So I took a bit of a break from working on our church website. I’ve been trying to wrestle Joomla into what I want to make the site more useful to our congregation. Unfortunately I ran into a bizarre error on it today when I decided to go back to working on it and log in, I now get an error that I’m not authorized to view the content (as an admin no less!). Anyway, I’m thinking of biting the bullet and coding what I want myself. The two big things I want are the ability for members to submit news postings or articles, and a nice calendar.
Something to file in the category of “stupid things Robert has done” … dropped my gigabit switch on the power cord for my server, thus knocking the plug loose from the UPS enough to cut power to it. I managed to get through installing an electrical circuit to dedicate to the computers this afternoon only to have trinity go down hard as a result of clumsiness. Cue Alanis!
Well, this one is just a short one. The past two days at work have been pretty productive, so I’ve been feeling good about that. Did get some rather interesting news the other day that I’m basically a salaried person whose pay is calculated hourly (= they don’t pay for extra time). I’m not sure how that works but for what I do it all balances out anyway.
I’m pretty happy at home too these days. I did a little tidying up downstairs in my computer corner so it doesn’t look quite as much like a disaster area. Hopefully we’ll be putting in a dedicated electrical circuit for the computers this weekend since having the computers on the same breaker as the washing machine (with it’s motors) = bad idea. Not sure what else will be done this weekend. Oh yeah… that’s right … I get to go up north and toss firewood into something with wheels to transport it to my parents. Fun fun.
I need to start thinking about what I want for Christmas. I’ve already decided I want something remote control with wheels so I can terrorize the cats! (insert evil grin here) As far a computer gadgets, I’m not sure. I think I could probably use a flash drive for home use (for my housecalls). There are some spendier items that I’d like (Palm TX, LCD monitor), but I am not going to bother putting those on the list.
I’m getting a little irritated with my Internet connection. It dropped out at 2am this morning and didn’t come back reliably until sometime after 9:30 I think. I tried getting it up this morning (the connection, not “other”) and upgraded the firmware, but unfortunately I succeeded in locking myself out of the administration of the router. Yay. Reset that tonight and re-configured it. Don’t have WEP working again but I think I got the other bits going (port forwarding, SNMP, MLA security).
Off to bed … hopefully no dreams about getting my arm ripped off by a shark tonight.
I find this amusing.
Ever have one of those days where you don’t feel productive at the end and you don’t feel motivated enough to do anything about it?
I don’t normally don’t say much regarding political issues. I have a general distaste for politics. I was reading digg tonight and the latest post was a link to an article regarding some comments Mr. President made to regarding the Constitution. The article disturbed me enough to investigate its veracity. Sadly, I haven’t found anything that refutes it yet and it’s apparently been reported in other locations as well. To sum it up … Bush calls the Constitution a “goddamn piece of paper.” As has been pointed out, the presidential oath of office includes wording regarding “upholding and defending” the Constitution.
I’m almost at a loss for words. I’m somewhat surprised that this is the first I’ve seen of it given that the incident occurred last December. Anyway, how can this man still, with “good” conscience, stay in office? With all his emphasis on God, values and the Bible … he conveniently forgets an oath he swore on the Bible. Suffice it to say, this bothers me. I wonder what the men and women who are out there defending our freedom would say to this. Kind of along the lines of “do as I say, not as I do.”
On a different note, my oldest uncle got his legs caught in a combine today and ended up at Sacred Heart Hospital in Eau Claire for surgery. He survived and is recovering, but will need at least one more surgery. Hopefully things go well in that area.
Anyway, on to more positive things. We had visitors today. My good friends Brandy & Jake and their children came over for lunch and play. It was a good time. I don’t think we have really had significant visit time with them since July ’03. Definitely have to work on improving the frequency of visits. Anyway, we had a good time eating a yummy salad creation of my wife as well as grilled chicken. The children were very quiet at first but warmed up, especially when food was had. For part of the afternoon we went outside and took advantage of the winds out here to fly their kites. After crashing one of them several times, we improvised a tail of duct tape, which improved its performance greatly. We also had fun picking green stuff from the yard and feeding it to the horses in the neighbor’s pasture. Sadly, our visiting time came to an end a little after that. I hope our next interval between visits is considerably shorter.
Tomorrow, we’re hoping to take a drive up along the river to St. Croix Falls to look at tree colors. Things are looking pretty good down here but I’m expecting them to be awesome along the river.
A quick math funny … just about split my gut laughing. 
I know. I’m a bit of a geek that way.
I’ve been working like a crazy man lately. Work is usual nutzo for September. At home, I’ve been working on the church website. I’m redoing it with Joomla to give other people the ability to contribute more easily.
I’ve been doing a few video editing things too and will be doing some more in the not too distant future. So, I finally ordered another drive for my system … a 320GB Seagate. From what I’ve read it should perform very well though may run a bit on the warm side. Oh well. It will allow me to keep my video projects on a separate disk from my apps and OS. This is generally a good thing.
Back on the work front, I now know what three “tasks” (= projects) I’ll be involved in this fall: “Footprints” (I’m project lead on this one), desktop operating systems (yeah, like we’re likely to get rid of anything) and CMS implementation (for campus website). There’s also a bit of shuffling going on … I now have an interim manager above me who happens to be a former faculty member. Should be interesting. Of course, this also means we needed to create an office for her, so there’s been a lot of re-arranging going on. One of the staff from Information Systems in North Hall is also moving to our side of the street, so we’re feeling even more like sardines than we were.
Home computer projects I’d like to do:
computer projects involving $$ (that I don’t have):
home-improvement projects:
Sorry updates have been sparse of late. Don’t really have much reason for it. This past weekend Liz and I attended a wedding down in Iowa. The bride was so happy she looked about ready to explode … and would turn into a big cloud of happy confetti. On the way back we got to see the trees that were downed near Le Seuer on Hwy 169. Pretty serious stuff.
Monday night Liz and I had a nice “date” at home. We finally watched Pearl Harbor together (the one with Ben Affleck in case anybody is wondering). It’s the first time I’ve seen the movie since I bought it a few years back. I really enjoyed it. Listened to the soundtrack on the way into work this morning (yesterday’s music was Celine Dion!!).
Today at work started off fairly reasonably. One of the projects I’ve been working on is getting a Smartboard Sympodium ready to go for one of the distance education rooms. That took a fair amount of time this morning but I think it’s pretty much done. This afternoon I helped a co-worker set up a classroom computer with projector in the photography lab in KFA.
At 3 o’clock I had a meeting that pretty much started the downhill slide for the day. I got reminded why I detest Windows … or at least the security issues that go with it. We’re rolling out some wireless access on campus using Cisco Clean Access. We’re requiring that Windows users have up-to-date anti-virus software and that their Windows patches be up-to-date. So I think a lot of our support load is going to fall into the arena of getting people’s computers up-to-snuff … but we have a policy that we don’t work on personal computers. We didn’t get details ironed out today so I get to work on that some more tomorrow. Yay. Two hours of meetings plus who knows how much time planning.
Tonight at the end of the day I had scheduled an upgrade for our lab software license server software. This went pretty well when I did it on our test servers but of course not-so-well in production. It took me over 90 minutes to get the new software running to the point where I could connect to it with the administrator’s “console”. After that, I couldn’t get it the lab clients to connect. In the end I ended up reverting back to the old version and will have to try again later. I’m thinking we’ll eventually run this on a Windows server much as I hate the idea … simply because the Linux version seems rather hard to deal with (kill -9 should not be the “recommended” way to shut down the server daemon.)
Anyway … bedtime for me. *yawn*
Well, work has been interesting in the past 50 hrs or so. At approximately 2:50pm on Friday, the main power transformer serving campus failed. If that wasn’t exciting enough, some of our battery packs for UPSes in our server room started venting gas (of the hydrogen sulfide variety). I’m not sure what percentage of our servers got shut down gracefully but I think at least a few went down hard. Six IT staff went to the hospital via ambulance for treatment for gas exposure. Power was restored late yesterday afternoon. If I understand correctly, it’s a temporary replacement transformer so there will probably be another outage … hopefully planned. Last night through this morning was spent getting batteries recharged and back online along with the network hardware (= switches). At noon there was a meeting which I decided to attend for information (I wasn’t involved in anything to this point). Ended up getting roped into working (most of which was acting as a “buddy” in one of our server rooms with battery packs). Most services were restored by 8:30 tonight though a few are still being worked on. Hopefully those aren’t too difficult for the staff remaining to restore. Tomorrow of course I’ll probably get to deal with fallout from office workstations that went down hard. Yay.
Yay! We now have A/C. The house feels much cooler. A lot of that is due to the dehumidifying of the air, but the temp is definitely lower too. The installers did a pretty good job, but I wasn’t impressed with their customer service … I wanted to get the bits of information I needed to investigate rebates but they were in too much of a hurry to leave. Grr.
Anyway, today was my first day back at work in a while (since last Friday). Still feeling a bit on the overwhelmed side but I think I got a lot accomplished on the computer lab side of my world today. Tomorrow morning I have some stuff to do relating to wireless deployment (lucky me is in charge of support and end-user documentation).
This weekend I’m hoping to get some more rock picked up in the yard (likely Saturday morning while it’s still hopefully somewhat cool). I’m not sure what Saturday afternoon will entail. At some point this weekend I’d like to get some programming work done on the church website. I want to make the announcements easier to manage and figure out if I can improve the calendar management. Saturday evening my aunt and uncle are coming to visit. They missed the open house because they had a wedding to attend. I’m looking forward to their visit.
Sunday we’re planning on heading up to my parents for my dad’s birthday. It’s actually on Monday but of course I have to work then. I’m also hoping to drop in and visit my younger sister. Her computer is showing its age (8 yrs) so I’m going to try and replace it with something a bit more up-to-date. Hopefully I have time for all of that.
Well, off to bed…. with closed windows! (it’s cool outside, but it’s also humid)
Update: just as I was heading to bed, one of the smoke detectors decided to have a low/dead battery (started chirping). Since I can’t sleep through that, I figured I’d better fix it. After determining which one of the 5 it was (thankfully, it turned out to be the one in the basement and not the one at the peak of the kitchen/living area), grabbed a battery out of the garage and replaced it. No more chirp.
