2021-01-07:

Fri:
Put the books in
Found a place for them
Cleanup
Calendar
Finished 2020 customer stuff, another 9 customers done last month! Yay! 96 total for the year, exactly as the year before. Interesting.
Made less than $5000 for the whole year. Multiply 96 by $50 a job and figure it for yourself. I mean, some people sent me checks and (don't tell anyone) I didn't record those. So bad I know. It wouldn't have raised the total by that much, let's be honest, they weren't pouring in or anything. So I put into the IRA more than I... made... huh that doesn't work I only put the cash in (maybe one stack of checks somewhere?) nothing from Xerox money. But yet it worked out more? I record cash sales the same as check sales, that's so weird. How in the world...
Got the sheet ready for printing so we can use them for the tax.
And it was only 10:30!
Checked sites, ate lunch.
Made the clock!
Played River City Girls, almost to the end!
Went to go shopping, whoops they were closed. Sigh.
Did turn in my lottery tickets and got gas though.
Saw my parents.
Came back, won RCG for the first time. I'll have to find all the statues to win it again.
Watched a movie. One of the ones I got from grandpa. It turned out to be delightful!

Sat:
Did a bit of cleaning.
Sites.
Videos.
Ate lunch
Went out to set up the new PC. Went fine, it actually had an SSD (M.2), a real power supply, and a laptop optical drive. Crazy.
Only took an hour.
Came back here.
Thought about where to take the story next, still don't have a "date" for them to go on. I want to reward Lysanias with something good for clearing the Darkbolt world. Maybe the orb from the angel of life? But his powers sort of suck in the story, Lysanias already has most of them! But that's not to say he couldn't get others when bonded.
Read over the comic (briefly) looking for his powers, and honestly he's not in the story all that much anyway. Weird.
Had my parents over, watched Pete's Dragon. My mother looked at my sewing machine.

Sun:
Finally had egg bites! With tortilla.
Looked that the neighbor's dumpster. 7 mattresses? Who has that many mattresses in their house? And nothing else? The rest was just sticks and drywall type stuff, they're really tearing the place apart in there. Clearly it wasn't the neighbors that tore everything down, the place is gutted. Walked around the place, looked inside. Could go inside if I wanted, their back door isn't locked or anything. (Yes, I have the curious weakness sue me) Weird. What happened to them?
Tried to do the sewing. Not having it. Still messed up. Sigh duck.
Ordered the TV stand leg for dentist guy.
Reported the fishing website I got in a text this morning pretending to be the DMV. Come on guys!
Wrote the next chapter, after figuring out the date for the two. Worked Ayeka and Tenchi into it a little so they got a date too.
Watched the other movies I got from Grandpa. They were not delightful.
Got ready for tomorrow, had two phone calls over the weekend. One person with a windows live mail problem, which I solved with some registry trickery, oddly. Why have I never done that before? I've had people with that issue. Weird that the solution came right up this time. And one person who wants me to check their machines over. They're down by my sister, so why not?
Back to reality I guess. Though there's really only two weeks before our next three day weekend. Wonder what I'll do tomorrow anyway?

Mon:
Had a few things to do today. Kevin wanted me to make sure his precious (blackboard card reader) continued to work on the latest D5.4. I mean why wouldn't it? Why would it suddenly stop working? But I loaded the latest build and made sure it did. Yay.
Was reminded that with a certain card feature on the list of card types wouldn't show up. Whoops! Took that out and it was fine.
Wrote up a bug about the cards not working in D5.4. Checked all the settings over (afterwords, but what can you do?) against a working machine to make sure they were the same. They were not! But making them the same didn't make a difference, so it's still broken.
Was told I needed to turn on open access to job information to keep scan from failing in D4.0. Odd that it works fine in D2.9 but whatever. Turned it on, made sure it scanned so that completed that test.
Various emails and oh, I helped Ken track down a misbehaving device. The colorcube (the one with the wax) that has been sitting "booting" for days was failing some sort of check, so I removed it from the network. And we talked about what to do with Celiveo, as they have yet to post the software I need to make sure it works with D5.4. Joe asked them again were it was.
That was just the morning!
The afternoon... was... sure was... busy like that... no writing at all. Nope, just work, work, work that I won't bore you with here. So nice of me.

Went to after work work, just a checkup, no problems.

Came back here, had dinner, checked sites, and saw I had two phone calls. One appointment for a misbehaving trackpad that's a half hour away. So that'll be fun. One person just wanted to make sure they were ok after one of those "call us or your PC will explode" messages.
And 45 minutes of Ellen going over, again, how to import her photos now that photos on PC inexplicably doesn't make dated folders anymore. Who complained that feature should be removed? Why does Ellen, a woman who has used computers for probably 20 years, still not understand basic tasks like dragging or making a new folder? It's madness.

Got ready for bed, and games with the crew.

Tues:
Today was crap.
Utter crap.

I did nothing but spin my wheels and get nowhere all day. It begins with Celevio pointing out that the software I was looking for was for the box, not for the server. Whoops. So I set out to do two upgrades to hook one device to one printer and do one print test. At first I couldn't upgrade the server because the installer just straight up crashed when you opened it. Off to a good start! I figured out if I removed the old version manually, it would open and work. No other software works this way. If the old version is installed, it just upgrades it. Never, ever have I had to completely remove something (apart from really old versions that it doesn't know how to upgrade I mean) to do an upgrade. So you can already get a sense of the quality of this product. First hurdle cleared. Now it comes time to upgrade the device. I feed it the file, and two hours later I still have no idea if it's doing anything because there's no status of any kind. Neat. I email the guy, who is in France, and wait one hour. Realizing I can use wireshark to see if there's traffic between the server and the device I take a look. Maybe it's just really slow? Nope! No traffic. Great. So it's just hung, I guess? I kill the process and try to do it via USB. Meanwhile I remove the device from the server to stop the process and try to add it back. Now I get some bizarre error about running the app that finds the printers (because this is all a website, the ultimate in usability) because it can't run from where I'm trying to run it from, because it's already installed over in this other place. Only windows would have such a bizarre and bonkers error message, believe me. So I figure out I have to remove the "installed" app (How did it get installed? I didn't do it. And this adding of printers worked before so it must have been recent so maybe the upgrade did it? And messed itself up? It's the only explination!) and let it download and run (from somewhere?) to add the printer back. Meanwhile the small units aren't taking the upgrade? It said the red light should flash for 20 minutes, it didn't flash for two before going green. So... success? Now that I have the printer back, the lights are green, finally no more issues, right? Wrong. I go to sync the oh so great software with the tiny box and it goes through all five steps (of what?) before telling me there's no answer from the box. Uh, shouldn't that be step 1? Check communication with box? So I set up an older device I had used before, light goes green, hit sync. Same issue. So I email "here's where I am sir frenchinton, what do?"

I used these exact words. Business communication is nuanced and formal, so you have to know how to phrase things luckliy I words use really good writing things darn tooting.

In the midst of all this I got some unfortunate news as well. Seems the higher amount I was hopeful I was going to be paid, you know, the one that weeks ago I emailed my new "employer" about to say "there is a descrepency here, what gives?" finally caught up with them. They sent me another form I had to "sign" (i.e. Put some pixels onto electronically because somehow that magically makes it "correct") with the lower amount. Sigh. So it's 14% not the 30% I was promised. I guess it's better than nothing? I can see how my "relationship" with "A+" is going to go based on this. It took 18 days from me literally telling you guys "this is wrong" before you finally, without so much as a "you were right that was wrong thanks for trying to warn us hurp a durp" for you to catch it and admit it was wrong. Well done.
I leave for my after work job. (Note it is now sightly before 4:00 PM this becomes important to the story later)

Her cursor is acting weird, and I figure it's not the trackpad at all, it's a keyboard issue. 11.00 and change will get you a new one, she orders it herself on amazon as it's easy enough to change he figures he can do it. She wants her machine to be faster. (It's an old dual core AMD something) I foolishly, stupidly, moronically, say that I could change the drive out. BIG MISTAKE. I'm going to have to have some new "rules" for the new year. Like if a machine has SATA II forgot it. No upgrades for you. Because I got home after nine o'clock. She only had 80gb (or so) of data to copy. I even remembered to run ccleaner which got rid of like 16GB of log files??? But of course there's no real indication of transfer speed or how long it will take. The "estimate" simply ticks up minute by minute. Counting down 5 seconds, boom, two minutes added. Counting down 3 seconds. Boom. 30 seconds added.

NEVER. AGAIN.

You might sense I'm in a bit of a bad mood. What would give you that idea you sillies????????????????

Wed:
Didn't notice this yesterday in the dark when I pulled in at home but the workmen must have raked the leaves in the back. I say this because there's a big pile of leaves in the front now. To which I would ask them, had I the opportunity, "do you really think the town is going to make a special trip to come pick up these frozen leaves you've left out here two months after they last picked up?" Because I don't see them doing that. Those trucks and equipment are probably in storage now. Way I see it, those leaves are going to be there for months. Better to have just left them until next year.
Surprise, got no response from the Celevio people last night, so I have no idea how I'm going to complete this stupid test. I'm not bashing me head into the wall for another day trying to get it to work, we played that game yesterday and we all saw how that turned out. I did try it again, just in case sitting overnight changed anything. Nope, it didn't. Still doesn't work.

As I had nothing new come in I didn't have much to do, so you know what happened next!

Came back home, ordered new SSD and a dual drive "enclosure" that can copy drives by itself. It's a bit limited in that it can only clone to bigger drives, but I figure if it's a smaller SSD (which I do but not as much now that I order 512GB drives) I can always put both drives into it, hook it up to my tiny laptop with USB 3 and make the copy that way. Much faster than relying on USB 2 and ancient machines as happened yesterday.

Ate dinner, checked sites. No calls today, thank you. Just the one from yesterday, a camera issue maybe? Whoops, got another call, he deleted his shortcut I made him for the router on his phone last week, and his wife was having printer trouble. The camera lady, well we ran two separate tests and the camera worked just fine so what can I tell you?

Did some writing, I had an idea for the beginning of the next chapter and wanted it put down.

Thurs:
Meeting day. So I had meetings. We still don't know why cards fail to do LDAP stuff but supposedly I'll be sent a possible fix. I didn't get it.

Still no answer from Celievo.

At the meeting I was told the voice stuff fro D4.0 was done, so I could mark it finished. That's two things off the list, one that's been there since before Chris left. Sheesh, good riddance. But now I have to get it set up on D5.4. I think it'll take a new version because of the cert stuff but I guess we'll see tomorrow. So that's my plan there.

Nothing exciting I'm afraid.

Came back home, they're working on the roof next door. The TV antenna was torn down. There was roofing material in the driveway so they must be putting up new shingles? Or whatever they're called.

Checked sites, had one call today someone wants a new laptop. Ordered them a new laptop. A referb laptop. A new to them laptop.

And called the lady I got the battery for, she's just down the street from work. But she wanted Monday. So there.

Going to post this early to make sure the archive works for 2021, as this is the first entry for that year! It's a simple enough change I think, but I haven't done coding in so long! Too long. Far too long. Sigh.

Anyway, let's look to the future! *pointing* Nothing for the weekend so far. Tomorrow the usual stuff at work I guess, oh I want to try and cross the voice system off D5.4 that's right. Wish me luck. Then shopping, I don't think I need gas, and seeing my parents.

No game Friday that I know of, but I think we're doing game Saturday. Sans Neil, for reasons I'm not disagreeing with.

Hope your first week of 2021 was good, and that the 20th comes at as great a speed for you and me as it can. Go use the power of friendship or something.

See you next time!