(no subject)
Dec. 20th, 2006 06:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogI envy those on my friends list whose places of employment seem to winding down for the year. In addition to the increased work load we've been having lately (many new hires starting in January to get ready for as well as a lot of urgent problems to resolve before things are finalized for year end), my department has one person out of three out on vacation. Of course, it's worse for the infrastructure department. I keep sending tickets to them knowing that it's going to be a while before they're addressed; two out of three of their people are out, and the head of the group canceled his own vacation so he could stay this week and next. Apparently the entire group had scheduled vacation for the same time and nobody realized 'till last week.
I'm doing something that's a little new to me; I'm pricing out auto-loading CD/DVD duplicators. In fact, after deciding on one (incidentally, it's a $3100 unit from Meritline with four integrated Plextor DVD burners and a 500 disc capacity; anyone have experience with Meritline? I've never heard of them, and their tech support line was answered by an automatic greeting with a very heavy Chinese accent so I'm a little bit hesitant) and recommending it to the IT VP, he had me research warranty and support options for the one I liked, telling me to go ahead and create a PO for it if it looks good. I'm now awaiting a call back from the vendor to discuss support. I know I've said things along this line before, but once in a while, the progress I've made in this aspect of my life hits me. There was a time in my life that I thought doing anything like discussing quality of support with a hardware vendor as part of deciding on a multi-thouand dollar purchase was completely and totally beyond my abilities and always would be. I'm a very, very different puppy from my old high school self.
Speaking of a changed puppy, I've decided to finally write the letter to Ray Bradbury that I've been telling myself for years now that I'm going to write. I started it in the car on the way in to work this morning. I'm sure I'll post it here once I finish it and send it. I just have to figure out where to send it. I wonder if he has an agent or similar I could contact for an address. I don't want to do it via email; it just seems like something that should be done via good old hard copy. HIs work is very important to me and a physical missive just seems more appropriate than something virtual.
My truck broke down yesterday. I'm guessing it was the water pump. Serin and I were coming back to work from a very dangerous place-- a Chinese buffet with really good food within driving distance for lunch from my place of employment; I definitely have to limit myself to once a month visits or so-- when I noticed a small but growing amount of steam coming from under the hood. We stopped and I opened it up to find steam billowing up from the engine block and large amounts of coolant splattered around the left side of the engine compartment, much like a coolant balloon had exploded in there. I determined that none of the hoses seemed to be ruptured and I couldn't find any obvious leaks from the engine block or radiator themselves. Too, the radiator's temperature was not significantly different from ambient. My guess is that the water pump freaked out, sprang a leak, and shot coolant all over the engine. Hopefully I'll find out soon; a tow truck brought my little trucklet back north over the state line to our regular mechanic. I didn't get a call from them today, but they're usually busy enough that it takes a day or two for an appointment. I'll give them a call tomorrow morning and see what's up. Fortunately, I have about four hundred dollars that I've saved toward my camera that I can throw at it; I'm guessing that it will be between four and five hundred if I'm right about the pump.
Scavenging more SCSI drives fromscrapped decomissioned servers at work, I now have six nine gig drives for Alphawolf to build a RADI5 array out of, along with two 16s and a 9 for Betawolf. Of course, after I got all the hardware mounted and addressed, I tried to connect the data cable to Alphawolf's six drives and realized that, though it has enough connectors, my cable isn't long enough to get back to the controller. I don't suppose anybody has any forty inch or longer six device SCSI cables I might pick up cheap? If I order one online, it's going to cost me about thirty bucks.
I'm a little bit excited about having put together an HTML document with links to a bunch of the resources we use around the support desk. I know it's a pretty piddly bit of coding in the grand scheme of things, but that's the kind of thing I got into computers for; putting together tools that make things easier to do. I'm really looking forward to learning Sharepoint; we're moving to that for a lot of things where I am and I think maybe I can finally convince management to move to a Sharepoint hosted HTML knowledgbase for call resolution. I put one together on my own with a wiki backend, but they didn't seem to like it because it was running on Apache instead of IIS and on my own hardware. C'mon guys; it's not like you can't migrate the stupid thing onto a server in our building and onto IIS; it's just a database and a Perl script. *sighs*
In any case. I'm going to try setting up Sharepoint at home over the break so I can get some experience with it. Since it requires IIS as a backend, I'm going to have to stick it on Alphawolf along with Apache; that shoudl be feasible as long as I make IIS listen on some other port I would think. Some of the people over at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
itprofessionals agreed that it should be workable. I'd do it on Betawolf, but Sharepoint is only a free add on for Server 2003, and I can't afford a thousand-dollar license for server. If it comes down to it, I'll just move Apache to Betawolf and make it my production web server while Alphawolf just runs IIS for Sharepoint. It seems like a waste when I know the one machine could easily run both of them in terms of sheer processing power and drive space, but it's an even bigger waste to have the potential of a great learning tool go to waste because of software that would run just as happily under server 2000 on Betawolf.
Dinner with my parents on Mondway was wonderful as always. After the new year, I think we're going to start alternating locations. Every other week, my dad or mom will cook at their house, and every other other week, Andrea will cook at our house and we'll have them and my brothers over. That will be really nice. Tuesday was spend baking cookies because Wednesday was going to be spent meeting Andrea's brother's fiancee. As it turns out though, that's going to be next week. So instead, Andrea's going to finish cookies tonight so we can be all done by Thursday night when we're going to have![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
posicat, serinthia and todd_riverden over for food on Thursday. Whee! *bounce* I really love having people over to the house; that's when my house feels most like home.
I guess that's about it for now; I'm going to eat my left over pizza and finally play some DDR. It's good to be home. I hope everyone else is doing well!
I'm doing something that's a little new to me; I'm pricing out auto-loading CD/DVD duplicators. In fact, after deciding on one (incidentally, it's a $3100 unit from Meritline with four integrated Plextor DVD burners and a 500 disc capacity; anyone have experience with Meritline? I've never heard of them, and their tech support line was answered by an automatic greeting with a very heavy Chinese accent so I'm a little bit hesitant) and recommending it to the IT VP, he had me research warranty and support options for the one I liked, telling me to go ahead and create a PO for it if it looks good. I'm now awaiting a call back from the vendor to discuss support. I know I've said things along this line before, but once in a while, the progress I've made in this aspect of my life hits me. There was a time in my life that I thought doing anything like discussing quality of support with a hardware vendor as part of deciding on a multi-thouand dollar purchase was completely and totally beyond my abilities and always would be. I'm a very, very different puppy from my old high school self.
Speaking of a changed puppy, I've decided to finally write the letter to Ray Bradbury that I've been telling myself for years now that I'm going to write. I started it in the car on the way in to work this morning. I'm sure I'll post it here once I finish it and send it. I just have to figure out where to send it. I wonder if he has an agent or similar I could contact for an address. I don't want to do it via email; it just seems like something that should be done via good old hard copy. HIs work is very important to me and a physical missive just seems more appropriate than something virtual.
My truck broke down yesterday. I'm guessing it was the water pump. Serin and I were coming back to work from a very dangerous place-- a Chinese buffet with really good food within driving distance for lunch from my place of employment; I definitely have to limit myself to once a month visits or so-- when I noticed a small but growing amount of steam coming from under the hood. We stopped and I opened it up to find steam billowing up from the engine block and large amounts of coolant splattered around the left side of the engine compartment, much like a coolant balloon had exploded in there. I determined that none of the hoses seemed to be ruptured and I couldn't find any obvious leaks from the engine block or radiator themselves. Too, the radiator's temperature was not significantly different from ambient. My guess is that the water pump freaked out, sprang a leak, and shot coolant all over the engine. Hopefully I'll find out soon; a tow truck brought my little trucklet back north over the state line to our regular mechanic. I didn't get a call from them today, but they're usually busy enough that it takes a day or two for an appointment. I'll give them a call tomorrow morning and see what's up. Fortunately, I have about four hundred dollars that I've saved toward my camera that I can throw at it; I'm guessing that it will be between four and five hundred if I'm right about the pump.
Scavenging more SCSI drives from
I'm a little bit excited about having put together an HTML document with links to a bunch of the resources we use around the support desk. I know it's a pretty piddly bit of coding in the grand scheme of things, but that's the kind of thing I got into computers for; putting together tools that make things easier to do. I'm really looking forward to learning Sharepoint; we're moving to that for a lot of things where I am and I think maybe I can finally convince management to move to a Sharepoint hosted HTML knowledgbase for call resolution. I put one together on my own with a wiki backend, but they didn't seem to like it because it was running on Apache instead of IIS and on my own hardware. C'mon guys; it's not like you can't migrate the stupid thing onto a server in our building and onto IIS; it's just a database and a Perl script. *sighs*
In any case. I'm going to try setting up Sharepoint at home over the break so I can get some experience with it. Since it requires IIS as a backend, I'm going to have to stick it on Alphawolf along with Apache; that shoudl be feasible as long as I make IIS listen on some other port I would think. Some of the people over at
itprofessionals agreed that it should be workable. I'd do it on Betawolf, but Sharepoint is only a free add on for Server 2003, and I can't afford a thousand-dollar license for server. If it comes down to it, I'll just move Apache to Betawolf and make it my production web server while Alphawolf just runs IIS for Sharepoint. It seems like a waste when I know the one machine could easily run both of them in terms of sheer processing power and drive space, but it's an even bigger waste to have the potential of a great learning tool go to waste because of software that would run just as happily under server 2000 on Betawolf.Dinner with my parents on Mondway was wonderful as always. After the new year, I think we're going to start alternating locations. Every other week, my dad or mom will cook at their house, and every other other week, Andrea will cook at our house and we'll have them and my brothers over. That will be really nice. Tuesday was spend baking cookies because Wednesday was going to be spent meeting Andrea's brother's fiancee. As it turns out though, that's going to be next week. So instead, Andrea's going to finish cookies tonight so we can be all done by Thursday night when we're going to have
posicat, serinthia and todd_riverden over for food on Thursday. Whee! *bounce* I really love having people over to the house; that's when my house feels most like home.I guess that's about it for now; I'm going to eat my left over pizza and finally play some DDR. It's good to be home. I hope everyone else is doing well!
