2014-11-20:

Fri:
Freaking snow. All day, no real accumulation but it's there. Mocking me.

At least work went better than the last few days. Three jobs. First was Cyberlink Youcam somehow causing chrome to crash. Took care of that, did the usual stuff.

Then at 1:00, an updates problem with 8.1. It actually fixed itself by rolling the stuff back, so then I took over and did what needed to be done. That turned out fine in the end, though I wanted to do the updates a few at a time, but when I came back to them, there seemed to be fewer and fewer than there should be. They weren't hidden, so I have no idea where they actually went to.

Then the long one, at 4:30. Before that I came back here, used ideas sent by my mother to do some christmas shopping. The job was one of those temp profile things. How badly written is windows? (Don't answer that, I already know) that it can have all the folders and such for the profile right there, but be unable to see them? So I did the whole "make a new profile and copy stuff." She uses some crappy mlxchange website that still uses activeX and doesn't work in IE11. Shock and Surprise. Hey, that would make a good super hero team. Anyway, I tried various things and didn't get it, she's going to call the maintainers and see what's up. The bizarre part- it shows the site for a spilt second so I know it's there, then replaces the entire page with an error message.

Honestly, fix your stupid site. Lots of people have Macs or tablets now, they are not going to be able to use a site stuck in the early 2000.

Played some Borderlands with the crew, even Neil got on!

Sat:

One job in the morning, just taking care of some issues he had. No big deal.

Got the supplies to make Mom's birthday gift. I hope it turns out all right.

Worked on it. Made two, one for me to mess up on and one for her. Hers of course came out better, which is as it should be. Thought of using glue on part of it at first, but then had the bright idea of not using glue. I used twist ties instead. Ha, figure that one out, mom! Anyway, hangs together well and I think it'll be quite useful. So there.

Watched the latest episodes of stuff I've been keeping up with.

And that was Saturday.

Sun:
Mainly wrote. One chapter and most of another. It's a battle right at the end, so it'll either be a long one or she'll just one shot everything and that'll be that. I'm going to run those numbers tomorrow.

Good number of calls, so I have some work spread out over the week. Also got the RAM for the Mac Pro guy so I might pop that over, as I have a space later in the day. I'll give him a call.

Week three of November- start!

Mon:
Merry Christmas!

Oh, I'm still early for that. Well, it's snowing like crazy outside and even accumulating and my goodness those are large flakes and when is summer coming back?

At least it changed to rain later and most of the snow is gone.

Normal shopping in the morning, no surprises there. Went to install the RAM for the guy, it didn't like it at first. I moved the modules around and it was fine after that. Installed 10.6 and left it updating.

Ate lunch, then went over to see the accountant guy. The server blew up. When it gets power it turns itself on for a split second, then off again. Over. And over.
Tried a different power supply, no luck. I'm getting them just a NAS, because I think a whole server is overkill for what they do. At least I hope quickbooks doesn't run anything on the server that I'm going to regret doing this.

So I was late to my 2:30 but it wasn't anything major. Looked it over and went to my 4:30 on time. It was just networking stuff, a bit of a head scratcher as to what the time warner guy did, but I undid it and made it work.

Couple of calls today, good amount of work for tomorrow. The activeX lady spoke to the maintainers of the (crappy) website, and they couldn't get it working either. (big shock) I'll do the in place "upgrade" and see how that works out for her. I'll pick it up tomorrow at 6:00 and let it go for the hours it'll take to get finished.

Tues:
All right, who left the freaking freezer door open? It was 20s today. And low twenties, not high twenties. I *do* mind the cold anyway, especially when it drops that much overnight. Could be worse, some places have 4-5 FEET of snow. That's almost as tall as myself. Some other people, also, not to exclude you, even if you might not exist.

Called the dentist, as they had called yesterday. When the guy looked at the tooth during my checkup, he was all like, oh, we'll take care of that next year. Now suddenly he wants to do this year I guess. That will run me $1200, plus Tinker's dental work. Seriously thought about getting dental coverage somehow, or paying for it separately. But in reality once this work is done, there will be only one tooth left with the older filling. So that should be the end of it for some time. Right? Right? Because I'm paying for this Health insurance and still don't even have a doctor but I keep paying for dental stuff where I have no coverage. Does that seem right to you?

Oh, wait, of course it does, silly me. The system wouldn't work if it happened any other way.

Told you there would be some major expense. Didn't I tell you? I did. I totally did.

So, some work today to help pay for all this. First one was just a tune up, it had been 270ish days since I was last there. He also wanted to know about things we had gone over… the last two times I had been there.

Early afternoon one was just a standard cleanout. Took a bunch of crap off the machine, no problems.

Went to go get the demon machine, I think my win7 doesn't have SP1, which of course the installer complained about. Downloading two different ones off pirate bay to hopefully get what it needs to be reloaded as I did with that Vista machine a bit ago. Oh look, it complains when I run the 64 bit installer. Some autorun.dll problem. 32 bit one works. Lets me select the 64 bit version, then gives me an error. Wonderful.

Found an official MS one, downloaded fast, trying that instead.

Some calls today, so that's good.

No jobs came of them. That's bad.

So I have the system to drop off, that's at 9:30. Then another at 3:30. I do have a cable and 2 CDs to deliver so I guess I could do that. I would rather wait until I was going to be in the area, it's a waste otherwise.

The upgrade seems to have worked. At least Ninite works again, and she has IE8 back. Replacing my current Win7 USB drive with the one I downloaded.

Worked on my little "The Gamer Reorg" project. It's a webcomic I like, but saving it and reading it offline is tricky because it's just a narrow, vertical strip. I'm combining 2-3 comics into one, making it less spaced vertically but more comic per page horizontally. Just something to work on when it's dark, and the wind is howling, and you know it's like 18 degrees out, and everything pretty much sucks.

Oh wait, what was that last part? Anyway, today is over!

Wed:
Happy Xerox Day! Yup, 12 years ago today I went to see my mother around noon and she was like "what are you doing- wait, don't tell me" and I was like "yup" because she had heard about lay offs and there I was.

Thanks Obama.

Wait, that was before his time.

Anyway, delivered the system, and the website worked so thank goodness for that.

Worked more on the reordering project, then in the afternoon went to my 3:30. Apart from not paying me the tax, clearly labeled on the invoice, that went fine. He needlessly purchased a new router, and got rid of his old one. Needless because it wasn't the router at all, but the switch on the side of the machine that had turned the wireless off. Good job, toshiba or whatever his laptop was. Good job. And a double plus good job to you, sir, who did not call me straight away, but spent money AND tossed out prefectly good hardware. Well done.

Did the usual stuff, which went very, very fast because I had put an SSD in that machine some time ago. 5 minutes to run an mbam scan? And 18 seconds to boot, I counted. Why we're still using spinning rust I'll never know.

Oh, right, because manufacturers apart from Apple don't care about the experience of their customers. They only care about getting as much profit as possible on each machine. After all, they've already got the people's money, and everyone knows windows is crap, so why try?
Just as a point of interest I looked, only 3 models don't have some kind of flash storage. Seems like dell offers one or two models with a pitiful amount- at any price. Only their most expensive models come with a 32gb ssd option. Uh, dell, there are cell phones with more storage than that.

Just saying.

Just saying down with traditional HD I guess.

Anyway, three jobs for tomorrow. A cleanout in the morning, then in the afternoon a paper jam (yes this is how low I've sunk) and 8 minutes north, a machine that is either not booting or the monitor is dead. I'm not sure a simple user could distinguish the difference, but maybe.

Still bitterly cold out. Rainbow, I thought I told you to keep Stormy busy for a few more weeks!

Thurs:
Woke up to a bunch of snow. Not 6 feet like in some places, mind you, but more than I would like.

First one went fine, just a cleanout, got rid of his FBI thing (again).

Came back, had lunch, worked on the reorg project, and then the NAS came. So I set that up. The web interface is pretty slick, I have to admit. It's like a whole mini OS inside a web browser. How about that?

Started the files copying back over and left for my 3:00.

Which took some time. The paper jam one was fine, she had a few questions but nothing major. The next one was dead. It would get power but do nothing. She had a laptop I put some RAM into and transferred her files over. That might work OK for her.

Came back, made my calls. Busy day tomorrow, and probably game Saturday so Sean can finally have his birthday gift and books he wanted to borrow.

There was a chance we would play Borderlands, but no go, I guess.

Hope you're not getting buried in snow out there, but if you are, make snow cones. Millions and millions of snow cones. Ship some to California or something.

See you all Thanksgiving day, as I'll update then because a little thing like a holiday isn't going to step me getting my weekly complaining in. That's my nindo!