My week consisted mostly of chaos and darkness, so I am going to vent a bit here on my blog. You can skip my moaning and groaning and scroll down to see my updated steam greenlight stats and some other positive news :D
Quick personal info update: Seeing as I live in a very small town (100 people +-) I am the only one with any advanced IT knowledge.
Monday
On my way home, just after I dropped my daughter off at school. I received a call to help with a dead computer, which died due to our power issues. So I needed to get a quote for a new computer and also for some UPSs due to all the load shedding. Then I needed to do some website maintenance work for some extra income.
Bye-bye quite morning of indie dev. I did get some work done in the afternoon.
Monday evenings, me and my best friend Rudi usually play some co-op games to relax and have some fun. Like 7 days to die, pay day 2, planet explorers, swtor or terraria. But oh-no not this evening, we both got load shedding!
Tuesday
6 am my ups alarm wakes me up. First I thought... o this is nice, load shedding early in the morning to get it out of the way. Sweet back to bed.... 9 o'clock and still no power. Asked around and found out they are busy fixing a problem on the power grid and the power will be off for the rest of the day. So bye-bye indie dev for Tuesday.
Wednesday
My humble bundle account for Delta Quadrant was activated. So I started to go through the motions of finalizing all the last info they needed. I needed to sign a Tax form(W-8BEN) they sent me, but I must fill in a ITIN number on there which I have no knowledge of. So of to the wonderful world of google. After reading on so local forums about other peoples experiences, I ended up on the IRS website.
Now I need to submit another form W-7 in order for me to receive the ITIN. Still not sure how this works, I continued reading and found this page where they list Acceptance Agent Program or Certified Acceptance Agents. The first one on the list - Deloitte and Touche has a local branch. Tried their website and found nothing to help me with this situation. I send them a support message, but haven't heard anything back yet.
With my wife off to work for the evening, the rest of the day consisted of watching after my daughter and more load shedding. Also starting to feel some flu symptoms.
Thursday
The flu hit me hard throughout the night, so I decided to take a sick day and stay in bed. But, oh no.... murphy had some other plans for me. I received a call from that same person I helped on Monday. Nothing on their computer works, they can't open any files and some weird message about encryption is on their computer. Seeing as they have a business to run and everything has come to a standstill and no one close is even remotely able to help them. I had to take a warm shower and prepared to go out in the cold. After a quick look at their computer, I had no clue what caused the problem. But it had to be some kind of virus. Packed it up and took it home.
Ransomware, can you believe it!!!! They encrypt all your documents and even pictures and you have to pay them $500 in bit coins in order to receive the decryption. Read more - Wall Street Journal
Our local currency the ZAR is R12 for each $1. The $500 in our local currency is about R6000. That is a huge amount of money to pay, so of course they didn't. I had to format pc and with no backups It is a dire situation.
Friday
Today I helped setup the computer and tried to get them up and running. Also helped them with backup procedures. At least the flu symptoms are almost gone and I am feeling better. Looks like it was a quick and aggressive one.
Steam Stats Update
Still moving forward slowly, but I will get there :)
Part of a bundle
It looks like my game will be featured in a bundle next week! Can't wait and I will definitely blog about that next week.
Ludum Dare 32
This weekend me and Rudi are doing the Ludum Dare!!!! My second one and I am so excited. Guaranteed to be blogged about also :D
Enjoy the weekend, I know I am! Even with all the stupid load shedding.
Stay warm if you have an early winter like here. Till next week...
Jayson
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