I think today was a better day at work. I got to get out of the office and work with some of my technicians on fixing some trouble calls. It’s generally good to make people happy. 
Of course, I pissed somebody off too. I told her she had to go through one of our Windows XP training sessions before I’d let her have her new laptop. She signed up for the workshop tomorrow and I agreed that she could have it after she was out of the workshop. We’ll see how well that works.
I stayed late at work tonight to load the iMovie tutorial in one of the labs that has an iMovie workshop tomorrow. Last year this would have been a simple process … this year I had wonderful things like permissions and a script that rebuilds login directories to deal with. I think I have it figured out and am also well on my way to implementing something that was requested for the Educational Technology Center computers. I need to figure out how to when the contents of a directory were last modified tho.
Since I was late getting home, I didn’t get any video editing done tonight. 
Hopefully I’ll be able to do some tomorrow night. I did manage to get the map to Karges Center posted on the Dance Theatre website. That little project reminded me that I need to set up something so that the DT site can make use of my server for hosting pictures and video from older concerts.
Anyway, bedtime for this rabbit. Hopefully tomorrow is less stressful. ttfn.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Well, I guess I haven’t posted in a while. I’ll just touch on some recent events. This past Thursday, I took liz4jc4ever to The Machine Shed in Woodbury for dinner. It was very yummy and of course we have leftovers. Friday evening I don’t remember much about. Not sure why (no, it has nothing to do with drinking). Saturday was pretty busy … got up and finished my homemade coffee tables. I’m not completely thrilled with the results, but they’re functional. After that I took a break and putzed on the computers for a while before going out and mowing lawn. After that was lunch and wash up before heading to pick up Liz, flutterbyefred and tinytom to head to Buca Di Beppo’s in St. Paul for dinner. That was very yummy. After that we headed into downtown to find parking for Blast! at the Ordway. We sat around in Rice Park for a while and got to see an awesome sunset behind the cathedral. Very cool. The show was suitably awesome and I recommend it to anybody.
As far as projects go, I have started digging into editing the video from this past spring’s Dance Theatre concert. Apparently I have the only decent video footage of the concert available. Unfortunately the audio track has some issues, so I’m learning how to dub over it … which is a challenge because of course the concert is set to music and I have to get it sync’d up perfectly or it won’t look right. It would be nice to include some elements of the original audio track in the final version, but I’m not sure I can do it reasonably. For example, some of the pieces feature some jumping that the mic on the camera picked up the sound of … plus there’s the applause, though I think I’ve edited that out in the past. Anyway, all this editing would be a lot more fun on a faster computer, so I ordered myself a new computer … dual 2-GHz processors, so it should have plenty of ponies to meet my needs for a while.
As far as other computer projects go, I’m thinking of trying to develop a calendar system … sorta. I installed php icalendar on my server and decided that I really like it. Unfortunately, unless I get webdav going and convert all my friends to Macs (okay … I have to admit that’d be nice, but it’s not likely to happen), there really isn’t a way for friends to add items. So, I am thinking of creating a mysql database from which an iCalendar file can be generated. I think I’m going to tackle that after my video project is done tho unless that becomes not-so-fun.
Work continues to suck the big one. One of my student employees gave two weeks notice last week. Unfortunately, he was my most experienced Windows technician and a good worker. I can’t blame him for leaving tho … he has to cut back on work hours to keep up with school (= organic chem, calc-based physics and calculus!!). So, instead of hiring 2 new technicians I get to hire and train 3. This will keep me very busy. I wanted to do some training with one of them today but there seems to be an epidemic of sick children at work, so two of my coworkers were out of the office leaving me to back up the HelpDesk. Ick. I spent pretty much the entire day doing paperwork for new computers. The depressing part is that the paperwork isn’t even all done! I still have to create inventory database records and print off data sheets for the new orders. Bleh!
Well, I think I’m going to turn in now … I’ve been sleeping like a stone the past few nights. That’s a good thing, but would seem to indicate that I really need more sleep. Sleep good…. mmmm …. zzzzzzzzz
Work is sucking a big one right now. Workload is causing difficulties with priorities and nobody’s doing much about it. I can’t even get the installation of a Biology lab workstation that’s needed for classes moved up because our work queue is so fucking constipated. Argh!
If I were a doughnut, I’d be a raised-glazed one. Why?
– sweet outside
– soft and tender inside
– they have nothing to hide (you can see right through them!)
– they are generally well-liked
So, what doughnut would you be?
Well, I guess my job could be worse. It’s been kinda rough lately, but I scheduled a bit of time off today (for the end of October) and I think I’ll try to take some off next week. Sh*t. It looks like my ‘k’ might be dying. Not cool at all.
Anyway … back to the reason for the post. For anybody who thinks they have a sh*tty job … check this out.
I got plenty of sleep this past weekend. Averaged about 11 hrs each Friday and Saturday, though a fair chunk of Friday “night’s” sleep came between 10am and 2pm on Saturday. Yeah, I decided not to go to RenFest this weekend … just felt I needed more rest. This coming weekend I think I might investigate doing some wood cutting, assuming the weather isn’t going to be too wet for it. This would be for my parents. They need to fix their trailer for hauling wood tho. Hopefully they use some hardwood this time around and maybe it will last longer.
Anyway … bedtime for me.
I put in 12 hrs (not including lunch) yesterday. When I got home, I ate and played with spam filtering for about 2 hrs (amavis-new and spamassassin). Couldn’t get filtering to work but I think I am further than I was.
I spent another day at work today (11-1/2 hrs). This morning I worked on templates and scripting stuff. This afternoon I spent in the Ed Tech Center setting up computers. That didn’t go as fast or as well as I had hoped. We only got 8 of 14 machines set up. And even those don’t have the software set up on them yet because we ran into a problem imaging them. Not fun. I may have a solution, which I need to finish testing tomorrow. This evening I got some more scripting stuff done and did some troubleshooting on the imaging problem for the ETC.
As much as I got accomplished this weekend, I am going to keep the Mac labs closed tomorrow so I can do some more tidying up. Tonight I got niceties like a logout icon on the desktop working and some tweaking of shortcuts.
Well, I made notable progress at work today. Joshua and I got MacOS X installed on all but 5 of the 64 computers located in our computer labs. The Red lab went fairly smoothly, but the Green lab sucked. A quarter or a third of the machines in the Green lab had issues getting the OS installed from CD and required cloning a portable drive to get them going. Unfortunately, we only have one portable drive like that, so it took quite a while.
The radmind server held up well. I watched the load and when building the Red lab, the load average peaked at 2.50. For some reason, it hit 7.50 or so when we were building the Green lab. In any case, I don’t think it’ll have a problem handling the load of 80 or so machines by itself for a while. Today was the tough one, as the lab computers had to pull down about 3GB each from the server.
Tomorrow we tackle the Ed Tech Center. That’s going to be even more fun, since we have to set up the new computers before building them. Hopefully they don’t have issues with the software loadset. Hopefully I get some free time tomorrow too … today I left for work at 9:30am and returned home at 8:30pm. I need zzzzzz…..
Okay… it’s 4am and I’m awake. I don’t want to be awake. I woke up shortly after two and got stressed about work. It got to the point where I didn’t think I’d fall back asleep and needed to relax. So, I got up and decided to play with my server for a while. So that’s what I’ve been doing. I got netatalk up and running so I can access the server from my workstations. It’s nice to see the number “121 GB free.
Yesterday I helped liz4jc4ever and flutterbyefred finish moving out of their apartment so it could be cleaned so they can move back in. Thankfully a co-worker was nice enough to let us use her full-size truck (F-250) to move some things like beds. We’re going to do something for her.
flutterbyefred brought along her boyfriend. He’s a really nice guy and I’m very happy for her. I think her being alone has really bothered me. I hope that he can be there for her. One thing that was a little odd is that he’s 6ft 7 …and I’m not really used to looking up at people that much. 
I look forward to getting to know him better … we’re all going to see Blast! at the Ordway on Oct 4th. It should be a blast (pun intended).
Today was spent in St Paul. We swung by the apartment to clean some stuff out from under then sink, then headed to Maplewood Mall so Liz could get some shoes. I got my watch fixed there too (back wasn’t on) … had to replace the battery even though it was nearly brand new. I suspect the battery got shorted while it was in the baggie with the watch. Anyway, it’s working again, and my wrist no longer feels empty. I also got a start on my Christmas shopping!!! Have stuff for my older sister and my mother. We then went to Har Mar Mall, where I got a cookbook that Jake and Brandy had recommended when we visited them a few weeks ago. From there we went to JCPenney in Rosedale Mall, where I finally found jeans that fit me, so I bought 5 pairs.
On the way home, we stopped in Hudson at Papa Murphy’s so Liz could update her phone number since she won’t be in her apt for 2 weeks. Lo and behold the owner was there and had tried calling her today. Now she has a job!! Yay! We grabbed a pizza, then some groceries, then headed home.
