Saturday, I spent just over ten hours upgrading a friend's web site and forum. They have fifty thousand members and a quarter million posts on a relatively small computer. And, given the apathy of most of the Internet, they don't bring in enough to actually upgrade the machine to decent hardware. So, I had to figure out a way of getting a SMF forum upgraded on a 500 MHz machine and not break anything.

I can't say it was easy. It wasn't, mainly because their forum attachments sat at 60k+ files and 6 GiB. In one directory. *shudder* Basically, it took more than three minutes to parse the directory contents and the system had a 30 second cut off. So, no maintenance, no downloading, nothing.

The frustrating part is, despite I'm doing everything for him for free, he can make money on it. But, he doesn't. He doesn't even follow minor suggestions which I know work, since I've seen them work. When I first got involved, I showed him how to save five hundred a month on his forum. The only thing I can do else is make it profitable, but he keeps saying "yah, yah, yah, I'll get there." I really hate being blown off that way. Just do it and get it over with.

I've slowed down my support of his machine over the years. I'm guilty of not really helping people who don't help themselves. In five years, he's had so many opportunities to make money, but all he does it bitch about not getting enough donations.

Hrm, kind of like me bitching about not enough time to write or program. Damn it... I need to change that. Remember, boys and girls, what you hate the most in others is something you probably have yourself.

Now, the one person I can't do this to is Fluffy. In the last year, our MythTV box has been steadily ignored except for the occasional hard reboot when it locked up. Every other time I visited, I spend a few hours just repairing the thing, but I haven't really been back to Illinois since it depresses me so much--it hasn't been home for months. From here, I try to repair it, but the reboots and lack of love finally pushed it over the edge. Last night, it basically imploded. I can't fix it remotely so I walked Fluffy through disconnecting my 700 GiB MythTV box and hooking up the receiver directly.

In two weeks, it comes to Iowa. I'll make it work again but I'm frustrated that it died a week before I was about to shut it down to move.

Today, I would seriously like to not do tech support.