A Weekend in Clearwater

We're currently racing around at my job in a last minute dash to upgrade our Windows 7 PC's to Windows 10. I found out I have to go to California the week after next to perform upgrades on ~30 PC's. But before California was a trip to Clearwater to do upgrades on the machines we had there.



I told David and advised him to call in on Saturday so he could go with me. Last time I went to Clearwater I brought him with me, and I could tell then that this would be our thing.

So early Saturday morning we went and rented a car and drove up to Clearwater. I needed to drop David off at the hotel before heading into work, but figured I'd stop for breakfast too since I was feeling pretty hungry.

This hotel that I booked was awful. I won't say names, but yeah, there was blood spotting on the bedding, what look like crusted vomit across the cabinet, and the breakfast offering was meager at best. So right after breakfast I canceled our second night there and booked the next night at the hotel we went too last time since it was the same price. A little further of a drive for me, but much MUCH nicer.

I got to work and started getting busy. My goal was to do 4 upgrades over the course of Saturday and Sunday, however once I got started on the first PC, it became quite clear that my goal wasn't going to happen considering I had spent 6 hours on getting a PC done, only to have it almost done. So I figured that there had to be a better way. After an hour or so of research I found out that in-place upgrades were possible to deploy with PDQ so I extracted the ISO to a folder, setup the package in PDQ and deployed. 2 hours later I had Windows 10 on 3 machines.

Saturday night we went out to eat at Quaker Steak and Lube. This place was crazy. From the outside it looked like an old fashioned service garage, and on the inside was a sports style restaurant littered with delightfully tacky vehicular paraphernalia.  I ordered chicken tenders with a hot sauce that was generously far up the list of degrees of hotness. Something I paid for dearly the next two days.

We stopped outside on the way out and snapped a few pictures. We had a blast. I discovered David likes pictures of me smoking. I'm still trying to decipher how that makes me feel. Hahaha

The next day at work, Sunday, I worked on deploying the in-place to the rest of the machines. Out of 12 machines I was able to get 10 successfully upgraded. I was feeling proud about myself for finding this much MUCH quicker and easier way to upgrade the PC's than the side-by-side method we were using. However, I knew that Monday when all the users came in to work would be the true testament to whether this method was a success or utter failure.

Sunday night David and I ate out at BJ's. I'm ashamed of the amount of food I ate but I stand in defense that BJ's cheese curds are NOT to be passed up. I have wet dreams about those delicious little morsels.

Monday at work it was time to see the damage. I aimed to come in early, however I got to work at 8am on the dot so I was already sweating when I pulled up to see I beat absolutely no one there. I just kept panicking on the inside thinking that people were having problems and weren't able to work. I walked in and...nothing. No issues. No issues at all. My method worked way better than I could've dreamed.

So I'm feeling pretty proud. I told the boss about it, and my coworker who's on his way to Hatfield tomorrow to do upgrades. Effectively this method could cut my two week trip to California in half if everything goes right.

So yeah, first weekend of 2020 and things are going great. 2020 let's go!