This is the day I planned for my Labor Day holiday:
- Sometime after 10:00am – Wake up
- 10:30am – Eggs and Bacon or something similarly nummy for breakfast
- 11:00am – Do random household work, garbage, dishes, whatever is required to keep the health inspectors away from the door
- 12:00pm – Do random computer stuff… fix up my firewall, fix logrotate, tag some mp3s and other relatively harmless and brainless stuff
- 1:00pm-10pm – Sit on the couch either reading, watching TV or a DVD, or staring for long periods at spots of nothingness somewhere in between my nose and the wall.
- 10:30pm – Sleep
However, that was not how my day went. Read on for some whining.
</center.- 9:00am – wake up. Get asked by Firefly to help her pound in fenceposts at her parents to get their property ready to receive horses. Grudgingly agree, but state that I’d show up in a bit as I had some random household things (garbage, etc) to do
- 9:30am – Cereal and fruit for breakfast
- 10:00am – See Firefly out the door
- 10:02am – Phone call for Firefly, take message
- 10:04am – Phone call for me from my accountant, arrange meeting
- 10:06am – Phone call from Firefly asking me to bring stuff when I come
- 10:08am – Phone call from a ex-coworker asking me if I can come and help her get rid of virii and spyware, grudgingly agree
- 10:10am – Phone call from someone else
- 10:11-11am – finish up breakfast and fight with AVG to try to convince it to make me a recovery disk
- 10:50am – head out to see ex-coworker, completely forgetting the joystick I was going to return
- 11:00am-1:00pm – fight to remove gobs of spyware, adware, virii and nasty programs (again). Remove Kazaa desktop (not kazaalite, the spyware free version) and other suspicious looking software installs. Use a combination of ad-aware, spybot search & destroy and AVG to purge the system of all sorts of nastyness (see rant a bit further down on this)
- 1:15pm – head to Fireflys Parents place
- 1:30pm – get told that FireflyGramma is getting a blank screen on her computer and “now we have the computer expert here, you can help her.” Say “not a chance in hell,” but only with the voice inside my head. Say “Firefly maybe you can see if you can help her out first,” in my best outside voice. Firefly’s good with her Gramma, good with computers, and I had every confidence that she could determine or fix the problem, or at least, prevent me from having a brain aneurysm from illegal forced family tech support
- 1:35-6:00pm – pound fence posts in, help clean up junk, stand around, clean more junk, wander back and forth and generally do things completely unlike how normal people (yes, dad, I know you guys are canning peaches today) should be spending a holiday long weekend
- 6:30pm – each a nicely prepared meal of fresh BBQ salmon and chicken made by FireflyFolks’ basement border
- 7:15pm – head home to do laundry, garbage, etc
- 7:30pm – remember I was going to call and ex-coworker and bring the joystick back, call and say I’ll drop it off (and to get payment for my services)
- 7:45pm – get home, get laundry together, get joystick, submit rent check, discover laundry is in use, head out to return joystick
- 8:00pm – do a bit more support trying to get a printer going, noticing there are still some strange things going on. The CD refuses to install the printer driver software, and will happily run the setup program but after showing the “setup is running” it simply goes away for a bit and then comes back with an “error 1234” message. Notice also that the printer’s USB cable will work when plugged into the USB ports on the motherboard, but not the auxiliary ones on the backplate. I pull open the box to see if something isn’t plugged in. At this point I noticed that the CPU fan wasn’t going at all.
On an Athlon-900 this is a serious thing. I told ex-coworker-fiance this and told him that getting a new fan was a priority, with a secondary one being to clean the year or three of growing dustpuppies. This could have contributed to some of the strangeness. The speed of the computer however, now that the spyware and adware had been gotten rid of, was considerably faster, and much less painful to work with. I’d say that a mission for Microsoft for their now delayed next version of Windows would be to make it not as easy for unscrupulous companies to install shit into their system
- 8:30pm – go home
- 9:00pm – put in laundry, do garbage, dishes, have cup of tea, tag some mp3s, etc
- 10:45pm – start blogging the weekend
- 11:56pm (future) – put laundry away
- 12:00am (future) – sleep (hopefully)
So that was my weekend. Yes, I know I’m a whiny little bitch for wanting to not work while it was needed, but still, it didn’t go quite as I planned.
Aside: Ha ha… I still haven’t gotten any SoBig virii… guess that everyone with me in their address book is not infected. $newboss however, gets about 1800 a day, and when I tried to email him on Sunday to find out if Monday was, in fact, a holiday (only reason I wanted to ask was that no one had said anything on Friday like “have a good long weekend” or “see you on Tuesday”). I just got a bounce message saying “mailbox full.” I guess that means he hasn’t been checking his mailbox this weekend 🙂 Time to get some filtering dude! Well, a real mailserver that actually has IMAP capacity would be the first thing to get though (the company mail is run off of some ancient Mac mailserver).