This week is turning into another long, slow slog.  I’m once more having a very hard time waking up in the morning and making it in to work with a smile on my face.  I’m literally counting the days ’til the weekend.

Seems like I’m having more bad days than good lately.  I’m not sure that this necessarily has much to do with how work is going either…  Work hasn’t been too rough this week.  Busy, but not too busy.  I’m wondering if it’s just my attitude.  If I’m not looking forward to work…so it drags on…so I’m not looking forward to work tomorrow…so it drags on…

I’ve got a long weekend this week.  Monday off for Labor Day, and then Tuesday and Wednesday off because my folks will be up to visit.  Hopefully all that time off will give me a chance to recharge.  To re-set my attitude.  To make the workday more tolerable.

Last night they kicked off the Democratic National Convention…  And Terri, being the political junky that she is, had it going on multiple TVs in the house.  No matter where I went, there it was.

Lots of rousing speeches, lots of pundits, lots of arguing.  About what I’d expect.  But then one of the commentators on MSNBC made a very strange comment…

In referring to someone’s speech he said that it was “very scripted.”

It’s the Democratic National Convention.  They’ve been planning this for months if not years.  They’ve rented a venue, flown people in from all over the United States, arranged tons of press coverage.  They’ve got speech writers, and teleprompters, and a pre-recorded documentary on Teddy Kenedy.  Scripted?  You think?  Maybe?

These folks are politicians, not comedians.  It isn’t like they improvise all this stuff.  Of course it’s scripted.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been doing some more work on my blog’s theme.

I still haven’t found any drop-in replacement that I like, so I’ve been making small tweaks to my existing theme.  I’ve got a new header, for example.

Last night I discovered a great new plug-in: Category Icons by Brahim Machkouri.  It lets you replace the text categories with icons in your posts.  And one of the complaints that Terri had is that my blog is just too black.  So, I’m breaking up all the black with some colorful icons.

The icons, for the most part, came from the Buuf set by mattahan on deviantART.  I strongly recommend downloading the icons yourself…  They’re absolutely amazing and the little pictures here on my website don’t do them justice.

Looks like summer is just about over…  I’ve noticed the leaves starting to change color as I drive around the area, and the weather is starting to cool off.  I am certainly not going to complain.  Fall is my favorite season.  I can’t wait until the skies turn grey, it gets windy, all the leaves drop off the trees…  Good stuff.

It also means that Terri’s birthday is rapidly approaching, as is our wedding anniversary.  And my parents will be up to visit soon.

And, of course, Winter is on the way…  I can’t say I’m terribly thrilled about that.  I don’t like the cold.  I don’t like the snow and ice.  I don’t like having to shovel, and scrape the car off.  I don’t like the muck and slush and crappy visibility.

But, of course, there are some nice things about Winter too…  Thanksgiving, and Christmas, an New Years…  I guess that almost makes up for the crappy weather…

One Man And His Drake did not renew the wardec this week, so after the 24-hour cooldown things will be back to normal.  I’m thrilled.  This has been a boring war…  With only one war target there hasn’t been a whole lot of action.  It’ll be good to get back to mining and missioning.

It’s Saturday, and I’m at work.  This is happening entirely too often lately…  My boss complains when I schedule these late night or weekend jobs…  Says he tries hard to give me a regular schedule so I don’t need to do this stuff.  The problem is that that a “regular schedule” doesn’t work so well with a lot of our clients.

It’s hard to work 8:00 - 5:00 Monday through Friday when you need to work on a computer that can’t be taken down during business hours.

I’ve suggested to him, more than once, that we really ought to have someone on payroll who doesn’t work a “regular schedule.”  Someone who works four 10-hour days…  Or someone who works Wednesday through Sunday…  But he isn’t interested.  So, I wind up working these odd days/nights myself.

Which really is’t too bad…  It’s kind of nice being here at the office with absolutely nobody around.  There’s no-one distracting me with random comments or questions.  No new calls coming in.  The phones don’t ring, I can completely ignore any email that comes in.  It’s much easier to get work done without all those distractions.

This weekend’s job is a relatively simple one.  We support a biological testing laboratory (yeah, that’s about the best I can come up with…  I honestly have no idea what they do there, but it looks impressive) in the area, and they’re going through a bunch of upgrades right now.  New workstations, new servers, new workflow.  All sorts of disruptive stuff.  And the folks in their testing lab do not like disruption…so we’re trying to make this as painless as possible.

This weekend I’m migrating everything from one of their old lab PCs over to a brand new PC.

We couldn’t very well do it during the week because they need the machine up and running every single day.  They can’t deal with real downtime.  So I picked the machine up after they closed on Friday, and I’ve got to get it back to them before they open on Monday.

So, I got an image of the old machine using Acronis - which is some terrific software.

I’ve loaded the image onto the new machine.  Looks like everything migrated just fine.  Now all I’ve got to do is play around with drivers to make all the hardware happy.  Shouldn’t take all that long.

And when I return the machine on Monday it should be almost identical to when it left on Friday.  Faster, obviously…  But all their software and settings should be the same.  That’s the idea, at least.

It is Friday once again.

I’ve only got one call left today, and it should be an easy one.  I have to drive an hour away, pick up a machine, and bring it back here.  That’s it.  I shouldn’t have to do anything at all on-site.  I’ll be working a little late tonight…  And I’ll be back in tomorrow…  But I should really have to deal with clients much more this week.

I’m also feeling relatively healthy at the moment.  I’ve been feeling pretty crappy all week long, but I’m feeling less crappy at the moment.  Still a little achey…  Still have a headache…  My neck is sore from being crammed in a wiring closet all morning…  But my stomch feels ok for the moment, which is a huge improvement.

The most recent wardec in EVE should be running out this weekend, so I will be able to go back to my mining and missioning soon.

And, of course, it’s Friday.  Sure, I’ll be doing some work over the weekend…  But I really don’t mind that very much when I don’t have to deal with other people.

So, things are starting to look up.

Lately we’ve been having a hell of a time at work with rogue malware scanners.

These things get into your computer and then constantly display messages warning that you’ve been infected with viruses and spyware.  They offer to remove the viruses and spyware if you pay for the software.  And if you don’t pay for the software you constantly get spammed.

They’ll often display pop-up advertisements for various things…  And if they’re allowed for a day or two you’re virtually garonteed to wind up with some genuine viruses on your machine.

The problem is that the legitimate anti-malware companies like Symantec and Panda don’t seem to do much about this rogue stuff.  You can run scans all day long and they’ll never actually detect or remove much of anything.  So you have to use a variety of other products like Hijack This! and Spyware Doctor to pry the crap out of your system.

And, as I said, it’s become a pretty big problem lately.  I don’t know what is happening…  How people are getting this rogue software in the first place…  But it’s everywhere.  We get at least one call a day related to this crap.  About half of the machines that are on our workbench at this moment are because of this crap.

This has been a pretty hellish week.

Terri started getting sick last Friday - achey, sore throat, congestion.  So a good chunk of last weekend was spent taking care of her.  She’s starting to feel better, but Christopher and I are feeling worse.

We’re both coming down with basically what she had.  I’m feeling worse almost daily.  I’ve been coming home from work and just crashing.  Haven’t been able to do much of anything.

Normally I would have called in sick by now, but this week has been insanely busy.  We’ve had things breaking left and right.  All sorts of stuff that I just cannot dump on other people.

And this weekend isn’t going to be much of a respite.  I’ve got to work on a computer over the weekend.  It shouldn’t take too much time…  Hopefully I’ll be able to get some rest…  But I won’t be able to simply crash Friday night like I’d prefer.