See I knew this would happen. I knew if I let myself start skipping days of entries in the blog one day here and there was going to turn into two and three days which would eventually be several days at a time. I knew it. And that’s what’s happened, hasn’t it? I’m now going days at a time without making any entry. I mean the goal was every day for the whole year and I did go a good consistent six or seven months which is nothing to be ashamed of but I really would liked to have kept it going more consistently even than that. So all I can do is try and make sure I do my entry daily so I don’t fall behind again.
So since the last time I wrote I had to drive about two hours down to a little town called Tracy. It was supposed to be half way between where I live and where the staffing service lady works but I think I really got the short end of stick since she only had to drive a fraction of the time I did. Not that I’m bitter.
Actually I don’t care that much. Just more paper work I kind of which I could have done at home and scanned/emailed like all the other paper work I had to send to her that way. If nothing else so far I have learned the software that came with my printer/scanner quite well. Scanning several documents into the one PDF for instance. Never bothered to notice that before this last batch of sending paper work to the staffing company.
Oh and I finally received a start date for the new job. So there’s that. I mean given my track record I won’t consider it really a new job until I’ve been there a while. A couple of weeks perhaps. And the commute will be pretty far. At least 45 minutes with no traffic. Probably longer actually. And way longer with traffic. After the initial training period, I’m told, my shift will most likely be from 3pm to 11:30pm. So I’m not really expecting any traffic at either of those times. And if I can manage it I am going to go to bed as soon after I arrive home as I possibly can so I can get up at 9am or whatever. Maybe I can go jogging or study or continue volunteering a couple of hours or whatever I want really. That’s my theory right now. I don’t know if sleep patterns will really work out like that.
I mean the main reason I don’t go to bed at say 7pm, after getting home around 6:20, is because it seems some how odd to go to bed so early. And the sun is shinning in through all the Windows and there’s lots of activity outside and everything else that’s wrong with that. But if it’s 12:30am when I get home, or whatever, everybody’s asleep anyway so theoretically it shouldn’t be that hard to talk myself into sleeping soon after getting home.
So my only complain about this new staffing service so far is that it took four or however many weeks for them to get me to this point of a starting date. And yet Friday, the very day I before I would be starting, I was informed one of my employers couldn’t be verified. So what you didn’t try to verify until the Friday before I’m set to start? Really? And you couldn’t put in the same of the staffing service into Google, go to their home page, click “contact” and call the 800 number? Is that what you’re telling me? IS THAT WHAT YOU”RE TELLING ME???
It took literally minutes to find and call this 800 number to verify my employment. LITERALLY MINUTES. I cannot believe employment verification people who sound like by the name they do this sort of thing FOR A LIVING couldn’t USE THE GOOGLE to find this 800 number. I mean even if they were having trouble why wait to the last minute to ask me? IT MAKES NO SENSE.
Okay I don’t know why this sort of thing just grates on me especially bad. Maybe it shouldn’t.
In other news my planned robocopy of stuff to the two hard drives via USB adapter is still going to pretty well. I volunteered to re-install my land lady’s PC with XP because it seemed to old and antique-dated that I didn’t even bother to try and install SP3 on it. And when I heard about that shortcuts glitch that was already being exploited to install nasty software I had to insist to her that I re-do it for her. So she let me finally. Her computer is a Dell with a Celeron. Yes, JUST A CELERON. With 256 megs of memory. Will it even run IE 7 or 8?? I don’t even know. I do know the patch for the shortcuts shell glitch is only officially available for SP3 and that’s enough reason I need to get her PC up to date as much as I can. And I’ll try and make it as easy as possible to use Firefox or Chrome or some other browser that isn’t IE 6.
Once I get the updates under control and figure out her drivers, including her printer I should probably make a note of that, I don’t think it will be that difficult. Just can’t get carried away.
So my idea, for now at least, for choosing which apps are installed and where aren’t is to have basically a config file: just a text file with the short name or nick name of each application followed by either a 1 or a 0. Like logmein=0 and 7zip=1 and other similar. Then during windows install a batch file with a for-loop will going through this config file and conjunction those statements with the the words SET. So it would be SET logmein=0. Once all those environment variables were set it would just be a matter of adding some logic that would run the install if it was set to 1 and skip the ones set to zero.
The obvious step of course is to have an actual program that will generate this config file list of programs with a fancy GUI for setting which programs I want and which I don’t. Well I’m getting more and more tired and the wee hour of 8:45 and obviously I haven’t worked out all the details yet. But anyway that is what I am going to work on tomorrow.
So I made up a new little hierarchy of folders for my VirtualBox VMs and all the related stuff and started some new VMs. I think I have to go through and download all the latest SP3 updates out since April of 2009. The ones that can be slipstreamed will be slipped everything else will be installed via batch file on-the-fly. Just have to figure out a new method of picking and choosing which applications will and will not be installed.