cold. My heat is coming on in spurts now. Sigh.

Tried the demo for the visual novel "Starswirl Academy" by Zap Apple. They could have done the whole thing much faster and cheaper in LiveCode. They're bringing it out for just about every platform under the sun, and it's a simple enough concept one person could bang it out in short order with LiveCode, and for free. Oh well. It seems pretty fun!

Tues:
One cleanout today in the morning. Took more then 50 minutes to run the quick scan with mbam. Remember not that long ago how I expressed amazement that the SSD ran a scan in less then 2 minutes? Well, this machine was a bit older then that, apparently. It was a crappy P4 and the only thing seemingly wrong with it was age. Mbam found only 2 registry entries, and combofix found only a few files. When Apple intros new machines, all with flash storage, it makes you wonder why people are hanging on to these machines with PATA ports. Now that's old.

Anyway, that took two hours so I got home about 1:30. Tried to watch the keynote but it was swamped so I just looked at the text transcript of everything they were showing. Wow, the OS is free now? If they're giving it away, do they care if people put it on PC hardware? I mean, it's free, right? Like linux. (Okay, not exactly like linux)

Still, a bold move. I still have no machines to run it, so that's 3 OS versions I'm behind now. There was a time I installed a beta OS X, remember that? Up until 10.7 I think I had used every single version of the Mac OS from 4 to 6 to 7 to 7.5… you get the idea. Those were the days. Black powerbooks, cubes, fruit colored iMac. We still had an economy, we didn't have a TSA. Or PRISIM.

Tried to get hold of the two people that called yesterday. Failed.

Touched up Mizzy's gift. Ready for stage two, I think.

Reached one person from yesterday, going there thursday. Got one new call today, going there tomorrow. Got one call at 8:45, so I have a 5:30 as well. Talked to the guy messing about with his keyboard for 45 minutes, trying to get a comma because he had two periods. (He's the guy who types in ukranian, doesn't like the built in keymaps, and made his own.)

That's about it for today.

Did some Borderlands 2 with Sean/Mizzy.

Wed:
Morning one went fine. A new sort of problem, it was deleting anything I downloaded in either firefox or IE. I mean, why? Did they (the virus writers) think that would somehow make removing it harder? News flash: it didn't. It was annoying though, as mbam and combofix didn't find it. Huh. Had to run hitman pro to get rid of it.

Came back here, ate lunch.

Finished chapter 114.

Then went out again for my 5:30 one. It was actually fairly new, and not too infected, so I got home pretty quick. I saw a pond in their yard. Why do pool owners have to have a huge fence around a pool, but someone can have a huge pond in front of their house with no fence? It doesn't make sense to me.

Made a bunch of calls for tomorrow, I'm going to be BUSY. Five places to go, pretty much the max I can do in one day Huh. That should make up for the lackluster week thus far.

Though about chapter 115, and beyond. I know the basic direction, I just need to know how fast to get there, and what adventures happen along the way.

Thurs:
Got through the day!

The first one was a bust. It was that guy with the expensive router from just a month ago. Yes, it was doing the same thing, and not recognizing it was plugged in. I called them again from their house, and she didn't have me jump through too many hoops. Maybe they know that router is bad news? Anyway, another $10 down the drain shipping that one back. Note to future self: Don't buy d-link products.

Came back for lunch, then out for the afternoon fun. The first one went fine, I took care of a bunch of her issues.

Then to a cleanout, and found out his keyboard was shot. It's a laptop, so I left him a loaner and ordered him a new one. The cleanout went fine, it wasn't too bad.

Back near home, I re-setup a windows 8 machine he had for some bizarre reason taken to Staples and they reloaded it. Yeah, smart.

Then down past the still empty, unsold house at 6:00 for more general problems. Whew.

Couple of calls today, so I have two jobs for tomorrow. Shouldn't be too bad.

Game Saturday, looks like Shadowrun, so no Dgh for another month.

Rainy, chilly and nasty today. A little preview of winter yet to come. So nice.

And in one week, it's candy day, and into November. See you all then.