2018-02-09:

31 of 34 bugs written, by me, today. And here's a little fun fact for you. I haven't actually started the official test. Nope, that was just me taking a look at the service and saying "oh, that can't be right." and "why is it doing that?" and "how did they even?"

So I'm sure to find some more, though hopefully not too many given I'm pretty sure by this time if I can't just look the thing over and tell how well it's working I would be a pretty bad tester.

Also created the print side of the sharepoint service test cases, and had another AT&T meeting. Still didn't get through it all. Sigh.

Did the shopping, had dinner with my parents, and went over to Sean's. Not too much happened, I was expecting to fulfill Neil's "favor" to the angel he incurred for the spell last session but nope, just a party. Ah well.

Sat:
Got up, got ready to go.

And then fun times were had.

By nobody.

First one with book ladies was fine, I put her stuff in iTunes and organized it. She still hasn't used the computer so… that's a thing.

Then down the street to the first failure. (spoiler: more to come)
I got the disk out (Dude, iTunes is a thing) and sadly after booting the machine with the flash drive and trying to run disk utility shows NO HD. Sigh. Nothing.

Take it to Apple. Sorry.

Got gas on the way home.

I get back home and eat lunch, then leave again.

My 2:00 was late by about 20 minutes, and his problem was his modem. It has a manufacture date of 2006 on it. Yipes. He was losing packets left and right, so he's going to have to pick up another one.

The day starts going downhill quite fast from here. My next one, the guy that can't get his CD drive open. I open his case because he's not even showing a drive letter for it and it's unplugged. I have a faint suspicion we unplugged it for a reason, but hey, it can't hurt to plug it back in, right?

WRONG BUDDY!

His HD choose that exact moment to die. Yeah. It's now clicking away like a maniac. What? The odds against that thing happening are incomprehensible! It doesn't make sense! But now I have to take this machine home, put a HD in it, (for free) Load windows, and restore his stuff. Luckily he does have a somewhat recent backup. Why is it unplugged? It's been unplugged for a month. Why?

Anyway, now I move on the final appointment and just to show me things aren't as bad as they could be, the universe allows me to drive by a pretty terrible accident. There were about 6 cop cars, the front of a car was totally ripped off, and someone was being loaded onto a… what do you call that thing you would be strapped to in order to ride in an ambulance? huh. Anyway, one of them.

So yeah, see, it's not all bad.

I get there, set her laptop up, and then further down the street on the way home I see another smashed up car, this one the side. Wha? The odds of THAT happening are even more remote, aren't they? What the heck?

So I get back here at 6:30 and start reloading his machine. Naturally I use a HD I don't care if I lose just in case it's the power supply or something. It isn't. So I put in a 1TB I have lying around and get windows installed. I didn't know you had to use the same username in order to restore from the backup, I thought it would just be like "oh, there's files here, would you like them in places?" And I would say "yes, yes I would like them in places."

So I copied the files manually, not realizing that the way file history works is it makes a copy of the file, and then puts the date after it. Huh? That's so dumb. Oh wait, it's microsoft so I repeat myself. So I figure that out, and I have to erase the other user and now re-copy everything the "proper" way. It's now 10:22 and I would like to get to bed at some point this evening. I guess it can just sit there and do its thing. The estimate is 45 minutes.

Also I made two appointments for tomorrow, YAY A MILLION TIMES (9:00 for returning this PC and a guy trying to print envelopes. Because his skype account wouldn't work so I couldn't see the program he was using. Remote stuff is easier on PCs, at least because I set it up that way.)

Also talked to a guy 9:00-9:30, yes a half hour past the normal time, but at least I got his email account password reset. Write your freaking passwords down, people!

So yeah, I could be hospitalized or dead. But I'm not. So everything is in perspective.

Tomorrow I get to do two jobs, paperwork so I can send my sales tax in, perhaps work on a valentine's day gift and then dad's party at 5:00. So much for the weekend.

Sun:
To balance yesterday today went a bit better than planned. Amazing.

Up at early to get the machine back to the guy. Realized that, like all MS products, their backup is crap. It doesn't backup the appdata folder, so anything like mail or favorites for the browsers is lost. Great job MS. *slow clap*

Got it back to him, that went fine, then went just down the street to skype guy. He had printed the envelopes by just printing a sheet and then cutting it and pasting it on. Uh, okay, I was coming to help you, but whatever. Oh, and he's like "this machine does a lot of the same stuff I complained about with my old machine!"

And I was like "Yeah, I told you that would happen. There was nothing wrong with your machine." In fact his machine is still working perfectly down in my basement, because I paid him for it after "ebaying" it.

Went to a store a little ways away for a Valentine's component, and came back by about 10:30.

At that store I saw the cutest little TY Luna plush!

[[image file="2018-02/ty-princess-luna-plushie.jpg" alt="plushie" ]]

There was a Cadence too, and supposedly there should have been a Solestia, but I didn't see her. The Luna is sooooooo cute! I don't even know why. There were tinier Mane 6 like Applejack and Twilight, but the Luna!

If there was a birthday coming up, and I don't know someone happened to see one of these and then remembered someone saying how cute they were… I'm just saying.

Did the paperwork, I still have this month before sales tax is due, so I didn't have to do that.

Went over to my sister's for my father's birthday and the BIG GAME. The team he was rooting for won, so that was good. Fairly close game, and could have easily gone the other way in the ending moments.

Got back way too late, went to bed.

Mon:
Very productive day, did tons. Got the full print portion done, I'll now go back to the scan portion. Got it partly done. Wrote 9 of the 10 bugs for today, bringing my total for these two services up to 46, and my absolute total to 385. Senpai just broke 100, so well done! (he said not at all sarcastically)

Came back here, checked my sites, ate dinner, did some Sunday stuff I should have done before I left for Heather's house… *ashamed*

Spent an hour on the phone trying to upgrade a lady's Win10. Apparently there's this tiny partition before the main one, but if it's too tiny it fails with the usual BS from Microsoft about something being wrong. Looking the error up I found out about this "feature" that windows can't, you know, deal with the problem by itself and I had to go download a third party tool to resize that partition so it would perform the upgrade. Another fine showing, MS, fine indeed.

No job for tomorrow, like it!

Did some writing!

Tues:
Finished up the service, wrote a few more bugs. In fact the group joined in, (finally?) and wrote a bunch as well. Is this software in fact getting worse, and not better? It's possible!

Not much else interesting, sad to say. No meetings, though we're having our luncheon and yearly group meeting tomorrow. Didn't get lunch last time that I recall. Huh.

Oh, and they're totally tearing apart and redoing a section of the building. They're really going to town on it, it's basically just empty space now.

Apart from that not sure what I'll be doing tomorrow. Probably pick something at random I guess?

Yay.

Back here, no calls or rather three calls that become no calls. Two from the same lady, she was having internet issues but solved it. And movie guy who still wants a DVD, despite my telling him to shove the disk I made him into a computer because making a DVD is time consuming and I don't want to do it until I have the final go ahead. Moron.

So nothing for tomorrow either. Sheesh, was a great week.

Wrote the second to last chapter, which I thought would be the last chapter, but no, there's another one. The final battle in this world.

Supposed to be really yucky tomorrow morning, so looking forward to that.

Wed:
Some ups and downs today.

Got the new build, so I was checking out my old bugs. Cleared a few of them, and wrote the inevitable new ones relating to the "fixes" that broke stuff.

Had the communication meeting, apparently we're not doing too badly. We got lunch and a special book with our name on the cover printed by our very own inkjet on object printer. Pretty neat.

Had some leftover sandwiches for dinner while there, and a cookie.

That was the highlights for that part.

Got back, cleared the driveway, gave thanks that we did not get 1 inch of snow per hour as had been forecast, and checked my sites. Wanted to get chapter 18 done but only got part of the fight completed. Because I was stuck on the phone for half an hour with a guy apparently having Facebook problems. And he had this fake AV that was supposedly taking up his screen. When I tried to boot into safe mode so try and work around that he couldn't log in. So we made an appointment for tomorrow.

He called me back a bit later that he managed to get in, so I got on finally and cleaned the crap (like a driver finder, the fake AV, and a dozen chrome extensions) off his machine. Managed to get into Facebook by logging in with firefox, doing the reset password, and then going back to chrome. it would only do the "let's secure your account" but he didn't know the old password to make a new password. Oh, and he couldn't type his machine password into chrome to see the old password, because it makes you do that. So what password he used to boot the machine I have no idea.

So at least it saved me an hour of driving, but it's now 9:45 and I didn't get anywhere in chapter 18. Ah well, at least I'll be home early tomorrow. And he offered to send me money even though I said it was fine.

The print I had made for the valentine was too big, whoops I measured wrong, so I didn't work on that. Maybe I can finish that up tomorrow as well.

Now it's about bed time.

Thurs:
Fairly busy at work, no time for lallygagging around. Had bugs to verify, and so I did. Then switched over to office depot to take care of bugs on that side. I had so many it practically took me all day. Of course we had two meetings so some time out for that was mandatory.

I got most of them done. Some I can't do because it deals with the card reader, and some of course are one time things I probably won't see again.

But I got though it.

No job so I came home. Wow, a whole week off. What, did I somehow do Zeus in mortal guise a favor or something? How did that happen?

Checked my sites, finished up chapter 18, the final FF6 chapter. Just have to proofread the whole thing now.

Talked to greenlight lady about doing updates, some are still failing I guess? I told her how to do them, we'll see what it comes up with.

Got ready for tomorrow, wrapped the gift for my mother because I finished that up. It's not too bad, I'm fairly pleased with how it came out.

I'll show you a picture next week, I remembered to take one.

No Sean invite so tomorrow is fairly normal. Figuring out what else to do, bank because I didn't go last week, shopping, and seeing my parents.

Saturday watching the star wars movies and making notes so Lysanias can go there, finally putting up the promised page about the arcade machine, and I promised Sean I would look more of the monsters over.

I should really finish that match 3 game I worked so hard on at some point. Just sort of died, huh? Silly me.

Still cold, snowy, looks that way for the next few days too.

Only 21 days until my trays are hopefully out for good.

And the world keeps going.

See you back here next week everyone.